Syncing Audio with different Tempos

[Shane Ross]

Man, there is no way. Not unless they listened to the playback WHILE they were performing, to match what they recorded in studio. Because yeah, the performances are very different.

Well, there isn’t NO way. You will have to do a lot of editing, cut aways. Find chunks here and there that match up, and piece things together. A lot of work…

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Nick Meyers]

i’ve had to do this a fair bit.
generally it’s because i’ve got multiple live takes, and best audio is from one, and best picture is from another.
generally i’m just dipping into the non-sync take. a whole song would be harder,
but here is my approach:

do an edit on the take you want to use.
do the best edit you can on it.
then
take that edit,
and lay it up in a new sequence against the audio you need to use.

lock the OK audio tracks and just go though the whole edit pulling it into sync.
don’t be fussy about this.
as soon as it’s a frame out of sync (or sooner really) trim a frame.
doesn’t matter if it’s in the middle of a shot,
or if you have 3 or 4 trims in the middle of a shot.

once you are done with this process, copy the sequence.
now go though the copy and start cleaning up the edits
using either the roll tool or the extend function.

the trick is that you can get away with slightly loose sync at the start of most shots as long as they then come into sync.

one freaky thing i found was that on some shots i could add or remove frames invisibly.
depends on how much movement there is of course.
i had a close up of a singer once and needed to remove some frames.
i found that if i did it on their natural “holds” it would work
in the line “cos i-i-i-i-i will always love you-o-o-o-o” the holds would be pretty much where the dashes are

of course if your two sources are WAY out of sync then you can start looking for cutaways etc.
how out of sync are they?
i had to do a clip once where it needed a frame removed every second.
no tricks worked there.
it just looked stepy.

a strobe filter will make that look intentional!

nick

[Michael Gissing]

I couldn’t get past the fact that they are Michael Jackson songs and the cost of licensing the music will be the main problem.

When this sort of sync is a problem, you have to cut around the issue as as has been said and/ or speed up/ slow down the live video to better match the tempo of the recorded music.