Music Video Audio Sync

C

Centwo

Active member
Hello
I am shooting a music video this weekend and will need to sync the audio.
I have the artist do the full song in one location & Full Song in 2nd location so on and so on
So will it link the audio with the MP3 for each shot and put it on a new frame?
say I have 6 shots 3 full song and 3 part of the song
I import them in to CS5 with the MP3 audio
WIll it line each one up with the audio on seprate frame or does it chop the audio to match the video?
 
I would, if you're keeping it simple, feed the music playback back into the camera. I've used as little as an iPod with a splitter - one out to the playback system, one into the camera. It's not pretty but it works!

Then you can use something like pluraleyes (or even just your own ears) to sync it all back up.

Use the camera audio as a guide, and then use the original, mastered track as the audio for the video.
 
MP3?!?!? ARGHHHH! You should never use mp3 as a recording format. It is a release format, not a mastering one. Record the originals in an uncompressed format such a wave. Memory is cheaper than dirt and there's abssolutely no reason to skimp on it in shooting by using a compressed file format.

Music vdeios and musical production numbers are frequently done to pre-recorded playback. The song is pre-recorded and the performance is then shot of the band, vocalists, and other performers miming to the music playback. There's no way you can perform the song multiple times and have it exactly the same tempo, etc, for each run-through as accurately as is necessary for sync. Otherwise your recorded music track for scene 1 won't cut smoothly with the recordeed track for scene 2, you won't be able to use the video for scene 3 with the audio from scene 2, etc and have everything sync up properly.
 
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use pluraleyes

use pluraleyes

don't try to do it by listening to it. that's really time consuming. i've done that before on a music video and it took me forever. i used plural eyes on a feature film and it was super easy.
 
You stripe the audio with timecode before the shoot and, when you're on the shoot, you send the timecode from your (timecode enabled) playback device, like a 702T or the like, and send it either wired or wirelessly to your timecode slate, which essentially acts as a timecode display of where you are in the song at any given time. Every time you roll your cameras shoot the timecode slate. This way you'll always know what part of the song you the performers are singing/dancing to when in post. Or, you can use an iPod and just try to sync in post using the opened mics on your camera.


Centwo said:
Hello
I am shooting a music video this weekend and will need to sync the audio.
I have the artist do the full song in one location & Full Song in 2nd location so on and so on
So will it link the audio with the MP3 for each shot and put it on a new frame?
say I have 6 shots 3 full song and 3 part of the song
I import them in to CS5 with the MP3 audio
WIll it line each one up with the audio on seprate frame or does it chop the audio to match the video?
Click to expand...
 
dippenz said:
don't try to do it by listening to it. that's really time consuming. i've done that before on a music video and it took me forever. i used plural eyes on a feature film and it was super easy.
Click to expand...

Two quibbles with that statement. First it isn't hard to sync by ear. People do it all the time. Maybe you didn't record your playback audio and you were trying to sync by eye, that would be a pain.

And I teach at a small film school and when I arrived the students had gotten very hot for Pluraleyes and had decided it was "the" answer. Unfortunately they hadn't tried it out and didn't pay attention to the work flow and it turned out to be a nightmare for them.

So Pluraleyes can do a fantastic job. BUT you need to follow it's workflow, you need to sync BEFORE you cut a frame. You need to have audio clips that are 1:1 with the video clips.
Pluraleyes was not designed to do what people are using it for, it was designed to use the audio track to sync multi camera shots. They are actually making a product designed to sync audio called Dualeyes.
Anyway it works well but it's a time saver more than "easy". Easy implies you can be sloppy (to many people) and if your sloppy and don't follow the workflow it can bite you on the but.

OP: Don't record to MP3. There are a boatload of reasons but the fact that you can't guarantee that it will play back at the right speed all the time should be enough. I would go farther than Steve and call it an "end user consumer format".
 
Noiz2 said:
...OP: Don't record to MP3. There are a boatload of reasons but the fact that you can't guarantee that it will play back at the right speed all the time should be enough. I would go farther than Steve and call it an "end user consumer format".
Click to expand...
LOL - Actually I'd call it "an end-user consumer format for people who don't actually have a clue what real music sounds like." :)
 
You can use MP3s all day for reference to record the video and line up the takes, but when you edit the video just use a .wav or .aiff file from the CD. Put the CD audio in an audio track of your NLE and edit everything to that.

If you have 5 different takes of the singer/band performing the song, just line them all up to the CD audio, then edit to taste. I don't know about your NLE, but FCP and Vegas have a "Multicam" function where you can see all the takes at once playing (after you have lined them all up to each other), then you just click around between them in real time to make the edits. Then you can go back and adjust the edit points to get them perfect. Otherwise you will have to turn off/on the various tracks of video to see which take is the want you want to cut to. Then you just delete any clips above the one you want to use for that portion of the song.
 
It sounded like the OP was planning on recording MP3's, that is what we were reacting to. MP3's are not stable in terms of playback but should be close enough for lip sync playback. But it's a terrible recording format.
 
I didn't get the impression that they will be recording live music. I think he just wants to play an mp3, as nobody carries around CD players any more. But yes, it makes no sense to record MP3s of anything you're recording. Audio files are so much smaller than video files even at full quality.

This line confuses e: "So will it link the audio with the MP3 for each shot and put it on a new frame?"
What? Maybe by "link" he means "sync"? I have no idea what "put it on a new frame" means.

