Looking for a Syncaila alternative
If you are shopping for a Syncaila alternative, the useful question is not which tool wins a benchmark on somebody else’s footage. It is what your own shoot needs, what every waveform tool fails at, and what lands in your editor at the end. Here is both — and a method that works whichever tool you pick.
Why people go looking
Syncaila is one of the established paid tools for multi-camera sync, and people search for an alternative for ordinary reasons: a licence that does not fit how they work, a platform they have moved to, a shoot the current tool handled badly, or simply the wish to see what else exists before committing an edit to it.
This page is not a scorecard. Nobody has published a fair head-to-head on your footage, and any table claiming one is describing someone else's shoot. What follows is the set of questions worth asking before you commit, and then a practical way to sync a multicam shoot today. If you arrived here from the other direction — a PluralEyes licence that wound down — that move has its own guide.
What actually matters when you choose
What comes out the other end
A sync tool's output is its whole product. Ask what it hands your editor: an XML you import, an AAF, or a timeline built directly in the application you already have open. The difference is not cosmetic — a round-trip through a file is a step you repeat every time footage changes, and it is where clips go offline, frame rates get reinterpreted and audio lands on the wrong track.
Whether it works inside your editor or beside it
Before paying for any of them, it is worth knowing what your editor already does: DaVinci Resolve syncs three different ways on its own, and for a small shoot that is often the whole answer. Beyond that, some tools are separate applications: export a timeline, sync it, import it back. Others run as a plugin inside the editor. Beside-the-editor is not worse — it is simply an errand you do once per project, and if your projects are small you will never notice it. On a shoot you re-cut for a week, you will.
How it behaves when it fails
Every waveform-based tool fails on the same material: clips with no overlapping sound, clips whose audio was never recorded, phone clips with a variable frame rate, and long takes where two independent clocks drift apart. The question is not whether a tool fails — it is whether it tells you which clip it could not place and why, or quietly drops it somewhere and lets you find it in the edit.
What it does with mixed frame rates
A 23.976 body, a 29.97 action camera and a 25 fps drone in one folder is an ordinary shoot, not an edge case. Ask what the tool writes into the timeline for each file, and build the sequence at the rate most of your footage actually is.
The licence, in the shape you actually work
Perpetual, subscription, per-seat, per-machine — none of these is right or wrong in the abstract. What matters is whether it matches your year. If you shoot in bursts and edit for two months, a perpetual licence you use twice is cheap and a subscription you forget to cancel is not. If you work continuously, the reverse.
How to sync a multicam shoot, step by step
This works with any tool, and with none — it is the method, not the product.
- Get everything into one folder tree first. Cards offloaded, recorder files copied, phone angles pulled off the phone. A sync that runs before the material is complete has to be run again.
- Convert variable-frame-rate phone clips to a constant rate. Do it now, not after you notice the drift. Phones drop frame rate when the light drops; the head of the clip syncs perfectly and the tail does not.
- Sync by sound, not by file time. File modification times are set by the card reader, not by the camera. Timecode is exact only if the devices were jam-synced to one generator.
- Check the end of every long take. Drift is invisible at the head of a clip by definition. If a forty-minute take is in sync at the start and out at the end, that is two clocks running at slightly different speeds, and no amount of re-syncing the start will fix it.
- Deal with the leftovers deliberately. The clips a tool could not place are the ones worth your time — a camera with its microphone off, a second unit that never heard the same room. Place those by hand, once, and keep the project.
- Keep the camera audio. Whatever tool you use, do not let it replace scratch audio with the recorder file. When a recorder file turns out to be unusable, the camera's own track is the difference between a nuisance and a lost day.
How SyncLab does it
SyncLab reads a whole folder, matches clips by sound, and builds a timeline with every clip in position. Files it could not place are set aside with a reason for each, rather than dropped into the edit for you to find.
It works two ways, and the second one is the reason it exists:
- As an app on macOS and Windows, which writes a timeline you import.
- As a plugin inside your editor — Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve Studio. The timeline appears in the project you already have open, with no file to export and re-import. The Resolve plugin needs the Studio edition specifically: the free edition of Resolve does not load plugins at all.
One licence covers the app and both plugins. It starts with a 14-day free trial, no card.
What it does not do: it will not rescue clips with no overlapping audio — nothing waveform-based will, and a tool that claims otherwise is describing a different problem. Clap, use timecode, or place those by hand.
Try SyncLab
Automatic multicam sync, straight to a ready-to-edit timeline. Free 14-day trial on Mac and Windows.
Try free for 14 days →Questions about formats, cameras, or exports? See the SyncLab FAQ.