Camera by USB / Mic by Analog. Avoiding delay or out of sync

[Antifmradio]

im just gearing up and doing some research.

My home studio mainly consists of a NON video environment because its a radio station and 100% of the time its been only audio.

With that ive been using a mic connected to outboard equipment (Limiter / gate, Eq's, DeEssers, etc). So the sound is very clean and clear and THEN goes into the computers audio input.

Soon ill be including video but i want to avoid a delay or the appearance of the video being out of sync with the audio.

Im assuming it will be out of synch because:

The mic is analog

The camera will be USB

I will NOT be using the mic that is built int the camera because there is no way to better control the quality of its sound.

How do i avoid this pending out of sync issue between the two mediums?

[John V Knowles]

Hello there,

There may or may not be sync issues with that setup, so all you can do is try a test shoot. However you mention the camera is USB so can we assume you're filming yourself with a webcam setup? If so then you definitely may find they don't sync perfectly; I have a client who record selfies with Quicktime Player using a USB cam and a Scarlett analog to digital audio box and it's always 4 frames out of sync.

Not to worry though! There are a few ways around this:

• If you're recording the audio and video separately, then you can just marry the two files together in Premiere and adjust sync to your liking. Note that I would definitely record audio with the camera too (scratch audio) as that will make aligning the good audio a lot easier. You can put all the elements on a timeline, select all, right-click and choose "Synchronize" to align the audio, then delete the camera audio and link or group the good audio to the video clip. Or use multicam sync if you have a lot of clips to synchronize in your bins.
• If audio and video are being married together when you record then you may have to SLIP the audio into sync. Add a clip to the timeline, then option-click on the audio and use the slip tool to manually adjust sync in either direction until you achieve sync. This way is a bit more tedious but if you don't ahve a lot of clips it won't take that lomng. the good news is the offset should be consistent so you'll always be slipping by the same amount each time.

HTH,

JVK

[Antifmradio]

ok thanks

yes ill be using a webcam but i really dont want to use its microphone because of the lack of professional sound. This would be for voice overs, character animation, illustration work, etc. not to mention a vlog. I really need the audio to be top notch and i have the equipment in place to do that.

I guess ill have to time it and see how many frames out of sync it always is, and make that adjustment by either atting a delay start of using the blank space at the start of the video file in the timeline.

Ill see how it goes.

Thanks