Centwo, can you please clarify what you are asking?


I shot this silly ad a few years ago using one camera, with a CD playing in my car stereo, and I just used the camera's internal mics to catch the CD audio from the car. I just shot the dancer's routine about 6 times, then synced them up in Final Cut Pro with a full quality .wav of the song (that I wrote, performed and recorded myself). It was not too complicated really. Everything lines up, and you just choose the angle that looks the best at that moment. It would work the same with live music too. You would just mix the music to a single stereo file first and sync to that.

Here's my goofy "multicam" video. Brought to you by the venerable VX2100 SD camera!
 
The way I read the OP, he was not going to be shooting to playback at all. Instead he was going to shoot video of 2 separate full-length performances of the song and 4 part-length pickups of passages within it, recording the audio of those performances at the same time. Then he was going to try to cut it all together to make a full-length song out of the separate video-with-audio takes. AND he was going to record the master audio in MP3 format! But it's not at all likely that the audio tracks from all of these separate performances will intercut smoothly with each other. Nor will it be easy to take a piece of video from pickup performance 3 and lay it in to replace some frames in full-length video 1, for example, and have the audio from performance 1 sync up properly with the video from performance 3.
 
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Well a "performance" can be a lip sync as well as actually playing music. Regardless, I think the OP has abandoned his own thread, so I will too.
 
Noiz2 said:
And I teach at a small film school and when I arrived the students had gotten very hot for Pluraleyes and had decided it was "the" answer. Unfortunately they hadn't tried it out and didn't pay attention to the work flow and it turned out to be a nightmare for them.
Click to expand...

Not sure what you mean. I shot on a 7D with Audio on. I recorded on the H4 (not N). I imported into my timeline. I opened pluraleyes. I hit the sync button. Done. It worked and even wrote a glowing letter to the makers of the software. What workflow are you talking about? I bought the software well after we shot the movie (Trick of the Witch). I had not accounted for the fact before or while shooting that we would use pluraleyes. But we did end up using it and it worked wonderfully. Not being argumentative - really wondering about the workflow and what can be done to make pluraleyes work better? Always looking to improve! Thanks in advance....
 
They edited and then tried to run Pluralize on the finished cut. They also did some big groups and it crashed on them. I wasn't there so that's as much detail as I got.
 
Noiz2 said:
They edited and then tried to run Pluralize on the finished cut.
Click to expand...
One of the downsides of high-technology is that it enables people to get into the game who have no basic understanding of how things work. I suppose if you go through life taking modern technology for granted as "magic", you will get lucky some percentage of the time.
 
Noiz2 said:
They edited and then tried to run Pluralize on the finished cut. They also did some big groups and it crashed on them. I wasn't there so that's as much detail as I got.
Click to expand...

Your response went in a completely different direction than what you stated originally. These were your students, yet you were not there and you are not sure what actually went wrong for them. How about you? Have you actually tried the program to know if it is good or not? Curious... Thanks for your "response".
 
Richard Crowley said:
One of the downsides of high-technology is that it enables people to get into the game who have no basic understanding of how things work. I suppose if you go through life taking modern technology for granted as "magic", you will get lucky some percentage of the time.
Click to expand...

I agree on that. I have an appreciation for this program because I have sync'd audio prior to the advent of PluralEyes. Do you record your video on a "high-technology" device such as a dslr or camcorder OR do you use a Zoetrope? I know the answer (case and point). ;)
 
dippenz said:
Your response went in a completely different direction than what you stated originally. These were your students, yet you were not there and you are not sure what actually went wrong for them. How about you? Have you actually tried the program to know if it is good or not? Curious... Thanks for your "response".
Click to expand...

Not sure what you are talking about. I was hired mid year so when I got to them they were in post, so no I was not there when they tried it out and can only tell you what they told me and what I know from talking to the developer. Have I tried it, just to play with. It's a picture editors tool. I work in post sound, it's way too late to use it by the time I typically get involved. I have worked on a fair number of shows that have used it though and I get quizzed when they have problems so I know it's not "simple" for everyone. And I have talked to the developer so I know there are quite a few folks in the "trouble" boat. According to him it is 99% related to workflow. Of course he "wasn't there" either so maybe they were all lying to him.

From my little experience and talking to a lot of people who have worked films with it, it is a "good" program. It is especially a big time saver for doing what it was designed to do (syncing multiple video clips using the audio track as a reference). It works reasonably well doing what it was not designed to do (sync multiple audio tracks). It is not a huge time saver for syncing dual system audio but it seems to solve the biggest issue with syncing dual system sound by hand in FCP, the difficulty in syncing at a subframe level. I can probably sync dual system almost as fast in FCP by hand and I could probably beat it in Pro Tools. But in FCP your not going to phased in (I haven't fully confirmed that Pluraleyes does this in FCP but it does in Vegas), and well I would have to do it by hand. Even if Pluraleyes takes longer it's still a good value if you have a lot of clips and it does as good a job as you would have done by hand.
 
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dippenz said:
I agree on that. I have an appreciation for this program because I have sync'd audio prior to the advent of PluralEyes. Do you record your video on a "high-technology" device such as a dslr or camcorder OR do you use a Zoetrope? I know the answer (case and point). ;)
Click to expand...

More like case with out a point.
If your going to try to be clever at least do a little research. You can't record on a Zoetrope, it's a playback only device.

If you think syncing by hand is either really hard or takes a long time, you either haven't done it much or were very bad at it.
 
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