Music Video Syncing Without Audio

[Evan Butka]

Just shot a music video on a good ole Red One. Unfortunately my AC said we'd have a scratch track for audio but it didn't work. So now I'm ip syncing the video with the music track. Any helpfully hints? This is a really pain in the butt!!

 

[Tony Mac]

I've had to do this before for some interviews, but that wasn't that hard. Once I got it in the ballpark I just kept looping one sentence and moving the clip a few frames forward and back until it looked right. What might be hard is if there was coverage of instruments...a lot of it looks repetitive. If there was any pre-roll before they start playing, perhaps look for the first note?

 

[Michael Jarvis]

Look for cymbal hits, endings of phrases...if its a long clip, jump to the ending hit...or the beginning. Think like a performer. Look for visual musical elements. Make mental markers such as..."drum fill - then hats open - then cymbal hit on 1".

I've had to do this a few times on a few 3 hour live events. Its a bit time consuming...but not a huge deal. Got through it in a few hours.

 

[Jon D Kline]

You'll use different cues for rough vs fine tuning.

I've found most of the music videos I've shot have needed 1-2 frame nudges on a cut-by-cut basis, even when sync was pretty good. So you're not really much worse off having lost your scratch track.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Hire an assistant editor with good eyesight who knows the song backwards and forwards. Really good people can lip-read. (I've done it myself on torturous music video sessions.) Next time, use a timecode slate for playback, and it'll tell you exactly where you are in the song.

Or just grit your teeth and do it. The good lesson learned is: you won't shoot a music video again without a scratch track and/or a timecode slate.