Misleading. What you see is not what you hear.
The sound is in stereo and there's no way the way it was recorded to have come out that way. Furthermore, music does not match up with his actions. And finally, you can hear more than just piano.

This kid skillful, yes. But what we here are theatrics and not his real playing.

I noticed that too...and the green screen behind him, and the dizzying undulating camera movements, but close your eyes and it sounds pretty good.

While the camera wouldn't get that kind of sound recording, you can easily record a piano like that with close micing. You stick the microphones inside the lid, down near the strings. It gives a very wide, expansive, soundstage. Here is an example of one kind of setup like that.

However it has a downside: It picks up more of the piano's noise, in particular hammer and pedal noise, as well as key noise. Those are the noises you hear, particularly when he starts working the pedals hard.

In terms of his key movements being sync'd to the music, they look sync'd to me. That kind of thing isn't that useful for evaluation because there are too many variables that can affect it:

1) The sync of your system. Your sound system and monitor have a delay to them. Depending on the difference in the delays, things can be a bit out of sync, perhaps noticeably so. Unless you have your system calibrated for it, which isn't likely on a computer.

2) Problems in the A/V sync in production. Something like this would probably be recorded with two devices: A hand held camera, and a dedicated recorder. The audio from the recorder would then need to be sync'd manually with the video. Depending on how accurate that is done, there can be some desync.

3) Sync issues in the video. I'm sure you've seen plenty of videos online with sync issues, various problems in encoding and streaming can cause them.


Not saying that this is real for sure, I don't know, just that I don't see or hear anything inconsistent.

Well, what we see is very close to what we hear. While I agree that there's probably no audio that he played in the video take a lot of the movements line up precisely and it's clear that he is indeed the guy who played the actual audio track.

Keep in mind this is a rehearsal run, after all.

Not fussed about whether or not that was "real" / one take with audio direct from video recording, because musically it was *awesome*.

Whole thing was great, but I got the "whoa, this is f*&king awesome" goosebumps when he broke into the Smooth Criminal part!