qyll wrote:Another question for people since it's mildly relevant and I don't want to make a new topic: I was watching a few old videos and noticed that many of them were one or two frames off sync. I delayed the audio by a few dozen milliseconds and then it looked fine. At first I thought it was a problem with the media player, but then I realized that the problem could be with me. People might process audio and video by tiny fractions of a second sooner or later than another person.
It may be coming from the video, but at this level of grain what you're really running into is perceptive closure. Two frames out of sync is less than 0.1 second off, and unless you are really, really, locked in on cut discipline versus editing choices, this is barely perceptible. The mind, in both the case of the editor and the audience, will elide the difference and make it work. This is the same phenomenon that turns this guy
-_-
into a face; we autocomplete patterns when we think they should be there.
On a more technical theory/mathy level, assuming 24fps video and a 120bpm audio track, the most any given cut can be out of synch with
something is 6 frames, or 0.25 seconds. (120bpm = 2 beats/sec = 12 frames between beats; any cut will either be 6 frames or less after one beat or six frames or less before the next.) This is also pretty close to the closure threshold (which does vary from person to person). Faster music is actually easier to edit to, rather than harder, if you're concerned about "synch", because the space between beats goes down as you pack more of them into a given timespan.
--K