Audio sync issue

So while editing I ran into a small problem with my final shot. The shot is Anshrah getting out of the car, walking to the front of it, looking straight into the camera and lip syncing the final lyric before the video fades to black. In my head this was supposed to be the dramatic ending moment.

The issue was that the clip was longer than the part of the song it was supposed to fit into. Which meant that by the time she actually reached the lyric, the song had basically already moved on. Not ideal.

My first instinct was to fix it the normal way: trimming previous clips and rearranging parts of the edit. But every time I did that it started messing up the flow of the whole video, and after finally getting the pacing right I really did not want to ruin that.

So instead I did something that some editors might look at and go “hmm… interesting choice”

I cut a small part from the outro of the song and duplicated it, then placed it right before the final lyric. I faded out the original audio, faded into the duplicated section, and then let the song continue into the actual final lyric again.

Basically I added around five extra seconds into the song just so the shot had enough time to play out properly and the lip sync could land exactly on the lyric.

Is this the most traditional editing method? Probably not.

Did it fix my problem perfectly? Yes.

And honestly, if the audience doesn’t notice the audio trick, then it means the edit worked.