User`s guide

Chapter 25: Working with QuickTime Movies 373
Since a movie can be moved inside the
Movie track, it is fairly easy to match these
two times. In fact, you may not have to
move the Movie track at all.
For finer adjustment of a movie’s start
time, you can use the Set Movie Sync Offset
command to offset your movie in 1/4-
frame increments. This is more accurate
than dragging the movie track, and is espe-
cially useful in cases where your movie
track happens to begin with a partial frame.
To set the movie start time:
1 Double-check that your session’s SMPTE
frame rate matches that of your movie.
2 If you haven’t already done so, set the
Pro Tools Time Scale to SMPTE time code
by choosing Display > Time Code.
3 In the Edit Window, enable Grid mode.
4 Set the Grid resolution to frames by se-
lecting frames from the Nudge/Grid pop-
up.
5 With the Selector, click in the Movie
Track to place the cursor where you wish to
create a Sync Point. Often, the best spot
will be the “2 beep” two seconds before the
first action frame (the start of the video).
You can use the plus and minus keys on
your computer keyboard to nudge the cur-
sor and the Movie one frame at a time.
6 Choose Edit > Identify Sync Point to
place a Sync Point at the current cursor lo-
cation.
7 Put Pro Tools into Spot mode by clicking
the Spot button in the Edit window.
8 Click on the Movie track with the Grab-
ber. The Move Region To dialog appears.
9 Enter the time code number displayed in
the window-burn of the frame you are
spotting to (if your movie has a SMPTE
time code window burned into it) and click
OK to close the Move Region To dialog.
10 The movie’s sync point moves to the
SMPTE location you entered.
11 To fine-tune the movie start time,
choose Movie > Set Movie Sync Offset, en-
ter the desired offset value, and click OK.
12 Lock the movie in place by choosing
Edit > Lock/Unlock Region.
Spotting Audio to a
QuickTime Movie
For accurate spotting, Grid Mode provides
you with an effective tool for quick and ac-
curate selection of waveforms, and align-
ment of regions in tracks. When Grid Mode
is enabled, the Selector will snap to the cur-
rently selected grid mode value, and re-
gions selected with the Grabber and
dragged onto a track will also line up with
the selected value.
Conforming Your Movie
Before you spot audio to a movie, you
should conform the movie file so each
frame starts and ends at valid frame bound-
aries.
For example, Adobe Premiere contains a
Conform Movie tool for destructively edit-
ing the lengths of each frame to the grid of
the current frame rate. You should con-
form the movie to a frame rate that
Pro Tools can work with (30 FPS or
29.97 FPS).