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Dual System Audio Fail - Advice?


Dustin
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Hey All,

So last night I was shooting interviews with my a6500. All was going well, I was using my shotgun mic on camera for scratch/backup audio and my trusted combo of a lav into a tascam recorder for main audio. 

Footage looks great thanks to the a6500 but I hit a snag I didn’t notice until the third interview. Here goes... I realized my on camera shotgun was turned off so my dual system audio setup does not exist for the first two interviews. 

I’ve always just synced up in premiere but how hard would it be to manually sync up the audio with their mouth movement? I did a clap and maybe by some chance the on camera audio did record faintly something but I doubt it. (I should’ve had the talent clap, rookie mistake I know).

Soo anyone ever fixed this mistake in post? Is it pretty simple? Really don’t want to reshoot this interview as this project is on a time crunch!

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It's fairly easy to sync up to mouth movements. The hardest part is getting the audio in roughly the right place. that said, you can just find the very first word the talent spoke. You'll have that as visual and as audio. If you get that word or sentance close, just nudge the audio by 1 frame left or right until it matches. 

It's about 5 or 10 minutes work, depending on when you started the audio rolling. In all honesty, you could have got it synced perfectly in the same amount of time it took to make the post and wait for a reply. ?

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2 hours ago, Dustin said:

I did a clap and maybe by some chance the on camera audio did record faintly something but I doubt it. (I should’ve had the talent clap, rookie mistake I know).

Can you see the clap? If so then it is easy! Just line up the spike of the audio with the moment you see the two hands meet. 
But guessing that is what didn't happen.

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42 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Can you see the clap? If so then it is easy! Just line up the spike of the audio with the moment you see the two hands meet. 
But guessing that is what didn't happen.

This. And let this be a good lesson to take your time with your prep. A good clap into all mic's and in front of all cameras can really save you some headaches. When I'm working alone I always say what I'm doing out loud so I don't miss something. "Cam A rolling picture and sound, cam B rolling picture and sound, sound rolling." *clap* Then a few seconds to breathe and double check.

Good luck with your edit!

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21 minutes ago, MurtlandPhoto said:

Then a few seconds to breathe and double check.

Very important there is a little gap between when you last clap (or call "action") and when the take starts. 

For instance if in an echoey room it might take a few moments for everything to completely die down. And you don't want the remnants of echos to overlap with the actor's dialogue. 

Also, you want a bit of quiet at each end of the take of room tone to give you some room to play with in the edit rather than having to carefully slice it down to the frame. 

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1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

Also, you want a bit of quiet at each end of the take of room tone to give you some room to play with in the edit rather than having to carefully slice it down to the frame. 

And to help create space and hide a cut under some B-roll. In an interview setting, cutting out the taletn's 'Umms' and 'ahhs' is quite important, but you still have to have a small gap otherwise the cut can sound unnatural. Room tone is like audio cutaways in that sense.

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Thanks all I really appreciate the thoughts! I’m by no means a first timer at this but we were doing run and gun shooting trying to knock out as many interviews as possible. Normally I’m super careful but I’m this case when I do more of these later in the week I will have the talent clap for me- great ideas guys!

 

Sidenote I used the Aputure 528s (or w, can’t remember) and it did a fantastic job of providing some fill against the existing ambient light. 

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Finding the first word will help you.  After that, learn the keyboard shortcut for nudging clips to the right and left.  (on my machine in Premiere Pro its Command+arrow left or right)  Then, play back the audio nudging your sync clip to the right or left one frame at a time until the sync feels right; premiere can normally do this in real time. 

I've had to do this for several TV shows, hours of pre-content, hundreds of clips to sync, and the major wind they were shooting in on some mountain tops totally messed up the scratch mics...pretty much had to do it totally by hand.  Just be grateful you only have to do two interviews. ?

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4 hours ago, Benjamin Hilton said:

I've had to do this for several TV shows, hours of pre-content, hundreds of clips to sync, and the major wind they were shooting in on some mountain tops totally messed up the scratch mics...pretty much had to do it totally by hand.  Just be grateful you only have to do two interviews. ?

And that is exactly why every production should ideally have a sound professional on set managing timecode, as you never knew when a shot might be too windy, too wide, too far away, or through a window, and thus the scratch mic has no relevance at all to the audio that was recorded. 

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Just wanted to thank you guys for the support again. Finally got to work last night and yes as most of you said, since I knew where the starting audio point was by their mouth I was able to drag the audio perfectly in sync! 

Sidenote- this is the first time I’m using the a6500 for an interview project and oh my gosh, the easiest ever. No more riding the lens checking focus and worrying if the subject is out of focus. I used zone focus, hit their general area and I didn’t have to look again, my simple Sony 35mm 1.8 nailed it the whole interview! Boy would I have loved to have that shooting with a D5300 all these years (I did learn manual focusing so I have that to thank for the Nikon LOL).

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