In the era of DSLR video, where the sound recording capabilities of cameras is secondary to video, many videographers have been forced to return to double-system sound recording. This means they need some type of software to replace their original audio with the best version of the sound recording that’s available.

It all began in the year 2000, when Bruce Sharpe and his wife were shooting video of live events — things like stage presentations and dances. They owned two camcorders and took the sound from the local mixing board. But Sharpe wanted better audio and sought a way to automatically sync the sound from any outboard audio recorder to his video.

He tried to buy the software to do this, but found none available. Thus began a nine-year journey to create his own. “Because of my technical background, which was analyzing satellite imagery and visual data, I figured it was a solvable problem,” Sharpe said. “So I started tinkering with it.”

DIY solution

Sharpe created an application that would view and match audio waveforms. It could use a computer to automatically sync the higher-quality sound with the video. The user would not have to tweak it or be bothered with prep in the field. It would just happen — quickly, reliably and automatically.

In 2009, Sharpe’s software was ready for market. He created a company called Singular Software and debuted a new product called PluralEyes at NAB 2009. His timing was perfect — though at the time he didn’t know it.

The previous September, Canon had introduced the EOS 5D Mark II, the first DSLR camera to have high-quality video recording capabilities. But the audio was only so-so. PluralEyes was just what was needed to overcome the weak audio recording capability of the new generation of DSLR video cameras.(See previous PluralEyes articles here and here.

Sharpe’s software was a success and, in 2012, his small company was bought by Red Giant, a maker of tools for digital video makers based in Beaverton, Oregon. Today, Sharpe is Business Unit Manager of Red Giant’s Shooter Suite. PluralEyes, now at version 3.5, is one of the products in that suite. It leads the industry in sales and is priced individually at $199.

Since the emergence of PluralEyes, there have been a couple of small competitors, each also created by working videographers. However, no one has really been a competitor to the well established leader, PluralEyes.

New company in NAB StartUp Loft

At this year's NAB, two small companies are joining forces to take on PluralEyes. Pixelynx Labs, LLC of Atlanta and WooWave, Inc. of London have combined forces to specifically tackle PluralEyes with what they claim is a faster, more accurate, more feature-rich and more affordable audio-video synchronization application.

The new company is called WooWaveDreamSync, Inc and the product is called DreamSync (Powered by WooWave). It will debut at NAB in the StartUp Loft, a launching pad for new companies. The players behind the product are Igor Jovcevski, a London videographer who founded WooWave in 2001, and Jon Acosta, president of Pixelynx Labs, a videographer based in Atlanta.

Both have long worked separately on a better version of audio-visual sync software and joined forces last year when each realized the other had created better parts of a new solution that each needed.

“Igor is a brilliant software developer but was in the same boat as me,” said Acosta. “He was trying to find something better than PluralEyes. He couldn’t find anyone to create the software, so he ended up teaching himself how to code. He finished the algorithm in two years. The result was brilliant.”

That algorithm, said Acosta, is faster and more accurate than PluralEyes and works well with his own drag and drop interface in DreamSync. The two decided in order to compete with PluralEyes they should bring their two products together.

After four months of testing, the new software is now in beta and will be released at NAB. All current DreamSync users will get DreamSync (Powered by WooWave) for free. The current DreamSync will become DreamSync Lite.

“The WooWave algorithm is a lot faster than PluralEyes. As we’ve been tweaking it over the last few months, it outperforms PluralEyes on multiple levels and we’ve seen some errors that PluralEyes, Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premier have made, while the engine from WooWave is almost 100 percent accurate,” Acosta said.

“When the audio and video are off, it’s called a false positive,” he continued. “We found a lot of false positives from PluralEyes, while WooWave actually nailed most of them. That blew me away.”

Acosta said the new WooWave-enhanced version of DreamSync will process the audio and video quicker, have fewer false positives, recognize more video formats and be lower in cost, debuting at $99.

Acosta said a goal of the new application is to recognize any video format or codec. It will allow users to encode their video from inside the software, as opposed to handling the encoding in a third party NLE and then importing an XML file to DreamSync.

Once synchronized, the new software will let users trim down their clips, and even export individual synchronized clips as separate QuickTime files. This feature is for less complicated video shoots or single camera interviews.

The software also has a feature to automatically disregard the on-camera audio (the one users replace with better audio) so there’s no extra step in muting multiple audio tracks.

“Igor and I are determined to create a better synchronization engine than PluralEyes,” Acosta said. “We are not a big corporation, but a small dedicated team committed to making the fastest sync application out there. That’s our advantage.”

PluralEyes is not a bad application at all, said Acosta. “It’s a really, really robust product. Their business model is they are trying to make a suite of applications and trying to up-sell customers with all their other products. For us, we are trying to create software to solve one problem.

“Their biggest advantage from a competitive standpoint today is their drift sync auto correct,” he continued. “That’s when a video and audio clip are so long they fall out of sync ever so slightly. It happens the longer the clip is. PluralEyes can correct that for you on the fly. We will concentrate on that in our next generation, but not on the first release. We will add the feature later this year and make it free to our users. We think that feature is awesome and it took them a lot of time to put that together.”