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post syncing

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Again, thank you for the wealth of advice you've been giving me on my short film. I am two weeks away from shooting. Here in NY I'm thinking to process the film at DUART, because they do cater to NYU students by offering a discount. It's also good to introduce yourselves to a sales rep. I don't know how are they going to be taking care of my film when it moves to post. I'll let you know. But, meanwhile, burning question. I'm gonna be developing the film and transfer it to video dailies with Timecode for the eventual negative cutting. However, when it comes to syncing sound DUART will do it for video dailies at a rate of $110/hr. That is a lot!!!! Is there any other way beside syncing on a flatbed? I mean for 6000 ft of film at $110/hr that's gonna be about $1,100.00!!!!! Non-discountable!! Help!!

Actually, $110/hr for post sync is a reasonable price. If you plan to transfer negative to video, you shouldn't ever see a flatbed. Your time code and key code numbers will be used from your video cut to conform your negative. Sound syncing is either done by the lab or on your editing computer/edit deck. If you choose to have the lab do it, it should be very quick and simple, assuming that you have neat and organized camera and sound logs and your sound mixer and cinematographer marked and recorded sound and pix in a semi-professional manner. I would get a price quote first but it shouldn't be more than an hour or two of labor. It really depends on how good of records you keep, which is why you're smart to look into that before you shoot your film. It's a very simple task if you keep good records.

Sound syncing is just as simple on an AVID, but you may end up paying more for editing time on the machine syncing sound than it will cost in the lab. WARNING: if you plan to sync sound in this manner, you ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE THE AUDIO RESOLVED AT THE LAB. If you don't, you will have a horrible nightmare trying to match pix running at 30fps or 29.97fps to sound that was recorded in real time with pix at 24fps.

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