If you shoot with an external recorder, you already know the chore. Your camera holds scratch audio, your recorder holds the good audio, and before you can edit you have to marry the two. One clip at a time, that is quick. A whole documentary shoot with a couple of interviews, a pile of B-roll, and hours of tour footage is a different story, the kind of busywork that eats an afternoon before you have made a single creative decision.
So the team built Sync, a plugin for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve that batch syncs your footage to your audio. You drop in every camera file and every recorder track, click Analyze, and it works through the whole shoot and organizes the result for you. Here is how it works, and, just as important, where it fits.
This video may reference an older version of Sync. Features and UI may have changed since recording.
Should you just sync by hand in Premiere Pro?
For a handful of clips, yes, and we would tell you to.
Select the camera clip and the recorder file in the Project panel, right-click, choose Merge Clips and sync by Audio. For clips already on a timeline, select them, right-click and choose Synchronize. Premiere does this well, it costs nothing, and our guide to syncing audio and video in Premiere Pro teaches both methods properly.
Three interviews and a few B-roll shots? Do it manually. You will be finished before a batch tool has finished reading the files.
The maths change when the card dump does. Fifty interviews, two cameras each, plus a recorder folder per take is several hundred pairings, and every one of them is the same mechanical decision made by a human who is not being paid to make it. That is the job this page is about: not whether Premiere can sync, but what to do when the volume makes doing it by hand the wrong call.
Pro Tip: The honest threshold is roughly when the syncing would take longer than the first pass of the edit. Below it, manual wins. Above it, you are burning creative hours on arithmetic.
What Sync is: batch sync for a whole shoot
Lead with the mental model, because it shapes how you use it. Sync matches a lot of footage to a lot of audio in one pass. You point it at your clips, it figures out which recorder track belongs to which camera take, and it lays everything out synced and labeled. It is not a single-clip tool (more on that below), it is a batch tool for the moment you sit down with a full card dump and need it all lined up.
It works the same in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, so you can follow either one. Sync is a paid plugin, but it comes with a 7-day free trial through Filmit Studio, and the trial unlocks the whole Filmit bundle, not just Sync. You install it from Filmit Studio, our desktop app manager: open the Premiere option, click Sync, and click install, or do the same under DaVinci Resolve. Then open it in Premiere via Window, then Extensions, then Sync. In DaVinci Resolve it is Window, then Workspace Integrations, then Sync. Both hosts function exactly the same from there.
Load your audio and footage, then Analyze
Once your media is imported, open Sync and give it two things. First, drop in your audio by dragging your recorder waves into the audio area. Then drag in all of your camera footage. In the demo that was about 136 video files from a documentary we have been working on, a mix of B-roll, a couple of interviews, and tour footage, with at least 45 minutes of interviews in the project. You do not sort or pair anything by hand, you hand Sync the whole pile.
Then click Analyze. Sync loads every file, renders the audio it needs in the background, and starts working through each clip to see whether it matches a recorder track. That is the entire ask on your side: load, click, done. Everything after that is Sync doing the tedious part for you.
Robust, not fast: batch it and walk away
Here is the honest framing, and I say it in the video because it matters. Sync is robust, not fast. It does the work for you rather than beat you on a stopwatch. If all you have is one clip and one audio track, syncing that by hand in Premiere or Resolve is quicker, and you should just do that.
Where Sync earns its keep is volume. When you have a whole shoot to line up, you click Analyze and walk away: grab a coffee, answer email, cut something else, and let it run in the background. In the demo, 136 clips took somewhere around 15 to 20 minutes, and I was not watching it, I was doing other things. Ten clips would have been done in a fraction of that. The point is not the clock, it is that the boring job happens without you sitting there.
Pro Tip: Do not judge Sync on a single clip, judge it on a card dump. The bigger the batch, the more time it saves you, so save it for the moment you have dozens of files to line up, click Analyze, and go do literally anything else.
How Sync matches: timecode, transcript, and waveform
Sync does not lean on one trick to find a match. It uses three signals together: the timecode on your files, the transcript of what was said, and the waveform itself. Cross-checking all three is what makes it robust, because when one signal is weak or missing, the others can still carry the match.
Then it grades its own work. Every file gets ranked low, medium, or high. Low means no match, exactly what you want on B-roll that never had a recorder rolling. High is a confident match. Medium is Sync saying, in effect, I think these go together. You get that ranking across all your files and cameras, so before you build anything you can see what lined up cleanly and what did not.
