I’ve noticed many of the current crop of cheesy commercials for exercise equipment and whatnot are out of synch. That is, the voice doesn’t match the lips. Why? They don’t care enough to synch it properly? Something else?
Years ago, many TV commercials were on 16mm film and shown with a projector. If you didn’t thread the loops just right the sound and picture didn’t match up because the sound pickup was a pre-determined distance from the aperture where the picture was shown. Now virtually everything is on video, so this problem shouldn’t be happening, unless it was originally shot on film and somebody got careless in the film-to-video transfer.
Outsourcing commercial-filming to Bosnia? and having to dub the audio? :eek:
I’ve seen ones on satellite TV here where they’ve dubbed in a British accent over the American one. As if that makes all the difference.
Or over a South African accent. You might get away with using an American accent for UK audiences, IIRC (way back) some kid’s toy ad’s were obviously American - maybe they still are but I’m not prepared to risk my mental health watching kid’s telly to find out. But you could not use a South African ad without re-dubbing it.
I suspect it is simply yet another desperate tactic employed to get you to somehow notice something, anything about the commercial. I spend my life trying to ignore advertising of all kinds (which I have unfortunately already paid for via the contributions from previously purchased goods or services!).
I think this is just the televisual equivalent of candy wrappers that are printed in sixteen languages; the manufacturer can exploit economies of scale in the production process by producing a single huge run of multilingual wrappers, instead of sixteen smaller runs of language-specific ones (each of which requires layout, proofing, setup etc).
In the same way, it is more economical to shoot a single expensive commercial, then adapt it (using cheap dubbing) than to shoot many different language-specific versions of the same commercial (probably requiring many different actors). There’s also the advantage that when you want to add a new spurious claim to your commercials ('Now with added Vitamin X41 for guaranteed immortality!") - you only need to dub over again and maybe add a bit of extra graphics.
Unless I’m mistaken, most commercials are shot on 35mm film. These cheap commercials I’m talking about look as if they were shot on video. Yes, they probably separate the audio and video to edit; but why are they out of synch?
I don’t think so. I’ve also seen OOS footage on news programmes. I wonder if it’s not the commercial-maker, but the broadcaster that is having the problem?
In the case of non-commerical broadcasting, it could be some artifact of compression/decompression technologies (not necessarily in the final broadcast, perhaps internally to the station).