Sync drone and GoPro footage with your main cameras

Why aerial and action clips are the awkward ones

A drone microphone hears propellers. An action camera in a housing hears wind and mounting noise. Some drone clips carry no audio track at all. These are the clips that sit unsynced at the end of a shoot day while the main cameras and the recorder went together in minutes.

CamHeard treats them as part of the same day instead of a separate job. You drop the drone and action camera folders in with the rest of the cards and run one sync.

This is not a case we imagined. Aerial and action camera material sits in the test corpus CamHeard is measured against: 8 real shoot days and 1121 files, cinema cameras, a GoPro and a drone among them. A day of 215 files went through in 29 seconds on a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max.

GoPro cuts a long take into parts

A GoPro splits a long recording into parts and adds a suffix to the file name, so GX010121.MP4 and GX010121_2.MP4 are one camera and one recording. CamHeard reads them as the same camera, and each part gets its own place on the timeline rather than a new track.

A GoPro also writes a timecode track of its own, and CamHeard reads it.

DJI and Sony leave a sidecar file next to the clip

Sony cameras write a small XML file next to every clip, and the timecode in it is exact. DJI writes a sidecar of its own with the time of each frame down to the millisecond, although the drone itself writes no timecode. CamHeard reads both.

Leave those files where they are, in the folder with the clips. You do not need to clean them out or copy them separately.

When a clip has nothing to sync with

If an aerial or action clip carries sound that belongs to the day, it is synced like any other camera. If it does not, CamHeard places it by time or parks it at the end of the timeline, and either way the clip is marked.

That mark is the point. A clip without proof is never presented as synced, so the body of your timeline stays trustworthy and your review is a short list instead of a whole day.

What comes out in your editor

CamHeard writes a timeline you open in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro. Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve read the FCP7 XML file, Final Cut Pro reads the FCPXML file.

What lands in the editor is what you saw on screen. If the marked clips were sitting at the end, they arrive at the end. If you switched them to approximate places by the logic of the shoot, they arrive there, still marked.

Local, offline, and your files are untouched

CamHeard works on your machine with no internet connection and no account. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is rendered, and your media is only read. Cards and project folders come back exactly as they were.

It runs on macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later on Apple Silicon and on Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, and reads MP4, MOV, MXF, BRAW, AVCHD and other camcorder formats, plus WAV, MP3, M4A, AIFF, FLAC and CAF on the audio side.

Frequently asked questions

Can CamHeard sync a drone clip with no audio at all?

Not by sound, because there is nothing to work with. Such a clip is placed by time or parked at the end of the timeline, and it is marked so you can check it.

Will GoPro chapters show up as separate cameras?

No. Parts of one recording are read as the same camera.

Can I put a drone, two GoPro cameras and two cinema cameras in one project?

Yes. Keep one folder per card, drop them all in and run the sync once for the whole day.

Do I need GPS or telemetry switched on?

No. CamHeard does not ask you to enable anything on the camera before the shoot.

Where do the marked clips end up after export?

Where they stood on screen. The switch above the timeline decides that, and the export follows it.

Does it re-encode my drone footage?

No. CamHeard writes a timeline and never touches the media files.