Just found out something today that might help any of you with issues you are having with your lip sync.
I've been doing a lot of "lip syncing" myself, singing along to others, but today I went back and was recording my voice and face and I noticed, once again, that the lip sync seems a bit "off". So on a hunch I slipped the audio track forward by some frames and suddenly it not only looked better, it looked perfect.
A few things (and for those of you know know, you can skip this): humans are VERY sensitive to sync issues. At 24fps (the only thing I use) even a single frame off can be detected, and two or more looks *really* bad. It's much worse for the audio to be sooner, and for an easy to understand reason -- you can open your mouth without producing sound, but if you hear the sound before the mouth opens (unless you're a ventriloquist) it immediately raises red flags.
In the biz (decades ago when I used to sync reel to reel with actual film footage) we would often "trick" things by slipping the sync (the audio) forward a bit. It looks fine if someone opens their mouth without the sound coming out, and it actually tends to look better sometimes (particularly with fast dialog). Naturally you don't want to go too far forward, or you'll have the mouth closing before the sound ends.
I was a bit surprised when I finally ended up with five frames forward looking the best -- that's a LOT (remember we are at 24fps, and that's almost a fifth of a second). It didn't seem to matter if it was wi-fi or USB, the same issue prevailed (I'm guessing it has something to do with iClone's lag in recording things). And you can't do it in iClone -- you'll need to do it in your video editor (as if you needed another reason to export single frames -- only way to get 24fps anyway).
You might want to experiment with this if you are also having issues. It looks so much better to me I don't even think I'm going to do quick edit tests (to MP4) that I used to do. And, of course, YMMV (may vary quite a bit, particularly if you don't use 24fps). But it's another trick to have in your arsenal.
Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley