[time-nuts] Re: Where do people get the time?

[Peter Vince]

On Sun, 2 Jan 2022 at 17:57, Hal Murray <halmurray at sonic.net> wrote:
>
>
> How far off does the audio have to be before it doesn't look/sound
right?  How
> accurately does the typical movie process get things aligned?


I used to work in broadcast television, and find that most people would
notice a couple of "frames" (80ms here in the UK) - we, trained and looking
for it, would notice one frame (40ms).  But it is more disturbing if the
sound is early, as that is so unnatural.  At that sort of level though, it
is quite hard to tell if it is early or late, especially as the actors
won't just stand there saying the same thing time and again :-)

Because the sound and video don't use the same frame rates, MPEG codecs
have a hard time getting it right.  We developed a test signal which
measured the time between a blip on the sound and a flash on the vision,
and used it regularly when lining up links.

    Peter