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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Music videos have been around for decades and existed well before the day in August 1981, when The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" marked the beginning of MTV. That event clearly emphasized the importance of music clips as a means of breaking new acts and promoting established ones. These days, sites like YouTube offer the chance for any band to achieve publicity or at least notoriety, while the possibility of a clip going viral is definitely increased by decent production values and a good audio track."

The audio part should be easy, especially in a lip-sync shoot, where the challenges of recording clean sound on location are largely removed. And in these cases, much of the audio work revolves around two main goals: making sure that the performers can clearly hear the prerecorded track and making the editing and post process as smooth as possible.

If you're producing a clip that's 100% concept video—i.e., a video where there's no lip-sync, dance moves, etc.—you're pretty much off the hook, audio-wise. Here, you can simply assemble all the shots of the artist walking along the beach or driving through the country and throw in some B-roll of sunsets, seagulls, animations and so on.

In cases where there are only a few brief lip-sync portions, these often can be shot semi-wild, with manual syncing of the track on your playback recorder to the audio track picked up by the camera via a direct feed, a wireless unit or an external mic.

Here, the on-camera audio serves as a guide/scratch track that's only used as a sync reference for locking to the master audio during post. The camera track eventually will be discarded and replaced by the master track, but put some effort into making it as good as possible because matching the audio to a 1-2-3-4 musical countdown on the head of the track or a transient (like a snare hit or cymbal crash) is a lot easier if your scratch track is clean and not garbled or distorted. And a clear scratch track is a must, whether you're manually syncing or planning to use some software assistance to sync your tracks, such as the Synchronize Clips function in Apple's Final Cut Pro X (www.apple.com) or Singular Software's popular PluralEyes or DualEyes (www.singularsoftware.com).

The other advantage of having a clean on-camera track is that it simplifies on-location picture playbacks, without the hassle of synching to a separate audio deck for reviewing takes.

As long as you're shooting digital video and have a digital playback source, manual sync is possible because both camera and audio deck are locked to operate at their own constant speed. Just don't try this trick with a spring-wound Bolex and a cassette deck! Even a cheap CD boom box plays back audio locked to a 44,100 Hz clock—and will work in a pinch—but there are definitely better methods available.

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