On October 11, 2014 at 18:13, highfigh said...
Why is that an inappropriate name for it? It was first used to synch the sound and mouth movements when Talkie movies were the only thing that used sound and video, but it used a 78 RPM recording.
The existence of Phonofilm, patented by Lee De Forest in 1919 and defunct by 1929, severely undercuts the idea that 78 rpm records were involved. Phonofilm is an optical sound track!
As I have a large 78 rpm collection, I'm surprised that I've never run into any discs of the type you describe. Where was this done?
Checking via google gives us LOTS of references in the 80s and since then, and all of these have to do with making the lips move so that it appears that a recorded voice is live singing. Lip Sync is used to describe adding audio to cartoons as well as synchronizing by recording small bits of audio over and over until a visual match is obtained (also called "looping").
Synchronization issues existed as far back as 1919, as mentioned, and were used in films of the forties on. Often an actor who could not sing did lip-syncing, which one article intelligently calls miming, to have a good actor and good singer in a film... even if it was done using two people.
It would have been pointless to try to synch the sound and a video of a galloping horse, but a mouth doesn't move so fast that it's difficult to synch the audio. Well, it's true for most people.
I think the guy who wrote the original post finds it difficult!
