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Shooting at 100 frames with dialog.


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A client is shooting a commercial and wants to do a shot with dialog at 100 frames. The producer tells me that they have done it before and that they record the audio normally, then speed it up and have the talent practice it at that speed so that when they bring it down, it matches, sounds crazy to me, any ideas on what to do here, it would make more sense to me to record audio normally and then slow it down.

Any ideas?

Sent from my iPad.

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This is so ridiculous that it could be an April Fools joke, or an insane production. 

 

If it is real, you would record at normal speeds. I don't think any camera records audio when you go to those speed settings, so it's all double system. There are some interesting posts about the Hobbit shooting 48fps, and how they handled the audio, TC, slates etc. 

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Suggest to post that when they speed up the production tracks (really? I thought they'd want to slow it down, to match the 100 fps video  with 29.97 playback... anyway...)  ... that when they speed-change the production tracks, they use a phase vocoder rather than a conventional pitch shifter. I've found that to be a lot more effective and intelligible with mass speed shifts on dialog.

 

Of course this is an ad shoot, so you might not have access to the post people. Or even to the agency producer who'll make that decision.

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This is an old trick and we utilised it on Snatch for a few lines from Jason Statham as he speaks to Brad Pitt between rounds in one of the fights,Mickey (Brad) is taking a hammering,so as he rests between rounds his corner man (Statham) talks to him but Mickey is shot in slo mo,so that he appears punch drunk and the sponge being squeezed over his head has slo mo droplets of water hitting his head.

 

 

We recorded the wild track of Jason Statham's dialogue the day before,put it on CD at double speed (we were going to shoot the slo mo at 48fps) and had him practise speaking the lines at double speed that night.

 

The next day when we shot the scene we played back his wild track at double speed (48fps) and he spoke along to his own double speed wild track.

 

We used two machines- 1 to record the clapper board and the playback and the other to playback (all the old school guys here will know what i am talking about- its how we made music video's before timecode.....)

 

 

In Avid the 48fps shot was played at 24fps so it was in slow motion and the wild track played back at normal speed,but Jason Statham is speaking,in the slow motion shot at normal speed.

 

 

*Edited to add- We shot this before modern non-linear sound editing software,so we used a timecode nagra to playback the wild track,with the audio recorded at 7.5ips and 24fps,and we then played back the wildtrack at 

15ips using a 'timecode resolver' to run the timecode at double speed.We then rolled camera and clapped a sync board being recorded on an HHB Portadat,and when the 1st AD called 'playback' the digislate was 'showed' to camera (showing the tc from the nagra wild track) and then a 3 bleep intro gave Jason Statham his timing to begin the mimed dialogue.The audio from the time code nagra was fed into the HHB portadat.

This process gave editorial 'belt and braces' in the syncing process.Real time clap and timecode reference.

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I just did this recently, with a song though. I had suggested it to one our directors for a scene where he was worried about running out of walking "real estate" (if the action was in slo mo, we won't cover as much ground during the song). We didn't use it then, but on a later song, we shot an opening shot variation. We did 1.5x speed as double time was a little crazy for our singer (I can't imagine what 4x would be like). Since we shoot at 23.976, we had to pull out the calculators to find the correct frame rate for the camera (1.5 x 23.976). It's a cool effect, and our DP instantly referred to it as "that old music video trick".

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 I have done the "old music video trick" for a music video but I had never thought about using it for dialogue. Ingenious Simon, I will remember that for the future, although it does require some forward planning from the director and nowadays they seem to flip to high speed at a whim.

We often shoot 48fps shots at 96kHz, which can then be played back at 48kHz and remain in sync.

(so would 192kHz = 75fps or 100fps, I have wondered) .

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ok they are doing 48FPS not 100.  just had a meeting with the director.  have the wild lines recorded, halving the time of the audio by TCE in protools seems to more than double the speed.  Is that the correct way of doubling the speed?  it just seems so much faster.

 

Derek, are you saying that if i record the audio with the actor talking at normal speed @96khz and thenplay it back @ 48khz it will sync with the video played back at 24fps?

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I would think speaking 4 times faster than normal would be quite difficult.

 

That's what I was going to say. I've worked on plenty of music videos and commercials where they shot it at 48fps and had the actor "learn" the song fast (singing at 2X speed), so the resultant slow-down would now be at the normal sound speed but with 1/2-speed visuals. Shooting sound at 4x (100fps) with a corresponding slow-down would be impossible, in my experience.

 

No need to worry about digital sample rates or any of that stuff. Just take the track and play it at 2X normal speed out of Pro Tools or Courtney Goodin's BWF-Widget Pro. I would request a track with 23.98-frame timecode (assuming the end result will be at this speed), then speed up the playback on set. Most current-generation Denecke slates will accept varispeed timecode as an analog input. Barring that, put four pops as a count-off prior to the start of the song, and let the editor sync to that -- that's assuming they play the entire song and don't do any pickups in the middle. 

 

Previous discussions on music playback on set:

 

 

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Thanks for the help guys!

We ended up shooting at 32 fps because tdouble speed was too fast for the actor to keep up with, looked great, seemed like the right speed, and they will be doing adr, they just needed to get the speed right.

Sent from my iPad.

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