Introduction
Hello, my name is Brad, and welcome to my Freedom! Tech Tip article. You, as the viewer, are giving us your time out of your day therefore I want to respect that by providing you with good quality content. Editing is something that I am very passionate about getting right and I take a lot of pride in the content that I post for our viewers to see.
Once you have finished editing, you are looking at the final product that your viewers are going to be watching and the amount of times I have watched my videos over and over to make sure things are right to what I set myself as a standard is quite a lot. I have been editing content now for just over 10 years, so I have my fair share of experience. I have used many different forms of software, most of all Premiere Pro which is the software used in my tutorial.
Premiere pro gives people the tools they need to produce some really professional or even casual videos. I say casual because not all of us are working on huge advertisements for Audi or Porsh. Most of us are YouTubers, and some of us are gaming YouTubers. One of the most critical things that I feel should be taken seriously when providing gaming content to your viewers is making sure that what happens in your game, lines up perfectly to your reaction on screen. This brings us to syncing!
Syncing
Syncing is the term that I use to reference your audio matching up with the game audio, and my video above very easily demonstrates how you can make that possible. No one wants to watch a video whereby something happens in-game and your reaction to that has happened either 14 seconds before the event or 26 seconds after. Lining your audio to the game’s is crucial. So lets get into how this is done!
Step 1
I use Audacity to record my voice audio coming from my mic, this makes it separate from my game capture, Shadowplay, which is free to download if you’re using an Nvidia graphics card. At the start of each video that I make, I do a count down from three and finish my countdown with ‘now!’. At the same time as me saying ‘now’ I am clicking the mouse button on something in the game, causing the game to do something. Doing this means that the noise of my mouse gets picked up through my mic audio.
Step 2
Once you are done recording your video, and you have stopped the recording of your gameplay and your audio, you will have two separate files. One which is your game/game audio and the other being your mic audio. Go ahead and open up Premiere Pro and drag both files into your timeline. It should look something like this.
The audio that is underneath should always be your mic audio. Once everything has been imported correctly, using your timeline and looking at your preview screen, find where you clicked in the game. For me, I was playing Destiny 2 and clicked “Open Directory”. This meant that when I see my mouse hover over onto the “Open Directory” button, then suddenly it opens, that is where the click happens.
When you have found that instance, set a marker on your timeline by pressing the ‘m’ key on your keyboard. This sets a yellow marker where your timeline bar is meaning that it’s easier to find where the game reaction is without having to look for it again.
Step 3
Next, you want to listen to your mic audio and find the part where you say, “3, 2, 1, now!” When hearing ‘now!’ you should also hear the loud click from your mouse that you made. Now, all we need to do is put two and two together! The audio wave that displays the click of your mouse, drag that over to the marker that we made. Once that lines up perfectly, play your footage back and you’ll see that your audio from your mic is now successfully synced to your audio and video from the game!
I really hope this helps you better your content. Feel free to ask us any questions below!
– Brad