I was going to start a Pit thread about this as it has been bothering me since sometime in 1982 when MTV came to my house via cable for the first time. But I don’t feel up to a rant. I admit that I know nothing about video editting or film making or song writing. I did play drums for sometime as as an adolescent/teenager, although never professionally. I find it irritating while watching videos when I notice that the video is editted with the drummer about 1/2 a measure off. I can tell this because then guy has his stick in the air when the snare is being hit. I notice the drummer since I’m watching because I’m interested in drums, perhaps guitarists are also done wrong. Whose fault is this? Is it that hard for non-drummers to notice? I would expect that people who make/edit music videos have more experience than that, or would soon gain the experience after a few drummers complained.
What’s the dope here? Am I so wrong to expect more? I can say that perhaps it has gotten better in the 20 years bands have been regularly making vidoes, but with computer editting and such, I thought it might be a bit easier to scoot the editor over two beats to get the snare and the stick matched up.
Yes, it can be pretty distracting, once you start to notice. Who’s fault it it? Well, it depends. Are the shots you’re talking about singles on the drummer? ie., is there pretty much nothing else in the frame? If so, then yes, it’s the editor’s fault. There’s likely no reason why the footage couldn’t be slipped to match the playing. Unless of course, the editor just simply didn’t have the frames to slide it, in which case it might be the director’s fault for not getting his coverage, but most likely it’s still the editor’s fault for using a shot that simply wouldn’t work.
But if you’re talking about a wider shot, where you can see the rest of the band… what else is happening in the frame? Are other things in sync? When you film a music video, the band is lip-syncing (lip-playing?) to the song. In the editing room, the actual song is laid out, and the video is edited over top of it. So, if during the actual filming, the drummer was slightly off, but the others seemed closer, someone’s going to look out of sync. And most editor’s assume most people are going to be paying more attention to the singer and the guitarists, so they’d probably skew that way. Next time you see one of these, check to see if the other band members can be seen in the shot, and if they look like they’re in sync. If so, then it’s the drummer’s fault.
A good recent example is the Hives’ “Walk Idiot Walk” video available on Yahoo Launch. There are a couple single shots of the drummer out of sync and one wider shot. It makes the dorky drummer look like, well, a dork. But that’s also kind of the band’s style anyway.
My guess is it’s easier to tell when a guitar or singer is in sync than a drummer. To a lot of people, drums just sound like a bajillion hits and crashes a minute, and being able to tell which crash is which is not an easy thing.
On another forum I once asked about something I’d noticed about videos I’d seen of 1960s rock groups performing on musical/variety shows: they were often really obviously miming. To take one notable drummer-related example, if you watch the Who’s performance of “My Generation” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, you can hear Keith Moon playing the drums at the same time that you can see him throwing his drumsticks up into the air!
I was told by older rock fans that in those days any reasonably hip person knew that pre-recorded tracks were used for these TV performances. Many rock musicians apparently considered it kind of dorky to put a lot of effort into their phony performance, and some intentionally did things to spoil the illusion because they thought it was cool or funny.
So I’d guess that some bad miming or audio/visual mismatch in music videos is due to some accident, but in other cases it’s probably deliberate on the part of the musicians. I remember seeing on Pop-Up Video that Michael Penn thought miming for a video was just too cheesy, so he insisted on including a shot in “No Myth” showing him dropping his guitar pick and stopping to pick it up while the music continued uninterrupted. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there are more subtle, intentional “mistakes” in other music videos.
Not to excuse big time moneyed directors and editors from not synching their videos, but as a student I shot non-sync silent footage of a local band and edited together a video for their second album. (Shameless Plug Alert: www.ruskabank.com My video is on the second album… enhanced CD)
Only 3 or 4 seconds in the entire video were of the band singing that particular song. Who knows if it matched up?
