Premiere Pro: Audio and Video sync - especially in music videos

Report · Jun 14, 2017

Hi,

I've run into an interesting problem which I seem to be unable to find an answer to.

I am editing a music video. The footage was shot with a Canon DSLR at 25 fps and audio was recorded for reference. As it is a music video the reference audio can be heard in the video clips so that lipsync can be achieved. Now I am syncing the video clips to a wav file that has the music.

However the problem is that in a couple of video clips the reference audio that was recorded is around 1/2 frames off, so I am unable to accurately sync the video clips to the WAV-file to get accurate lip sync.

In most cases this could be solved by changing the timecode to audio units and moving the audio 1/2 frames, however as the WAV-file audio is the whole song of the music video, all of the video clips have to sync with the audio and not vise versa.

As you can see in example images, I have moved the WAV audio (A1) to sync with the reference audio of video 1 (A2+V2), but I am unable to sync it with video 2 that is 1/2 frames off (A4+V4). Example images 1 and 2 show the difference of moving V4+A4 one frame, always ending up starting too early or too late.

How is it even possible to sync all of the video clips with the music video main audio? Seems like many of the video clips that have been shot have the reference audio offsetting from each other by around half a frame. 1/2 frame of offset in a lip sync is somewhat noticeable.

Is there something to be done in the shooting of the videos for music videos to guarantee the sync of reference audio with the music and what can be done now?

Report · Jun 14, 2017

Typically, this would be done using Multicam editing, where all video & audio are synced to one track by PrPro. I'd recommend going into the PrPro Help files and searching for Multicam ... and also, you can look around Youtube/Vimeo for multicam in PremierePro, and ... the best thing to me ... is to really learn to use Premiere Pro. I recommend using the lynda-dot-com subscription service, which has many excellent tutorials including downloadable exercise assets, to learn the program. A month of working with a lynda subscription will save you many, many frustrating hours of work.

Neil

Report · Jun 14, 2017

middaw wrote
Is there something to be done in the shooting of the videos for music videos to guarantee the sync of reference audio with the music and what can be done now?

1) To prevent this, you would use an audio playback device and camera(s) that are all synced via a common sync generator.

2) In my opinion: a 1/2 frame offset - 1/50th of a second - should not, I would think, be observable by viewers. You may be overly sensitive to it since you know it is there.

Sound travels at 1088 feet/sec so if your camera that was recording the reference sound (assuming an on camera mic) was further than 22 feet away from the speaker the talent was lip syncing to, you'll get the 1/50th of a second offset from the track and the reference recording of it.

MtD