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speed change fields issue
Hey everyone,
I’m editing a concert video which requires the synching of two separate performances of the same song to a single audio track (which belongs to one of the performances, which I’ll call the A track). The performances are similar to each other but there’s usually some variation in tempo which makes it impossible to find/use a single sync point for an entire song.
My solution to this problem has been to mark in and out sync points for every four bars of music on both the A and B performance tracks, cut the four bars of B visual and line them up on the timeline with the corresponding marked points on the A audio track, then use Fit To Fill to either shrink or expand the B clip so its timing is exactly the same as the A clip.
The result is that my B performance looks totally in sync with A, but since the B clips are speeding up and slowing down throughout the song to maintain the sync (usually the speed change percentages are between 96% and 102%) I occasionally get an annoying flicker which I assume is Final Cut doing a poor job of interpreting the altered frames. When I check the “blend frames” box the annoying flicker becomes an annoying blur, as if the subject goes briefly out of focus.
Does anyone know of a solution to this problem? De-interlacing helps, but it also seems to affect the overall image quality/resolution. I’ve been reading here that Twixtor is the best speed plug-in, but the learning curve is daunting, and I don’t know whether or not I could do something like this with it.
AvB
FCP Editor -
1 Reply
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Are you saying that you are editing the two performances together to give you better coverage? So you end up with a single ‘multi-camera’ edit?
Surely you can use sections from the B performance that fit well enough for lipsync, so it doesn’t need to be continuous – in other words you will cut back to the other one at some point. In this case, don’t use speed changes, which at those percentages will ALWAYS cause judder or blur. Instead, use frame cutting to get the sync back, even if it means leaving gaps in the edited performance – so you add or remove frames from the B timeline to re-establish sync. Use as much of the B as you can before cutting back to the A coverage.
Maybe I have misunderstood your requirements here – If you are trying to match audio A with performance B throughout, you’ll never achieve a satisfactory solution. It’s an edit fix, isn’t it?
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS and FCP specialists
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