camera tricks | in-camera effects

This section includes in-camera effects for commercial or music video productions. This will be an ongoing article as new topics come up from my own shows and from questions posed on internet bulletin boards. If you have any questions about special processes, please feel free to contact me.

audio time shift

This is an often-used technique in music videos where the singer sings in real time while the image is in slow motion. The following table illustrates some typical shooting speeds and what time shift needs to be made to the audio playback.

These speed changes to camera and playback assume that the transfer speed on the telecine is 24fps. You can of course do other transfer tricks. For example, shoot at 6fps, set playback at 100% and then transfer the footage back to tape at 6fps. This will give any movement an exaggerated blur but with real time movement. You can also incorporate this with a strobe and get clean images with ghosting trails on moving objects.

The formula is as follows:

playback audio speed increase/decrease = (24 x 100) / fps or intended camera speed.

Note: 66.66 & 33.33 are repeating decimal values.

Example: To create a slight slow motion effect for a 3:00 song - say a shooting speed of 32 frames-per-second - the audio shift would be as follows: (24 x 100) / 32 = 75

This means an audio time shift of 75% or you would reduce the audio playback speed to 2 minutes and 15 seconds.