I'm not much of an audio guy but today I was presented with a puzzle on the feature I'm cutting:

They shot a TV news segment that I cut in one of the character's TVs. But the weird thing is that the audio of the TV didn't match up with the picture that was shot - even though the slate matched up. There was a serious drift - the picture was much slower than the audio.

I then realized that they might have shot it at 30 instead of 24 to get rid of the scan lines.

So I brought up the time compression expansion plugin which has always been a mystery to me. Then I had a light-bulb go off in my head.

The plugin has a ratio slider - it used to be a trial and error of me sliding the slider, rendering, and then seeing if it syncs up.

Forget that. Why don't I just figure out what the ratio of 24fps to 30fps and plug that in. So with a handy calculator and dividing 30 by 24 I got 1.25. Plug 1.25:1 into the ratio slider and Viola! instant sync.

I also applied this logic to a shot of a plate breaking on the floor that was shot at 40fps for slow motion. They also recording wild sound.

Did a quick 40+24=1.66666 calculation and plugged that into the ratio box and once again - INSTANT sync of a plate breaking in slow motion.

I love it when light-bulbs go off and I finally understand some part of an app that I didn't get before.

I know the editing aspect of Media Composer like the back of my hand - audio I wasn't always so keen on.

I hope this helps other people figure it out too.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

If only all sound synch issues were that simple, eh?

Actually figuring out that mystery - and using the logic in the solution - can pretty much solve any sync problem.

Of course - you need to guess at what the problem is and then apply the solution's ratio.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

Haha. Mine always tend to be more sinister. Like the clapperboard was broken, there was a timecode break, and someone clapped every few takes with their hands, while the camera was out of focus, on a slow shutter speed.

Ah yes. Well that's a different story.

Over the many years of syncing music video's I've become really really good at reading mouths and instruments to sync them up.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com