Great sound is the “secret sauce” that makes for a great final video project. Whether you’re filming a corporate interview or a feature film, you want to ensure that the audience doesn’t miss a word. To get great sound, ideally you have access to high-quality microphones and recording devices that can capture crisp, clean dialogue.

Then you get into the edit room, and you’re suddenly faced with separate video and audio files that you now have to get perfectly synced, or else risk your dramatic dialogue scene looking like a foreign language dub.

Thankfully, if you’re using Adobe Premiere Pro, there are several easy ways to sync your audio and video media files seamlessly, so you can spend less time reading lips and more time editing your final product.

Why Is My Video Out of Sync with My Audio?

There are several reasons you may have audio that is out of sync with your video. The first and most common reason is you recorded your audio on a separate device from your video, and with “off camera” audio, it is nearly impossible to get the files perfectly in sync on location.

This is the reason for the “clap” function on a scene slate, it allows for a sharp, distinct sound paired with a visual cue that is recorded on all devices simultaneously, and was absolutely necessary to sync sound with video in the days of film-based shooting.

Now, thanks to technology, even if you didn’t properly “slate” your shots, you can still seamlessly sync your audio and video tracks with the help of some intelligent tools.

Your audio track may have also “slipped,” an issue more common to the digital age, where some sort of delay may have occurred during filming that caused the audio track to fall out of step with the footage. This can also be corrected during editing.

How to Sync Audio and Video in Premiere Pro

Adobe has listened carefully to the challenges of video editors when it comes to the often time-consuming process of sound syncing and has “baked in” some incredibly time saving tools into the latest versions of Premiere Pro.

Check out these three different techniques for syncing audio and video in Premiere Pro:

Method #1: Sync audio and video using the Merge Clips feature

The Merge Clips feature is one of the fastest and easiest ways to sync footage with on-camera audio to an off-camera audio track. This is a great technique to use if the project was recorded on a DSLR with an internal microphone and you want to replace the camera audio with the high-quality boom microphone you recorded on simultaneously.

Step 1: Select both tracks in the project folder, right click, and select “Merge Clips”

Step 2: Set the synchronization point as “Audio” and check the box that says “Remove Audio from AV Clip”

This uses your on-camera audio as the “reference” audio and lines up your external audio source with the internal audio source, then removes the on-camera audio, leaving you with your original video clip synced to your higher quality audio clip.

Step 3: Add your merged clip to your sequence

You will now have a synced audio track paired to your video track which you can now edit as a regular clip.