When marks don't line up

How the sync actually works

Earwig does not trust clocks. During your shoot the phone keeps its own recording of the room; Sync compares that sound wave against the audio inside each camera clip and finds the alignment mathematically. When it succeeds you will see Audio-synced to footage on the session, and your cuts land on the spoken word regardless of what your camera's clock thinks the time is.

If it says audio-synced but a cut is off

• Check the app was recording for that whole take. Marks made while the session was stopped can only fall back to timecode.
• Very short clips, or clips where the phone could not hear the same sound as the camera (different rooms, wind, music blasting), give the matcher nothing to grip. Keep the phone where it hears what the camera hears.

If it falls back to timecode

With no phone audio to match (older sessions, or the phone too far from the action), Sync lines things up using time of day instead. That works, but camera clocks drift, so cuts can land a few seconds off. Two fixes:

• Set your camera's clock reasonably close to real time before shooting.
• Keep transcription or recording on in Earwig during takes, so future shoots sync on audio.

Clips from another shoot appearing

Some cameras write unreliable dates, so same-named clips from an old card session can look like candidates. Sync checks candidates against the session audio and drops clips that do not belong. If you still see a stranger in the timeline, email us the session name and the clip number; we will look at it.

Still stuck?

Email support@earwig.io with the session name, the camera model, and one clip filename that misbehaved. That is enough for us to reproduce most sync issues.