The rig nobody writes guides for
A GoPro on the car. A phone on a tripod at the corner. An Insta360 on the helmet, or on a pole, or wherever it ended up.
Three cameras, three brands, three places, and you started them one at a time by walking between them. Now you have three files of the same session that agree on nothing.
Almost everything written about multi-camera sync assumes you own several of the same camera. Pair them to one remote. Run timecode. Use the manufacturer's app to start them together. All good advice for a matched rig, and none of it exists for a mixed one. A GoPro remote will not trigger a phone, and a phone will not run anyone's timecode.
So the mixed rig gets solved after the fact or not at all. This is how to solve it after the fact.
Two problems, not one
The obvious one: the cameras started at different moments, so the same event sits at a different point in each file. One number per camera fixes that.
The quieter one: every camera keeps its own clock, and those clocks run at slightly different rates. Over a two-minute clip you'll never notice. Over an hour you will, because an alignment that was frame-perfect at the start sits visibly late by the end. A phone and an action camera are more likely to disagree this way than two cameras off the same production line.
If you've ever synced a long session, been happy with it, and then found the cuts drifting apart in the final third, that was this. It wasn't something you did wrong, and a single offset per camera can't fix it.
What StintBox does with a mixed rig
Load the clips into Sync Studio. GoPro, Insta360, DJI, phone footage, plus separate GPS or lap-timer logs if you have them. Then run the automatic sync.
It aligns them using whatever the files genuinely have in common: the telemetry they recorded, their audio, and other signals present in the footage. It doesn't care that they're different brands, and it doesn't need them mounted together. It also corrects the slow drift between mismatched clocks instead of applying one fixed offset to the whole clip, which is what decides whether a long session still holds together at the end.
For each clip it reports how confident the result is. Above 90%, cut on it. Between 70% and 90%, spot-check it. Below that, it's telling you to look, not telling you it failed.
Then verify, always. Find a moment that's sharp in two angles at once, like a gear change, a kerb strike or a door closing, and step through it frame by frame. Ten seconds of that beats discovering the problem after you've cut the whole video.
Where something is off, drag it into place by hand. On footage with nothing distinctive in it, your eye on one recognisable event is genuinely the better instrument, and adjusting by hand isn't a fallback so much as the right tool for that particular clip.
What to expect from your setup
Not every combination is equally easy, and it's worth knowing which one you have before you start.
Cameras that were near each other are the straightforward case, whatever brands they are. They were present for the same things, so there's plenty to work with.
Cameras mounted on the same vehicle are the easiest of all, and they stay reliable at speed, which is the situation where a lot of setups get harder.
A camera far away from the others, like the trackside tripod, the drone, or the phone on the far side of the paddock, is the one to check rather than trust. It usually works, especially if it was moving or caught the same pass-by, but this is where you'll spend your ten seconds of verification.
A static camera with no telemetry, far from everything else is the genuine hard case. It may have almost nothing in common with the rest of the rig beyond the fact that you can see the same thing happen in both. Place one anchor by hand on a visible event and move on. It takes about twenty seconds and it isn't worth fighting.
That's the honest shape of it. Most mixed rigs land in the first three categories and sync without much thought. The fourth is rare, predictable, and quick to deal with once you recognise it.
One thing that quietly makes it harder
Use the original files.
Footage that has been through another program first usually comes out the other side with its telemetry gone. Trimmed in the manufacturer's app, exported from an editor, re-encoded to save space, stitched from a 360 camera: the picture and sound survive, but the GPS track, the motion data and the timestamps written by the camera do not.
You end up with a clip that looks identical and has far less to align on. It's a common way for an Insta360 or DJI file to arrive at the sync stage carrying nothing but audio, and it turns an easy case into an awkward one for no reason.
The same goes for anything that re-wraps or "optimises" the file on import. Copy the originals off the card and work from those. If you need a trimmed version for editing, trim it afterwards.
Making next time easier
You can't improve footage you've already shot, but the mixed rig is a recurring problem and one habit removes most of it.
Before you start, with every camera rolling and able to see or hear you, make one sharp, loud, visible event. A hand clap in frame. A car door. Anything with a hard edge to it in both sound and picture.
Then do it again at the end.
The first gives every camera a common moment and turns the awkward setups into easy ones. The second is the more useful of the two. With a fixed point at each end of the recording, the drift between mismatched clocks can be measured across the whole session instead of accumulating quietly through it.
It costs five seconds. On a long shoot with a phone and an action camera in the same rig, it's the difference between a sync that holds and one that doesn't.
Why bother
Once the clips agree on what time it is, they stop being three videos and become three angles of one thing. A single set of telemetry drives the overlay across all of them, so you can cut from the car to the trackside phone mid-corner and the speedometer keeps counting. It's reading one data stream, not guessing per clip.
That only holds if the alignment underneath is right, which is why the ten seconds of checking is the part not to skip.