@DJTHED  
I understand, for what it’s worth I would give you a refrence of me singing through this, since even though I’m baritone the mouth movements would still be the same so long as I kept the key consistent. Unfortunately I don’t have the space or the equipment to do so, so you’re out of luck there.
 
Even more unfortunately, recordings of singers where the record focuses on how their lips and mouths move are pretty hard to come by. As such the only real recommendation I can give here is to do some looking on the term “belting” since a good portion of this particular song is belted. Once you understand the difference between speech, singing, and belting a bit better then you should be able to figure out the lip syncing in no time.

@Background Pony #8AAE  
Oooooooh, okay. I can see that working a lot better. I feel like these are things I should know at this point… But I don’t. I can pretty easily get it for standard speech since I could just hold my hand under my chin and say things out loud and immediately tell when my jaw moves or not. But for singing, using my own jaw isn’t great reference since I’m no singer, and never ever could be. Yeah, looks like I’ll have to do more research on singing.

@DJTHED  
Yes, it’s an improvment. That being said the jaw is still working too much there. The inflections in those particular tones will come more from the lips flexing than the jaw moving.

@Background Pony #8AAE  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=F0kV90GoXLc
 
Been working on the rig and this is what it looks like right now. This probably isn’t quite there yet, but hopefully it looks significantly better lip-sync wise, at least.

Tears….  
Only tears of joy and being touched…  
thank you for creating these

@Background Pony #EE00  
Yeeeaaah that’s my bad. It’s still there, but since the second shot is using the same lighting set up from the previous, it kind of hides the nostrils pretty well. Wished I noticed that before doing a final render, but ah well.

it looks like her nostrils disappear when it gets close up. Am I just blind?

@Background Pony #8AAE  
Yup. I already have an idea on how I should approach this fix. Involves relying on more shape keys and what not for extreme mouth shapes, like puckering lips. Something I should have done a long time ago but insisted to myself that I don’t need to rely completely on shape keys for the mouth.
 
And yeah the clip I linked is definitely not quite there either. No more excuses for me to not fix the rig, since I couldn’t get it right back then either.

@DJTHED  
Yea, it’s pretty imperative. Sure, I would say that a lot of people won’t notice it, but the ones who do pay attention to that sort of thing will catch it immediately. That all being said, if it’s a problem with the model then I understand completley. That is what it is. Though if that’s the case it’s pretty important that you get that fixed up so that you don’t have to fudge it.
 
Best of luck with that! As far as I’m concerned this is all witchcraft to me so I unfortunately can’t offer anything constructive to help with the model beside saying that fudging it like this is bad. I just know how mouths move ^;)
 
Oh, and for the record, even in the older version you linked there it’s not right. It’s closer, but even then it’s pretty far off. I’m guessing you’re aware of that though, but just mentioning it to be clear.

@Background Pony #8AAE  
Don’t worry about it. I’ve dealt with worse criticism before and I like to think I have pretty thick skin nowadays. All good. I encourage constructive criticism like this whenever I can.
 
And yeah, I was afraid people would notice some odd lipsyncing at the end there. it actually used to look more like this with more puckering:  
https://youtu.be/r8NwBrFHD0s?t=15s
 
But my current model kind of looks bad when puckering extremely right now, especially when it’s rendered out with all the shaders and lights. I consciously chose to avoid most puckering in the meantime and find a motion that felt nice to replace it until I can find a way to get my model to pucker them lips.
 
This also isn’t the first time someone brought the puckering issue up for this very animation. It definitely makes it more apparent how important it is to get it to look right. Definitely going to prioritize a fix for the mouth when I get to working on the rig again.

The lip syncing needs work.
 
“Let the magic in my heart stay trueoooo~”  
I only saw one U/O there when there should have been three consecutive U/O’s strung together. Just by eyeballing it what she said there is closer to “And let the magic in my heart stay true~AHHH! MMMPH” than what the audio is playing.
 
There are a few other instances where it looks like it doesn’t match, but it’s hard to distinguish what exactly is out of place. Suffice it to say though, whenever tries to make any U/O sound (with any volume and provided you’re not a talented ventriloquist) they absolutly HAVE to make an U/O with a visible pucker of their lips coming together to cover the teeth like you had on the syllable of “true” there or they’re going to sound legitimately disabled.
 
Sorry if this seems biting, but that really stood out immediatley to me. And when I say instantly I mean that my brow was furrowed through most of the animation here and when it came to that part in particular I was shocked.
 
If you haven’t already I would sincerely recommend getting a mirror in with you when you’re doing the lip syncing and whenever you’re unsure of what needs to happen next just mouth out how your mouth would move for those sounds. You’ll notice very quickly you can’t make that U/O sound with the lips you gave her for it.
 
If you need a more specific example, you can actually look to the very sceen you’re trying to recreate and see that they did exactly what I’m trying to describe here at timestamp 1:33  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgXTzOkCUI8

You, sir, are a genius. Never stop creating these animations, they are wonderful.

das a gud.