What Sync builds in your project
When the analysis is done, you tell Sync what to create. In the demo I had it build scene sequences plus a master, then clicked Create. Sync assembles a tidy Sync folder in your project panel and sorts everything into it: matched audio, matched video, your sequences, slices, and, crucially, unmatched audio and unmatched video. That last part is a touch I like: instead of quietly dropping what it could not pair, Sync tells you these did not match and keeps them organized, so nothing goes missing.
Inside the sequences folder you get all of your matched sequences plus the Sync master. The Sync master is a nested timeline that lays the entire project out in one place, which makes it easy to see the whole shoot at a glance and jump into any individual sequence from there.
Multicam angles and settings
Open one of those synced sequences and you can see the work. In a two-camera interview you get Camera A and Camera B stacked and synced to the recorder wave, with each camera's scratch audio sitting underneath. The clean recorder audio is the wave up top, and the camera scratch tracks are below it.
Sync's settings let you shape how that is arranged. You can build multi-angle scene sequences, build a master timeline, and choose where the main recorder audio lands. I like mine up top on A1 with the camera scratch below, so that is how I set it, but you can flip it and send the main audio to the bottom instead. It is your layout.
There is a nice detail for run-and-gun audio too. If you stopped and started your recorder several times during a shoot, Sync lays those takes out along A1 in order. If any overlap it stacks them, and as long as they do not overlap they all sit in a row on A1. That is how we wanted it to behave, so a messy stack of recorder takes comes back as an orderly timeline.
Pro Tip: Set your audio layout in Sync's settings before you click Create, not after. Deciding up front whether the main recorder audio rides on A1 or drops to the bottom means every sequence Sync builds comes out the way you want, with no rearranging later.
What happens when a match is wrong?
You hear it and fix it before anything is built. That was not true when this article was first published, so here is the current answer.
Sync tries hard to find a home for every file, and a tool that tries many methods will occasionally take a swing at a medium match that is wrong, like tucking a piece of B-roll into a sequence where it does not belong. The old advice was to spot the stray clip afterwards and delete it.
Sync 1.1 for Premiere Pro replaced that with Review. After Analyze, you open Review and see your clips as a list. Pick one and its camera audio and recorder audio appear as waveform lanes, one per channel, with mute and solo on each. Press play to hear them together, scrub anywhere in the take, and if a match sits a frame or two out, select the recording and slide it frame by frame, with Reset to put it back. Mark it Good or Wrong, then create one sequence or all of them straight from Review.
Wrong matches stay out of the build, so the stray B-roll problem is caught before it reaches your timeline rather than after. The full rundown is in what is new in Sync 1.1.
What else changed for big shoots
- Recorder folders count as one recording. If your recorder writes a folder per take with one file per microphone, those files are treated as a single recording instead of competing with each other for the same clip.
- The Auto setting. It places strong matches plus each clip's best remaining match, which is aimed squarely at shoots where every take sounds like the last one: an anchor reading the same script, or twenty interviews that open with the same question.
- Exact placement. Clips carrying a built-in head of media, RED footage among them, now land exactly in place rather than a few frames early, and camera audio stays linked to its picture.
- Faster re-runs. Running the same footage again reuses the earlier analysis.
These are in the Premiere Pro version. The DaVinci Resolve version of Sync is a separate release and has not had this update.
Key takeaways
Sync turns the afternoon-long chore of pairing recorder audio to camera footage into a click and a coffee break, in Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve.
Sync shines on a whole shoot. For one clip and one track, sync by hand. For a full card dump, let Sync do it.
Click Analyze and walk away. It runs in the background so the boring job happens without you sitting there watching it.
Timecode, transcript, and waveform together, then every file ranked low, medium, or high so you can see what lined up.
A Sync folder with matched audio and video, scene sequences, a master timeline, and unmatched audio and video so nothing goes missing.
The same workflow in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, and if a medium match is off, you just delete the stray clip.
Get started with Filmit
Sync installs through Filmit Studio, the desktop app you download from your dashboard to manage every Filmit plugin for Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and After Effects. It comes with a 7-day free trial that unlocks the whole bundle, and one price covers the entire growing suite rather than a steep fee per plugin, which is what funds the constant updates we ship to tools like this one.
If you are syncing a shoot in order to cut it, pair Sync with RoughCut, our AI assistant editor in the same bundle: let Sync line up and organize the footage, then let RoughCut assemble a first pass from your interviews. Start a free trial, install any of the tools, and the team is on Discord for questions and feedback. We would love to hear how Sync does on your projects.
