To those of you who do videos while playing

iaresee

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I have immense amounts of respect and admiration for your ability to put these things together. I'm trying to cobble together a stupid little video that's basically my miming to the pre-recorded Friend of the Devil track and it's stupid. Hard. To. Get. Shit. To. Line. Up.

Never mind my video production is simple and boring. Just getting the video of me "playing" over the Logic track to line up to the bounced audio in iMovie is ridiculously hard.
 
Yeah, it's lot harder than it should be in iMovie. If you're not doing so already, use markers to help you align your clapper points. On the other hand, this is extremely simple to do in Final Cut Pro.
 
This is pretty much one of the biggest reasons I bought Final Cut Pro after having the same challenge with iMovie. And FCPX has a very easy workflow so you can do great edits so easily, makes your basic videos really stand out with minimal effort.
 
Here's a simple trick.

Strum the guitar muted 4 times both in the recorded audio as well as the video so you can just drag and drop and line up the waveforms in the "pre-video" and the video will be synced all the way through. (Unless you have some sample rate difference). Then just delete the "pre-video" 10 seconds before the real content starts in the final video.

I personally use Premiere, but I did this in iMovie for years.
 
Strum the guitar muted 4 times both in the recorded audio as well as the video so you can just drag and drop and line up the waveforms in the "pre-video" and the video will be synced all the way through.
I did this! Had the forethought to do this as sort of a "clapper" mark. But still...

FCPX is tempting, but not money I want to spend for one video for the office. :D
 
It's hard to get it precise w/out some sort of auto-sync like what Final Cut does... but for what you're doing, eyeballing it should be close enough. I've had to do that with workshop presentations where I didn't have a secondary audio to sync with. Music probably isn't as noticeable (to non-musicians) but when spoken word is even a little bit off it's really jarring.
 
It's hard to get it precise w/out some sort of auto-sync like what Final Cut does... but for what you're doing, eyeballing it should be close enough. I've had to do that with workshop presentations where I didn't have a secondary audio to sync with. Music probably isn't as noticeable (to non-musicians) but when spoken word is even a little bit off it's really jarring.
I'll have to line the CEO's face up to his singing this weekend and that worries me.

Dang...FCPX is $300....wonder if I can expense it? Hmm....
 
I'll have to line the CEO's face up to his singing this weekend and that worries me.

Dang...FCPX is $300....wonder if I can expense it? Hmm....
In that case I agree w/ @fractalz - you do want to get it as close as possible ;-). Do you have audio of him singing that you can sync to? If not then there's no reason to spend the $...
 
I usually just get it close via wave form, then zoom in to frame level and line it up manually. Then I drag one 1 frame right and listen, 1 frame left, and use whatever sounds best.

The FCPX sync options are neat but over kill for 1-3 tracks that run the whole song length. If it’s multiple clips over the time of the song, the sync is nice. But not a $300 feature for a one-time use.

and from there, sometimes it looks better if the audio is slightly earlier or later.
 
Just been thinking about this a bit more Ian, I actually don’t know if the FCPX will work if you are miming the guitar and vocal parts. It works perfectly in the scenario where you are recording your guitar in Logic (eg thru the AxeFX or mic’d amp) and you are filming yourself play at the same time. Then the sync is flawless at aligning the camera audio with the recorded audio (I’ve done this a zillion times and it works so well even if the camera audio is barely audible, it’s so impressive). But I have never tried to align a video track that was recorded AFTER the audio was recorded. I’m worried you might shell out the cash and I don’t know for sure if that scenario will work or not. If you like, you can PM me your files and I’d be happy to try it in FCPX for you without you using precious guitar funds up!
 
Does Resolve have a function to align audio and video as well? That would be cool, I've been using it for colour grading in conjunction with FCPX, really useful for creating LUTs.
Yep. By time code or by audio. I prefer Resolve's editing/audio/compositing tools and node-based workflow. Blackmagic RAW is just ridiculously insane.
 
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Well Davinci Resolve is free, so might be worth trying that @iaresee?

I personally prefer the simplicity of FCPX, however, the cost for just one video isn't worth in my opinion.
 
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