Fix Audio Sync Drift in Your Videos Using Adobe Premiere & Audition

On this video published in late 2018 Gerald Undone looked at a problem which happens when recording sound on an external recorder, especially for long videos and how to fix it using Adobe Premiere and Audition.

The problem is simple and well known to many who tend to record very long videos with an external recorder (we have to admit that up to about 30 min of recording we never had this issue but if you are recording longer videos this can very well happen to you). Basically what we are talking about here is that in those long recordings the sound in the external recorder doesn’t match the length of the sound recorded to the camera and thus you start to get lip sync problems after a while.

To solve this Undone suggest that you bring the sound into audition manually sync the start of the sound clips (always make a habit of clapping or using some other method to sync your camera’s audio and your external recorder)  and then go to the end of the clips. Here you will likely see that the tracks do not match and what you can do is make the external audio clip shorter or longer by moving the stretch tool (see the video around 3:20) and bring the clips to fully sync.

What this does is basically stretch the sound just a little bit (depending on how much of drift you have). It should not change the tone of your voice significantly.

In general though – in any situation where you can do a short cut in the video and start a new clip – we typically suggest that you do that instead of recording a single extremely long recording – this will probably prevent drifting and might help you while editing as well (working with several smaller files is typically easier than one very large file).

On LensVid we have a very extensive section devoted to sound recording for video productions. You can find many of Niccolls/Drake videos here on LensVid. It is also worth checking out some of Gerald Undone’s other videos and we will be adding them to this sub-category on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

1 comment

  1. Unfortunately, this does not work for me. Only the first milliseconds of the begining and ending of a 5 second clip syncs up.

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