Pluraleyes allows you to sync audio files from an external recorder with video. For example, say you’re shooting an interview with your HDSLR – which has horrible audio – and using an audio recorder to record audio of the interview. You can sync that up in post manually, but that can take some time. Plural eyes will do it automatically for you. The video above shows you the steps, which is tremendously easy. He is using a Mac, so it may be different on a PC.

When out shooting and you know you are going to sync the video with another audio source not from your camera, it’s important to give some audio references. That means when you hit record on the audio file and on the camera (as close in time as possible), you have to give the camera and record a point of recognition. I was taught to say “camera speed” when starting to record and “camera off” when done, just before stoping recording on the audio recorder and camera. And you say that when no one else is talking. I have found that clapping three times works great when syncing manually. I look at the audio wave forms to line up the audio recording with the camera audio in FCP, and the claps give nice high waveforms. But to each his own.

The previous versions of Pluraleyes I have used were not that great. I would say that the success rate for me was less than 50 percent, so I just went straight to manually syncing. This new version looks promising though. It might be worth doing a free trial first. If you’ve used version 3.1.1, please let me know how you like it.

In March the Tribeca Film Festival put out a call for entries for six-second films, inspired (and sponsored) by Twitter’s Vine app. If you haven’t checked out Vine, it’s a fusion of Twitter/Instagram/Video. You record six seconds of video and post it to an Instagram like interface. There have been some really creative Vine videos posted, especially a lot of stop motion/animation.

The winners of the competition were announced at the end of April, and I have to say there are some good ones. Take a look at some of the finalist.

My favorite is probably the egg one. It’s clever. But a theme I’m noticing is that it’s difficult to find one that has a solid story in the six seconds. There is surely a lot of clever stop motion, but finding one that tells a story in six seconds is harder to find. It’ll be interesting to see this competition grow and the Vine videos that come out of it.

Even though the competition has come and gone, me and my wife Sandra were inspired to create our own today, which is what you see above. Have you shot any good Vine videos?

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I submitted this video for a CASE award earlier this year and my fingers are still crossed as awards will begin to be announced in June. I bring this up because while I was submitting the video some of the questions I had to answer where quite interesting. It asked: how much money did it cost to produce? How many people did it take? To answer those questions, I wrote down zero.

I didn’t have any extra cost for this video and I shot all the video used. I’m not sure if that fact will help or hurt at all during the judging process, but the questions made me curious.  They actually go back to the reason why I wanted to start this blog. You don’t need a crew or a huge budget to produce quality video that is effective at communicating your message. Now, I will say that it sure as heck doesn’t hurt to have a crew and a budget. Things can go a lot smoother and quicker. But most of us do not have that luxury.

What I think makes the video, is the focus on real people and real stories. These days viewers are expecting a certain amount of authenticity in their videos and it is up to us to deliver that. With the goal of producing video that highlights UC Davis and it’s students, these girls hit the head on the nail. They are in demanding majors, still finding time for a demanding hobby, creating opportunities where there wasn’t any, and give back to the community. I couldn’t draw up a script that was as good as these girls were in real life.

Keeping it simple can produce the results you want, and sometimes that can be best. Also, there are tons of stories right in front of you, and while there is a time and place for scripting out a video, sometimes you just need to go with what’s given to you – it might be better. Enjoy the video (and cross your fingers for me)!

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I shot this video with the Nikon D800 and various lenses. I rely heavily on the 24-70mm F/2.8, but also used the 80-200mm f/2.8 and 50mm f/1.4. I also use a juicedlink pre-amp to get better audio. I used Davinci Resolve Lite to convert the footage to black and white and FCP to edit it.