Film Making / Production / Sound Crew and Equipment >

While recording your sound on a separate DAT has many advantages it does make for a lot of work during editing since the process of transferring the DAT sound to the computer and then syncing each take with the video is mightily tedious and time-consuming. It is worth it, though; good audio will help compensate a viewer's perceived shortcomings of a DV feature.

I used the audio recorded by the built-in camera microphone for as much of the editing as possible, getting to at least a rough cut using the sound from the camera, which was pretty bad. Then I used that sound as a guide track for syncing the sound from the DAT. That saved me from having to deal with the DAT sound on takes I didn't use in the movie. It was still tedious, but I'd do it this way again.

During editing I gave each take a name that corresponded to its slate. When I was logging I could clearly hear the assistant director call out, for example "scene 34, angle C, take 3." That piece of video would get labeled 34C3 during logging and when captured to the hard disk where it would appear on the computer as a file called 34C3.avi. You can use longer filenames in order to add comments. Both the Mac and Windows operating systems will recognize filenames like "34C3 her head is cut off.avi," but make sure that the take information comes first and is complete; you never want to lose the link between the tape and the computer file in case you ever have to go back to the original tape and recapture the take. And the take information needs to be first so that in any alphabetical listing of the files on your computer you can quickly see whether a take is there, whether there are other takes of the scene you are working on or whether there is a missing take you might want to check out (for example if you have 34C3 and 34C5 you might be justified in thinking that if you go back to the tape you might find a 34C4 that you would like to look at).

If you use the same filename system for audio, the corresponding file containing the DAT audio will be called something like "34C3.wav" and you can easily import both the video file and the audio file into your editing software and sync 'em up.

My way of syncing audio and video is to import both the audio and the video of the shot into my editing software. The audio from the camera mic that comes from the videotape goes on track one and is automatically in sync with the picture. I mark a good spot for sync (a sharp sound or the beginning of a distinctive sound). Then I listen to the DAT sound and mark the same spot (more or less as I'm not likely to get it exactly right) and put that sound on track two. Then I line up the two marks and my sound will be roughly in sync, off only by the difference between my two marks, which were made quickly and are somewhat approximate. When I play the shot I will hear an echo because the two sounds are a few frames out of sync. I then adjust the DAT sound back and forth until there is no echo. Then I know both sound tracks are in sync, and I can eliminate the camera sound from track one.

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