Sync

Sound and picture agreeing about time: the word on the lip, the step on the beat. Milliseconds the audience cannot name but always feels.

Sync is the contract between eye and ear: dialogue married to lips, the door slam landing on the frame the door closes. Tolerance is brutal, a few frames of drift and speech turns uncanny, though the viewer will report only that something felt wrong, never what.

The term also names music's licensing world, sync rights, the permission to lay a song against picture, one word carrying both the craft and the paperwork. In the edit, sync is hygiene maintained from ingest to export; in licensing, it is the clearance that keeps a finished film from becoming a legal draft.