TV Production sound

[tim...]

Having not got useful answers from the TV group, I'm going to try asking this here

I'm currently watching reruns of Zen on Drama

and the sound is decidedly off

There's no sync between lip movements and the actual spoken dialogue

Sometimes it's off by a small amount and other times it's completely wrong.

And there's lots of panning away from peoples faces whilst they are continuing to talk.

It's like they didn't record the sound from the original action, just got the actors to mumble a bit of the dialogue and then dubbed it all in afterwards

It's a multi-country production so they may have decided that if the are going to have to dub in multiple languages, they might just as well dub the English in as well

Is this a known form of TV production, sometimes used, frequently used, or never used?

[Owain Lastname]

I would expect it's sometimes used. Not just for language reasons, but if sound recording on-set was poor for any reason.

And it's also possible that some of the actors are dubbed by another actor, although a quick look at the more international cast suggest most of them can produce lines in English.

I think some of the Welsh/English dramas are filmed twice, scene by scene for each language.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is fairly common

[newshound]

"Digital" factors can also take video and audio out of synch, all depending on the overall pathways that the streams have taken. As a simple example, recordings on my Humax PVR sometimes show this effect, but rebooting fixes it.

Panning away is obviously a different thing. And redubbing is not at all uncommon, for example to eliminate "noises off".

[Dave Plowman (News]

Very unusual to totally post sync dialogue on a TV prog made originally in English. Although common at one time on feature films.

Only time it's usually done is if shooting in a very noisy place where location recording of the dialogue impossible. Or to fix a fault found subsequently. It's rather an expensive thing to do properly.

I'm also intending watching it. I'll have a better idea after that.

>

[Jethro_uk]

<snip>

No idea about your specific issue, but I will note that my (8 year old) LG TV has a setting to adjust the audio/visual sync tucked away in one of the menus.

IIRC I was told ages ago that some cheaper TVs take a tad longer to process the video than the audio depending on codec etc. Which has a whiff of truth about it.

[tim...]

it's not out of sync in time

the lip movements are plain wrong

[Murmansk]

Not strictly related to the original question, but I have always noticed a slightly strange thing which is not a technical problem but more of a deliberate thing I suspect

When watching a drama you will hear the sound from the next scene while the current scene is still visible on the screen - for maybe 1.5 seconds so if there are two people in a living room talking and the scene ends you then hear a train coming into a station and then a second or so later it switches the picture to show the train arriving in the station.

It happens so often I reckon it's deliberate but I wonder why they do it and if it has a name so I can look it up online!?

Also I've heard of a thing I think is known as "reverse noddies" where when a reporter is interviewing someone, perhaps in the street, you'll occasionally see the camera switch to the interviewer nodding as if to say, yes, I see what you mean, carry on but I suspect the phrase reverse noddies refers to the fact that they only have one camera so have to film these bits afterwards and then paste them in - which might explain why they sometimes look a bit insincere and don't QUITE match what was being said.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Lead sound. On a cut.

[NY]

That's what they did for A Mind to Kill / Yr Heliwr [The Hunter], with Philip Madoc. I imagine that most of the time (and therefore the cost) of TV production comes from setting up the scenes. Filming what amounts to a few (*) extra takes (albeit in a different language) is probably a small incremental cost.

(*) To allow for fluffing the lines: good actors might well nail it on the first take, especially after they've already acted it in the other language, and two takes (English and Welsh) might be fewer than less professional actors might require in just English.

[NY]

The worst drama I ever saw for the "panning away" technique, used excessively and "oh bugger, here it comes yet again" was This Life (1996). In a scene with two actors, it was common for the camera to pan from person A to person B, while person A was still speaking. Fine: it lets you see B's reaction to what A is saying. Except (and this is the really maddening thing) the camera would often get half way from A to B, then pan back to A while it was showing neither of them. Or else there would be a jump cut from the panning-from-A-to-B shot to a shot of A again. Both of these fads gave the impression that the cameraman and/or editor didn't know what they were doing - it was panning for effect, drawing attention to itself, rather than for a dramatic purpose.

[Dave Plowman (News]

I watched the first few minutes of Ep1 - recorded off air on a Humax. The shooting sequence. Perfectly normal radio mics. And in sync.

[tim...]

However

it was E2 where I noticed it

I had deleted E1 by then

[Dave Plowman (News]

Very unlikely they had a major change in production technique between eps. Most likely a fault in the transmission, or your end.

Did you watch it live, recorded, or catch up?

[tim...]

on my PVR

but FTAOD, it's simply wasn't out of sync.

It was completely different to the lip movements

[Peter Able]

FTAOD - I take it that "completely" is an exaggeration?

I've seen what looks like poor re-dubbing. The only thing I've discovered is that you can make it even worse by using higher video compression.

Well, less i-frames and bigger GOPs. This could make sense, as the reconstructed frames following an i-frame must be biassed by the decode being a composite of several - time-separated - frames. This implies that what you see will not be audibly or visually in sync.

Err - I think.

PA

[Dave Plowman (News]

I'll look at it later. Just to confirm, the entire prog was like this or just some of it?

>

[tim...]

Enough of it for you not to have to watch very much to spot it

[polygonum_on_google]

Trying to decide whether that is more, or less annoying than when a character walks away from the rest of the cast, speaking, and the people several steps behind hear everything perfectly (rather, they act as if they did, which is what they are being to do).

[tim...]

Right

Ep3

about 41 minutes in. Zen is in the big white hall taking with someone

Sometimes the dialogue is in sync with the lip movements

sometimes they are out of synch, sometimes early and sometimes late