How do I see every frame of a clip on the timeline in Premier ?

Question

There are of course times when I need to see every frame of a clip to synchronize two clips. Imagine for example that you have a two camera shoot and both cameras were looking at a clapstick, or at a strobe. I want to put both clips on the timeline and zoom in to see every frame. Now I can align the two clips fo that one specific frame of each clip is over/under each other. However, when I have zoomed into the timeline it seems I can never zoom quite enough to see every frame What do I do to be able to zoome all the way in to the timeline so I can see every frame of the clips ? I haven't actually tried this yet with CC, but did with CS6 and it wouldn't do it.

Answer 1

I'm not knocking the idea of using the program monitor to place markers on sync points and using that to synchronize clips. It should be a very good solution.
What I am saying is that there are times when it would be advantageous to be able to see every frame of multiple clips on the timeline. When i first tried to do that I zoomed in and it looked as if it would display all the frames. I was dissappointed to find it wouldn't. As an editor who has done a lot of resynchronizing multiple camera shoots where there is no intentional visual sync cue, i can tell you it can be a big help to be able to see the frames as if we had a strip of film on each timeline. Sometimes we need to see several frames of each clip at the same time to make a decision about which frame represents the sync point, or to make the quickest possible decision about where to start and end a dissolve, or to chose which camera to use. In a scene shot with only one camera, there is no actual sync point. The action may have progressed slightly differently between shots. Being able to see 10 or 15 frames from each shot can help to make the quickest decision about how to line up the shots and where to do the transition. Would anyone out there say it would be a bad thing if Premier Pro could display every frame when we zoom all the way in ? It seems to me that it could only help. So i request Adobe consider it as a possible future improvement.
Here is an example, the last time i tried to see every frame in Premier. I had a scene I used Maya to create, series of Tiffs. This scene shows an object appearing as if arriving through a time or dimensional portal. The scene includes plasma popping and flashing. There are two different shots of the same moment in time. The shots are frame numbered. So if I could see the frame numbers from the original tiffs on the timeline I could align the shots that way. But of course I lose the frame numbers. The overall scene is too long, and rendering time too long, especially for 3-D 1080, to render each shot from the beginning of the scene, which would make synchronizing very easy. So i needed to sync to the flashing plasma in the scene. I though I had the shots lined up using a flash. It turned out they were not the same flash. So if i did a slow dissolve between shots, the flashes form each shot would not line up in time. What I needed to do is line up several flashes happening over a couple of seconds, so I coud verify the flashes were the same flashes. There are different numbers of frames between each flash, so if I got three to line up they would have to be the same flashes. I spent a lot of time trying to get these shots lined up. If I could zoom into the time line and see evry frame I could synchronize several clips by lining up the flashes, in just a couple of minutes. To do this with markers, marking say five flashes from each of four shots, it would take several minutes to do it before being ready to do the synchronizing. It's a workable solution, but is not ideal, a compromise.