Post syncing wild sound

[tlatosmd]

On the picture side, I found it was sometimes necessary to cut a frame out here and there, but on the audio side, I mainly just matched the clap and slate at the beginning, and the synch would hold for a little while, and then when it drifted, I would go back a few frames, cut, slide it over, re-synch it with the lips, and fill in the blank space with matching ambient sound. It was time consuming overall, but once I did it a few times, the whole process became fairly simple and quick, it was just the fact that I had some masters that had a lot of drift, so they took a while to fix.

I can vouch for this approach, (drift &slide), but found that cutting even one frame of picture was totally noticeable, unless it was end of shot...

Do you have a secret?

I've come across this problem with a copy of Triumph des Willens, it actually looked like Riefenstahl herself had done a very poor job at keeping audio and film in-sync, at one sentence the audio was right, and BANG!, the next sentence the difference was up to 3 seconds between audio and visual, and next sentence, BANG!, back to perfect.

I took the timecodes for certain visual sync points I chose, exported my audio, squeezed and stretched the audio in Cool Edit/Adobe Audition according to my timecodes and sync points within about two hours, re-married audio and video, done. Perfect sync, and other than messing around with cutting frames not noticable at all.

[audadvnc]

Keep in mind that large sections of Triumph des Willens were shot with non-sync MOS cameras. Some of the footage of marching soldiers speeds and slows down much more than would happen in real life. Supposedly Riefenstahl chose the tempo of marches to match accompanying music. Or perhaps it was the other way around, she conducted an orchestra to match the tempo of the marching soldiers.

[jukkasil]

Here is my old test file where I compared pulse synced sound ( with Pedro's box and used Mattias's software) and wild sync sound from same situation. Camera was Canon 1014 XL-S, sound recorded with DAT and AKG mic, film stock K40:

http://www.sorb-i-tol.com/SUPER8_SYNC_SOUND_TEST.MPG

[Evan Kubota]

With the wild shot, did you cut out any frames or change the audio speed to improve the match? Until the end it was quite good. As long as you don't have more than 4-5 seconds of a single speaking shot, wild seems like it would work OK...

[MovieStuff]

If you have one of your actors simply clap his/her hands at the beginning and end of each take, it is simple to stretch or shrink the audio to fit fine. I have seen this work for very long takes of over a minute at a time with no problem.

Roger

[mattias]

If you have one of your actors simply clap his/her hands at the beginning and end of each take, it is simple to stretch or shrink the audio to fit fine.

my point is that it is anyway; no need for tail slates. it sounds easy to just have your actor remember to clap when you say cut, but very often they'll forget, the cameraman forgets, or worse remembers and keeps running although nothing happens, everybody starts yelling and running around, and so on. it's a waste of film and an extra source of stress.

as for the cutting out frames issue, it's *very* rarely necessary to do that. just stretch to fit.

/matt