slow motion for music video

[mike simckowitz]

Hey guys my question is about slow motion for a music video. Is it necessary to have a speed up version of the song while shooting slow motion? I will most likely be shooting at 120 fps for my slow motion shots and I will be in a 23.89 timeline.

 

[Solomon Nero]

If you want accurate lip syncs...yes...but trust me...its tough for the talent to keep up with 60FPS let alone 120 fps...Better off just shooting them playing the song at regular speed...

 

[Glen David Miller]

Double the speed of the song and shoot at 48 fps.... that should be enough. As Solomon said above, any faster and the singer could have trouble. But, you're shooting digital, not film, so bring the singer over early and find out. Doesn't hurt to try. At the very least, you all will have a great laugh. The longer they have with the sped up song to rehearse, of course, the better.

Glen

 

[Taj Jackson]

I agree with everything that was said. Being a music artist myself, I had to do this exact thing. If the artist has enough time to practice, they usually can pull it off, but it really does depend on how much you speed up the music. Also, is the song an uptempo song or a ballad? That makes a huge difference. The song I sung was a ballad. An uptempo song might have been impossible for us. But then again we speed it up 3x to 4x.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

Its' worth trying - when it works it looks GREAT. But forget more than 48, and realize that most of it will be a flub, with useable bits here and there.

 

[Craig Parkes]

As others have said, depends on song speed. Also it depends on the duration of your cuts. i have produced a music video where the song was a bit of a ballad and we recorded at 60fps for 25fps playback and that's about as fast as anyone could reasonably go for anything but a really slow song, but also part of it was we were ramping into the shots and only capturing snippets of lipsync on camera, not long takes and verses. This gives you more leeway to slip sync around and also maybe does some time warping speed changes in between lines to accomodate for sync issues. For 120 avoid at 24 I'd avoid lip sync altogether. If you have a drummer or guitarist in shot you may want them to try to play at double time or faster so they don't look ridiculously slow moving in those shots compared to the music, but in general you will probably find 120 is just too much slow mo for anything apart from effects shot where sync is never going to occur anyway.