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I’m at the finishing road to finalize my first music video. Wow, what a process. I underestimated that keeping the syncing of the video and audio is such a big deal. I knew it would be challenging but not that I have to figure out for two weeks how to find a system or an editing strategy that I’m not bound by the technicality of syncing audio and video.

Often what you can observe in low budget music videos is that they use pretty long takes. Why? Because its one thing to sync lets say a 100 clips or 500 clips. I also didn’t want to subserve my creativity regarding the editing under the sync issue. I wanted to find a way where I can freely edit the footage without worrying if all my clips match with the original song or that I have to sync after the editing all the clips manually. I think I have found a solution and would like to share with you guys how I did it.

Final Cut Browser
My chaotic browser of the project is very well ordered


In order to be sure that everything matches we need to find a common denominator. That is obviously the song itself. Since each of my video clips has a different duration. I first dragged the song into the timeline, then the video and matched them together. Then I turned off the original sound of the video clip and now video and music are in perfect sync with the original music. I exported the file as a mov. I did this procedure with all my clips I shot.


After this procedure I import these synced clips into Final Cut. So, how do I get started to edit?
First I would like to separate on each clip the good parts from the bad parts. In this case I had five members of the band and I created 5 different timelines. One for Ori (lead singer), one for Brad (guitar, singer) etc. I do this because later I want to choose the clips according to the music.
Now. I load up the clip into my Viewer and start cutting out all parts with Ori and select only the parts I might use in the final edit.
I have now 5 different timelines with the selected clips of each band member. Relative to the music song they are again out of sync since I use only bits and pieces of the original (synced) clip. After this I create five new timelines and call them Ori – selected clips audio sync etc. Now I have the original music and my selection of my Ori clips. In order to sync it up with the music again I use a program called ‘pluraleyes’ that does the job for me. It compares the audio waveform of both clips and then repositions the video clips so that they fit with the music. I export this clip.

clips
Selected clips in sync


This procedure I do with every band member.
Potentially I have 5 different video and audio streams. In reality I had around 16. On each member I had at least 2-4 different selected clips because I wanted some variety in my footage and often had different angels of the same shot. I also shot some slomo shots (how to sync slomo shots I will discuss in a future post).
The question now arises how do I edit multiple streams, in fact 16 and edit them to the music? The magic word isssss: MULITCAM.

Multicam
Multicam

Yes, now since all the clips are synced I can see them all together in one window (namely the viewer). And now its super easy to edit towards the music.
First I play just the music file and make markers indicating the beat, or changes in the music. Then I play my multicam clip and edit to the rhythm. Since this is not super accurate I go back and polish the edit manually. So, all in all. Two weeks of syncing and one day of editing. I think next time it will be way faster. It just took me ages to figure out a system.

Let me know if I can improve this system and if you have other experience making a music video.

Shmuel




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