How to stop the picture showing someone mouthing words you cannot hear
Ask Vizard Agent to audit the film frame by frame for shots where a mouth is moving without matching audio, then to search your rushes for a window where the same person's mouth is closed and still. Covering the moment with b-roll is one answer; a shot where they are listening rather than talking is usually the better one.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Describe the symptom precisely. Telling Vizard Agent the lip sync is off sends it hunting for a timing offset, when the sync is actually correct everywhere and the picture simply outlasts the audio underneath it. Bring the rushes too, including unused takes, because the best fix is usually another window of the same person.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Most of a talking-head film is cut to the words, so mouths and audio agree by construction. The failure happens at the joins, where a line ends a beat before the shot does. So the audit covers the whole film, and the fix is a window where the mouth stays still for the whole gap, not a single nice frame. In the session behind this article it:
- Ran a frame-accurate lip-sync audit alongside the transcript of a campaign film where silent mouth movement had to be eliminated completely, and listed every offending moment.
- Examined the mouth through a specific insert shot and checked whether the lips moved during it at all.
- Grabbed a frame from every original clip, built contact sheets and surveyed every usable clip of that person.
- Scanned for a mouth-closed, stable window and found the quietest one among the candidates.
- Checked for held blinks as well as mouth state, since a held blink looks just as wrong, then confirmed the chosen window by looking closely at the lips.
When does this not work well?
Sometimes nobody is ever still. A subject who talks continuously through every take leaves Vizard Agent no closed-mouth window to find. Then the honest options are a cutaway, a tighter shot that excludes the mouth altogether, or ending the shot earlier than you wanted to. Single-take footage gives it nothing else to cut to.
Common questions
Is this a lip-sync problem? No, and saying so misdirects Vizard Agent. The sync is correct; the picture outlasts the audio.
Is b-roll not simpler? Sometimes. A listening shot of the same person usually reads better.
Does the audio change? No. Vizard Agent changes only the picture over those moments.