Ways to Lip Sync in FCP5

[Josh Rudy]

Hello everyone, I'm having a little trouble with a project I'm currently working on. I'm a 17 year old student in charge of the "video department" at a recording studio near DC (aka I'm the only person) and I've been faced with the challenge of making a bluegrass video cable television quality. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not that great of an editor, I'm more into the production aspect, but being the only person means I have to do everything myself. So here's the problem, I'm trying to sync up the mouths of 3 singers (all in the same shot) and up until now I've just been going through with variable speed and trying to match the lead's lips to the song.

I showed my boss and he quickly picked out mistakes and then he told me a story of Frank Williams and a song that was discovered 30 years after his death that was made into a music video. Anyways the people who did it back in the 80's took some video and somehow made it so his lips matched the words even though he was singing a different song. I'm not sure how they could of done it, but I'm wondering what kind of techniques can be used to match lips to audio in Final Cut Pro 5...Plugins, programs, whatever it is... any info would be tremendously helpful. Thanks

[Martin Labelle]

Thats a good one
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[Dean Sensui]

I'm working on a commercial where a political candidate did an on-camera read. The tone of his voice wasn't good at all due to the inflection he was using. However, the radio spot he did sounded just fine.

Fortunately he read the line exactly the same for both the TV and radio spot. So I used the voice from the radio spot and synced the video for the TV spot with the "re-timing" feature in After Effects.

The initial sync was close but not close enough. The speed was slightly off, and the points where certain key consonants and vowels happened were also displaced due to the timing of his read. So the re-timing tool was used to put those consonants and vowels to match throughout the delivery.

It worked nicely. This same process can be used for feature film work where an actor's ADR performance sounds great but doesn't quite match up to the original on-camera performance. And, of course, the same can be done for a music video.