Sofi Marshall (who wrote the amazing article on setting up for remote editing with Premiere Pro) has another must read article on Batch Syncing Audio in Adobe Premiere Pro.
I too prefer Merge Clips to multi-cam clips if there is only one video track because it acts more like a clip, but the problems are very frustrating. Why there is no batch ability for Merge Clips is beyond me, and why not ability to flatten back to source as you can do with Multicam?
But the biggest gotchas are with Proxy and Audio.
If you are going to be doing Proxy always do it before you Merge Clips otherwise it doesn’t work.
The number one issue with Merge clips for me has been that it breaks AAF export and removes all the audio clip metadata. And her solution to export an FINAL CUT PRO XML and re-import and it will fix the audio tracks and return audio metadata is awesome (and if you get rid of the video you can just cut this audio in for your mix). Sure it is an extra step, but a quick one that will work easily, but remember to switch off linked selection before deleting video or you will have more problems with your sequence.
Now the thing that Sofi Marshall doesn’t mention that is a huge got you for Merge Clips, is that using Merge clips breaks Project Manager in Premiere. So if you need to use Project Manager, then Merge Clips is not your solution and maybe just stick with Multi-Cam clips.
And I have always done Merge Clips in a different way than she does. She uses Multi-Cam Batch to sync all of her clips, then goes into each Multi-Cam sequences and merges clips, using the multi-Cam batch to do the syncing.
Personally I just sort each folder by Media start and select the audio and video that corresponds (with similar start time code) and right click and merge clips.
And from the dialogue sync by audio and remove cameras audio.
My only complaint with this method is the weird sort issues of Premiere Pro’s bins, that even though I am sorting by start timecode, the new merge clips jumps to the top of the bin after it’s creation, and until I make a new clip won’t sort into timecode order. I never figured out if this is a feature or a bug, but to me it is a bug, if I am sorted in a certain order, I always want every clip to sort that way and anything else is just confusion.
Now there are literally a ton of threads on issues with Merge Clips at Adobe Voice, and I hope anyone who reads this will click on many of these to try and get Adobe to work on these issues.
