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First, let me say this – This post assumes you own all of the rights to or have a license to use any audio you intend to use in your videos. If you are doing video editing for a music group that is also recording their music, I strongly recommend the audio is mixed separately from the video. Perhaps with basic songs where the individual audio recordings themselves are of equal quality and no major edits and balancing is needed to combine them, you could “mix” the audio in your video software while you are editing the video. I have done this for basic vocal songs with a handful of voices and a premixed instrument track. It was not ideal. However, with COVID and social distancing a lot of things aren’t.

But even with social distancing, a better quality on audio can be achieved. I will not go into the step by step details in this post on the logistics of that, but in essence it is preferred when video editing you are working with a final, pre-mixed audio track if you are doing a music video. Even if you need to use the audio from your video submissions to mix, I would recommend extracting and separating the audio from the video and mix the audio in an audio mixing program separately.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, you can ensure the audio is appropriately balanced and mixed using programs designed for that purpose. Second, it frees up your video design and editing options. Obviously, it means if you are showing footage of singers or instrumentalists you will need to sync the video footage with the audio (which can be tedious at times); however, you will be surprised how much more flexibility you have in determining the flow and design of your video.

One trick I use when aligning audio and video footage, particularly in lip syncing a singer is in the video editing program during editing I keep the original audio to the video footage attached to the video and use that to help line up with the sound from the final mix of the audio in the video program. You just need to remember when you are done to unlink the audio from the video footage and delete all audio except the final audio mix.

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