Surprisingly the basic tutorial we had prooved the synchronization to be much easier than i had anticipated. Instead of visual trying to match both tracks up by eye, Final cut pro has a conveniant "marker" function that you can use. This marker can be placed anywhere along the track with a press of the 'm' key.
A basic technique was shown to us for efficient editing, i thought i'd outline it below to show what i've learnt:
Open up the soundtrack first
Find a nice clear point of sound at the beginning, perhaps the first word of the song. It was easier to recognise where the word begins by switching to the audio representation tab, where the sound is shown as a wave.
Place a marker :)
Now we do the same thing by looking at the audio waves from the actual video footage, and place a marker
When you drag the video clip onto the time line above your clean soundtrack you'll find you can drag the marker to match the video and audio tracks up.
Mute the audio from the video footage, if you've got your markers right, you should find the lip movements and the clean audio soundtrack perfectly in sync!
Well it worked like a charm, i found my audio track matched all my layers of footage where i used the same technique. Along side that i also found i learnt a bit about cutting a music video, which was treated quite differently to the way we put together our thriller film.
The same basic principles applied but we expanded upon what we already knew, continuing to use markers, placing them all along the tracks, naturally keeping to the beat. We could then use the razor tool to cut each track simply along the vertical marker line. Repeatedly, then removing clips from each track at will to quickly produce a synced, varied performance pop video. It was pretty straight forward and produced good results, but alot more thought and planning will be need to create a truly spectacular music video, getting the timing and the look right could be considered enough but making sure you're using your best footage, keeping it interesting and varied will make a real success, and we wouldn't aim for any less :)
Having said that, now it's time to look at Part 2 of this task, my write up on our group lip synch exercise. It didn't exactly go to plan!
when it came to our group lip syching excercise, where we recorded lot's of different shots of the lovely Sylvda singing along, you can see our finished result here. We weren't entirely pleased with it as you'll read below but we feel is was an invaluable tutorial that really taught us what to look out for.
We used the same methods as in the tutorial, easily lining up the start of the vocal audio track with her lip movements on each track. After that we put markers at timed interviews along the track to match the songs timing then used the razor tool to cut up all our clips along those markers. The first couple of shots worked as planned but then we noticed that many of them were out of sych suddenly. We spent a lot of time trouble shooting this, it didn't make sense since we knew it was initially all synched and we hadn't edited the track in anyway that would mess up the timing. We came to the conclusion that it was simple human error case, that while it sounded fine when we were recording Sylvda singing along to the track infact she herself must have been singing slightly out of time as she got more into it, our brains had just fixed it for us and we didn't notice. Unfortunately this left us with only about 2 tracks of footage that were always synched and everything else was unusable. So our final practise video is rather boring and not very well done. However I really am glad we made this mistake! Now we will be very careful and acutely aware of this problem when it comes to shooting our pop video. It's safe to say that we learnt a lot from the whole ordeal.
No comments:
Post a Comment