In a number of my recent posts, I have been linking to YouTube videos on my channel, or talking about a lot of my challenges both with video and audio. In general though, I haven’t really talked about the process by which I actually go thru the editing. That being said, my process is still evolving – I am not a video editor by trade – and almost all of my methods are self taught (and probably very inefficient).
In my case, my camera records at an unfortunate 15 fps, and I have to record audio independently. This creates some initial challenges before I can even start editing. Specifically, I first use Handbrake to convert the video to 30 fps. In the process, it compresses the files significantly, which makes moving them around and working with them a bit easier, without (as far as I can tell) any significant change in quality. This is a time consuming step though, something I normally set to run overnight so I am not up and waiting (typically about 1 hour for each hour of footage).
From that point, I bring both video and audio into Davinci Resolve (version 12.5 currently), where I try to sync up the sound with the video. This isn’t too difficult, I always try to create a key reference point before the actual content. However, for some reason the “30 fps” of the video is never truly 30 fps, so over the length of the video the audio slowly drifts out of sync (approximately 1 second for every hour of footage). So my next step is to slightly alter the speed of the audio, with a similar key reference late in the video. Assuming both of these are correct, the audio and video is then lined up for the duration. Overall, I would say syncing the audio only take about 15 minutes or so, especially since I have a basic spreadsheet to help with the math.
From there, I can actually start cutting and trimming the footage, which I will comment about tomorrow.
