What’s new in Media Sync Tool 2.0

Media Sync Tool 2.0 is a major update — a fully rewritten code base, a redesigned Liquid Glass user interface, continuity-notes logging, and a smarter sync engine. If you’re coming from version 1.x, here’s what changed.

A simpler, redesigned window

The interface has been rebuilt to follow the new Liquid Glass paradigm. The window is a single drop zone: drag an FCPXML file — or a Final Cut Pro library, event, or clips — onto it, or click the import badge to browse for a file, and the sync starts. The old toolbar of separate buttons is gone; everything else lives in one compact control bar with three destinations — Continuity Notes, Settings, and Subscription. See About the user interface.

The old Auto Send option was retired. A sync now ends at a results view, where you choose when to send the clips to Final Cut Pro — so you can review before anything lands in your library. See Share and export synced clips.

Log clips with continuity notes

Media Sync Tool can now read a continuity report — a CSV export from your script supervisor’s software — and log scene, shot, take, and the take verdict straight onto your clips as they sync. Good takes become Favorite and NG takes Rejected. And if a run can’t pair anything by timecode, your logging isn’t lost: Media Sync Tool still logs the clips your report matched and finishes with a warning instead of failing. See Clip Logging.

A smarter sync engine

• Sync a whole production at once. Drop every shooting day together and Media Sync Tool syncs them all in seconds—there’s no limit on how many days you hand it at a time. It groups clips by shooting day on its own (from each file’s folder and recorded creation date) and pairs picture with sound by timecode. Overlapping 24-hour timecode is handled for you: when several days reuse the same timecode values, each day’s clips stay apart instead of being mismatched.
• Per-take splitting. When the camera restarted between takes while audio kept rolling, each take now becomes its own multicam or synchronized clip instead of one long merged clip.
• Per-angle clips alongside multicams. Every multicam also publishes its individual angles as standalone synchronized clips, so you can cut with a single angle and still switch to the multicam later. See Multicam and synchronized clips.
• Embed audio in all angles. New Synced Clips in All Angles multicam assembly option adds individual synchronized clips to each angle, so flattenning a multicam leaves you a standalone synchronized clip. See Settings.
• Cleaner trims. Standalone synchronized clips are trimmed to the picture’s range with no rejected sections; multicam clips still mark the angle ranges that aren’t covered. See Rejecting non-common ranges.

No more manual workarounds

The previous version leaned on manual workarounds to push problem media through a sync. Media Sync Tool 2.0 handles those cases on its own, so the extra steps are gone.

• No Force Sync keyword or manual bucketing. When several shooting days reused the same 24-hour timecode, version 1.x had you import each day’s subfolder as a keyword and tag its clips Force Sync so the app would keep the days apart. 2.0 keeps them apart automatically.
• No second FCPXML for transcoded media. When footage had been transcoded to proxies and lost its original metadata, version 1.x asked you to preload a separate FCPXML of the source clips to recover it. Now you are completely free of that extra step.

If a sync still can’t pair everything, the app tells you why — see When some clips don’t sync and Unresolved timecode overlapping.

Updated keywords

The keywords written to a synced event were tightened to describe the sync result more accurately. See Sync keywords.

• MOS marks silent picture — video with no audio to pair with.
• Processed Originals is a new option to include standalone copies of the source clips in the synced event, so it’s self-contained when you hand it off.
• The old All Synced Media, Music, and Stills keywords were removed.