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Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

How to manually sync align video & audio in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi everyone, in this video I'm going to show you how to manually line up audio with video, in case the automatic feature doesn't work. I'll show you a really cool nudge shortcut as well, if you do hang around and watch it. It's like a little bonus there at the end. All right, let's manually line up video in audio, in Premiere Pro. 

So you've got to match up your audio manually. Just know, if you're jumping to this video without watching the whole course, there is an automatic way using Sync Footage, but let's say we do have to do it manually. Let's find our footage, it's called Sync 2. Let's right click it and make a sequence from it. Let's give it a name, Sync 2 Sequence. Let's just drag it out, back into our kind of bin. So we've got our footage in there, here it is over here. Let's find the audio, do the same thing. Sync 2, just drag it out into the audio track. 

Now of course I could have this on its own track, right click them both and go to 'Synchronize', and that would work, but let's say we can't, because we have, either Premiere Pro just won't do it, or you just won't do it because otherwise you'd do it auto, but there are times you do have to do it manually. So what we're going to do is, I'm going to kind of move them both to the center, put them underneath each other. Basically we're just going to match the waveforms. 

What I might do is make both of these a bit taller, and what I might do is use my super spidey shortcut that makes this panel really big. Who remembers what it is? That's right, it's the Squiggly key, well, the Tilde, or the Grave key on your keyboard, make it full screen, and it's going to allow us to line it up. Now where does it go? That's why automatic's useful, because you're like, "Does it line up with this one?” Kind of does, but it's not it, so I'm going to do the fun game of, is it this one, or is it that one? Is it that one? I don't think it is, mainly because this bit doesn't copy across. 

I repeat myself quite a few times on this one, which makes it difficult for you, you're like, "There's a tough one." It is, is it that one? Must be this one. I should know, I made this course. I got these really a while ago. It takes me a long time to prep, so I forget what I did. So they're kind of lined up, let's have a little listen. "Hi, my name is… Not quite. So what you end up doing is spending a lot of time zooming in, and just dragging a little bit that way, try and get it close. "Hi, my name is Dan." Not great, so I'm going to show you a little trick for nudging our footage. 

It was useful for not just obviously matching sound, but all sorts of things, is with-- I'm going to nudge this one so I've got it selected, I'm going to hold down a key on my keyboard. On a Mac it's 'Command', so hold that down, on a PC it's 'Ctrl', and just use your left and right arrows. You can see, I can nudge it along. Get it close. "Hi, my name is Dan." There is still a tiny bit of echo, so I can move it back and forth, but really I don't need them, I don't need this. So I'm going to right click it, and I'm going to say 'Unlink', and I'm going to bin that one. I'm going to drag this one up. Tidy it up, snappy doodle, snap. Let's have a little look. 

Where's it all gone, what's the shortcut to bring it all in? You remember? backslash, ' \ ', there we go. I might just tidy it up at the beginning here and delete that stuff, and hopefully, let's have a look at the-- we're just looking for the synchronization. "Hi, my name is Dan, and I love animating… Close enough. Now in this case there is a little reverb - "I love animating infographics." - because again, got my microphone between my legs. Kind of early production days. 

So what I want to do now is, let's first of all do a couple things, let's get the dialogue auto matched. So that raises it up a little bit. Also let's do a little bit of Reduce Reverb. Probably needs to be pretty low, let's have a listen. "Hi, my name is Dan, and I love animating infographics, and bringing potentially boring data to life, using After Effects." I got my tongue out, kind of listening. It's a little bit of art knowing how much reverb to do, but that works for me. 

Why am I doing the weird ducking thing? Just want to show you. "My name is Dan, and I love animating infographics." Look at that. "Bringing potentially boring data to life, using After Effects." That's why I've got the weirdness in here because I kind of, did some fun stuff with some animated graphics. Those infographics were done in After Effects. If you are keen on doing kind of animated infographics check out that course. What was it actually called? Animated Infographics & Data Visualization Introduction. Yeah, that's the course anyway. 

So let's talk about other ways you can line them up. Now we've lined it up using matching the waveforms, what if you don't have the waveforms? What a lot of people do is clap. What do I mean by clap? I mean this, let's have a look. So there is an official clapper, that's what it's called, there you go. Clapboard. So you do that, and make the little snappy noise, so that on both the-- they'll be recording on both the camera, and separately through another microphone. They'll probably use the automatic feature to line them up, but if you don't you can use the--

Like, where both of these touch together, you can use that and line it up with the spike. That will appear on here, so you can visually line it up with the audio. Just so you know, yeah, clapboards. They're just used to-- obviously this is the name of the film. Actually got changed to Jacuzzi, this is a New Zealand short film. We call them Spas. You can call them Jacuzzis, depending on where you are. A1 Roll, this will be a folder that get sent to me. There'll be a bunch of rolls, which would just be folders or bins. Maybe an A1, A2, A3, so I can find it. I know that it's Scene 1, it's Take 1, I know who the director is, I know who the cameraman is. What else? The date, and these lines here.

Often can be used for color correction, so you know that, that in the scene, is meant to be pure white, and that's meant to be pure black. So you can adjust accordingly. Sometimes that will be color blocks on there as well, so you can kind of match the colors. 

Now if you don't have a clapper board what you can do is, this one, ready? "I was hoping that turns on or off something." I love her, Miss Donut, uh, Madame Donut. Watch, there's another scene. "I was hoping that turns on or off something." She got asked to clap, because they don't have a clapper board, and nobody really needs a clapper board unless you're-- well for this particular production they just clapped. It means they can sync camera A, which is a nice tight shot, to this one kind of like, this mid shot, where they're filming the exact same person at the exact same time, but just different zoom levels, and it allows them to kind of match it up later, if they don't use the automatic feature, which they should. 

They can match it up manually by using the little clap. Now they clap at the beginning because they're professionals - "I was hoping that… - but I clap at the end of it, quite often because I forget. So if I need to line something up and I need the clap, often I'll forget and get either the talent to do it at the end, or I'll do it at the end myself because I always forget to do at the beginning. It doesn't matter, it's easy to line up, you see the little spike in the old audio. Let's have a look at her spike. 

I'm just going to drag it straight into my Source Window. It's a little trick for here. It's cool, you can drag video straight into the Source Monitor. Random shortcut. It doesn't come into your Project Window, just the easy way of previewing it. If we look at the audio, can you see, at the beginning here if I zoom in, should hopefully see, right there at the beginning there's a nice sharp spike, and you can line it up with the other video, you have the spike. There you go. 

All right, that's manually lining things up, and way too information about-- and way too much information about clapping. On to the next video.