Sync Lock

Among the challenges of video editing is ensuring that the video and audio stay in sync. Whether the two begin as separate pieces or together, they can easily become separated in the editing process, so that before you know it, your characters look as though they are part of a badly dubbed foreign film. You can be the fanciest, most talented editor in the world, but if your product is out of sync, no amount of fancy or talented will matter.

Thankfully, there are tools in most editing software to help you maintain sync. So, as long as you use these tools, you will likely be fine.

Sync in life, while perhaps not as potentially jarring as sync in video, is just as important. When our lives are out of sync with our own beliefs and expectations or out of sync with other people's lives, the result can be disorientation--as if we too are living in that badly dubbed foreign film. The beauty may be there, but we can't see it because we are too busy looking at oddly speaking mouths. The truth may be there in our words, but when those words are out of sync, they become hard to understand.

It is not always easy to feel in sync when your path doesn't run the same way as everyone else's--when your work time is others' sleep time, when your focus is in completely different areas than other people's. But just as editing software provides tools to "lock sync," we have tools at our fingertips to hold on to sync in our lives. We can listen--both to our own needs and to those of the people in our lives--and find the common ground between them. We can speak up--so that we can hear the sync breaks and correct them. And we can stay vigilant, so that a loss of sync doesn't get worse as our story goes on.

As any editor knows, keeping the elements in sync is a crucial part of telling a good story. When we take our life sync just as seriously, we too can maintain a good story--not to mention the clear head we need to live that story.