How to Synchronize Audio in Adobe Premiere

When is Syncing Clips Useful?

There are several reasons why synchronizing two or more pieces of audio can be useful. Typically, your audio source will be different from your video source. This is why most big-budget Hollywood films utilize a slate, creating an audio and visual cue that allows the editor to easily sync an audio track to a video clip. But what if you aren’t using a slate, or simply don’t want to go through the process of syncing every single clip manually? Well Adobe Premiere has a solution for you…

Now keep in mind, this trick only works if your video source has some form of audio included. In other words, you still need to be using your on-board camera mic, because that’s what we will use to sync our high-quality audio to our video.

The Process

First, bring the audio and video clips into your timeline. In the example below, we are looking to sync video from multiple camera angles with our audio, which we recorded to an external recorder via a sound board.

Note that I have simply placed these clips at the beginning of the timeline, each on their own layer. As such, they are not yet synchronized. Also notice that both of our video clips have their own linked audio, which is simply each angle’s on-camera mic.

Next, highlight each of the clips you would like to synchronize, and right click any of the highlighted clips, then click “Synchronize.”

This will open the “Synchronize Clips” dialogue box. Select the “Audio” option, and for most cases, you will leave the “Track Channel” option set to “1.”

Now click “OK.” This will initiate a “Processing Audio,” dialogue box, which will analyze each of your audio layers, finding commonalities that the software will then use to synchronize your audio. As you can see in our example below, all our clips have shifted to sync based on audio.

Now we can remove our internal camera audio and alternate between cameras as we see fit.

Is it Reliable?

I’ve used this feature in Adobe Premiere countless times, and I have found that this feature works perfectly 90% of the time. Occasionally, Premiere will have issues finding commonalities in the audio you are attempting to synchronize, in which case it will display the following message:

This error is typically caused by one of two issues:

1. You have made a user error and selected clips in which the audio does not coincide.
2. One or more of the audio clips you have selected are either too quiet, or too unclear for Premiere to analyze correctly.

If option #2 happens to you, and the problem can’t be solved by simply boosting the audio gain, you’re unfortunately just going to be out of luck, as there isn’t an easy way to correct this problem. You will have to synchronize everything the old-fashioned way.

Occasionally, but very rarely, Premiere will botch this process and synchronize your clips incorrectly. This most often occurs when attempting to sync music, as repeating choruses and phrasing can sometimes confuse the program. That said, this is a fairly reliable method of synchronizing your audio and clips, and I would highly recommend it to editors of all skill levels.