Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum How do you sync your audio and video in your recordings?

I have seen many great performances here on PW where you have captured your performances on video and shared. My question for those of you who use external audio (separate from the camcorder) in your recordings, how do you sync up the audio and video in your video editor?

At the moment I am evaluating Final Cut Pro X and it seems to have the features I am looking for. Anyone else who uses FCPX?

Here is a video I just put together to evaluate FCPX and how it handles audio. On this track I play the piano (Roland RD-700NX) and a friend of mine plays the piccolo trumpet.


[video:youtube]I413ngRXhjg[/video]

I've been using Final Cut Pro since it first came out. It's pretty good software, and I think it's simple to use. I actually have the Express version now which gives me all I need since I'm more a musician than a filmmaker and don't need all the extra bells and whistles.

The best way to sync video and audio is while you are filming. With camera and sound running, clap in front of the camera. The sound will show up as a big spike, and obviously you can see when the hands come together. Line them up an voila!

Also FCP (and most editing software) has what's called a slip tool, where you can shift the video or audio to tweak it even further.

Brian,
Yes, that makes sense as I know film makers have those boards tkat make a loud clapping sound. However, FCPX now also had autosync features that are magic. I tried first iMovie but that was too frustrating for me as I have used NLEs in the past.

Sony Vegas (Platinum Version) lets you merge up to 4 videos and 3 audio tracks together. I make split screen music videos sometimes and it's easy and quick-ish with Sony Vegas.

I tired Final Cut Express and it frustrated me a lot. First you have to render the video before you can edit and it takes ages. Also you can't sync the separate audio and video well because you can't adjust the timing to the miliseconds.

Final Cut Pro must be to notch because of the price. Sony Vegas does the job I need for about A$250. Unfortunately Sony Vegas is only available for PC though.

I use Audacity to edit the audio track before I bring it in to Sony Vegas. Audacity is free and is available for Mac and PC.

Hope that helps.

If you use a camcorder and a Zoom H2, when you import the footage from the camcorder and the zoom, you will have two audio tracks, one from the camcorder and one from the Zoom.

Insert the video with the audio on the timeline and put the audio from the zoom on a separate track. Zoom in and visually align the waveform of the audio tracks. Listen to both track and move the second audio to remove delay. Mute the audio from the camcorder and check if the video is in sync with the audio and make correction. That how I do it.

Serge

I take the A/V out of the camcorder, directly in to a video capture card in the PC.
Audio is from the DP into an external audio/MIDI interface, and I use either the native DP sounds, or a software piano for the audio.
I record live video and audio into a video recording program, and have no need to sync anything.

Final Cut Studio here. I'm doing video as one of my other hobbies. You can just slide the audio with a 1 videoframe accuracy which is good enough for most jobs. If you need a sync below 20ms you would need something else I think. Maybe there's a special plugin for FCS?

Wait, what? Autosync? I may need to upgrade. Does it work? How does it know where the sync point is in the video?

I agree that iMovie is confusing, especially to anyone who did video editing before.


Only some things need to be rendered. I notice that too at first. Then I found out that it was my video format I was importing. Now I use MPEG Streamclip (free) to convert all my source video to the right format, make sure my audio is all the same and I then I only have to render graphics and some transitions.

With FCP you don't have to render most things, it depends on the complexity of the edits but many edits can be rendered realtime. Maybe it depends on your computer speed?

Brian,
The autosync is very impressive. I did an experiment with my DP and two cameras. The DP recorded in silence (I used headphones) so the cameras did not hear the music. All the cameras recorded was the thumps of me playing on the keyboard. in FCPX i selected the two videos w/ audio and the DP audio and clicked on sync clips... instantly all clips werer aligned! No manual tweaking needed. I didnt expect it to be that good. But the downside is the price. iMovie is free but also very limited.

You might consider PluralEyes or DualEyes if you go with an editor without syncing built in.

http://www.singularsoftware.com/pluraleyes.html

So that's what those things are for!!! Doh!

I already have Final Cut Express, version 4. I'll have to look into an upgrade, because I don't think that feature is in 4. If it is, I'll feel pretty stupid. That would have saved me hours of hand synching. Thanks for the heads-up!

I take the A/V out of the camcorder, directly in to a video capture card in the PC.