synching with miniDisc

**blackangus1** · August 15th, 2002, 02:01 AM

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#DDDDDD"><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by jefury:
I was just wondering.

Has anyone ever tried synching sound without the pulse thingy, or without using a crystal synch camera?

If so, how many seconds does the sound usually match the picture until it goes off beat? I plan on making a short and only having a couple of dialogue scenes, which have very little dialogue.

Thanks
Jeffery</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

Every camera is different -- I had one Chinon Pacific 200 which ran at 26fps, and my current Pacific 200 runs at something like 24.1 fps. So there's no way to know how far out of sync your camera may be.

The technique you want for sync'ing those few dialogue scenes is to put a slate at the beginning and at the end of the take. Slate the take as normal, including clapsticks, then at the end of the take keep the camera running so you can slate it again (usually with the slate upside down to indicate that it's a "tail slate"). That will give you two sync reference points, one at the beginning and one at the end. Then in Premiere just import the video and your dialogue, and line the dialogue up with the first slate mark, then time-stretch it until the tail slate clap lines up with the tail slate picture. As long as your camera runs at a reasonably consistent rate this method should give you a pretty handy in-the-field way to line up your audio with your video.

You may want to use Sound Forge to do the actual time-stretching to avoid audio artifacts, but you'd use the above technique to determine exactly how much to stretch the waveform.

**Matt Pacini** · August 17th, 2002, 04:56 AM

Yeah, SoundForge is much better at things like this than anything else I've used.
Premier really seemed to screw up the audio if you did anything at all with it.
I pretty much only use it to assemble elements together that have already been played with in other software.

Matt Pacini