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Advice – Field Recorder Audio and DV Tape Not Syncing in FCP Post-Production
Hi everyone,
This is an issue I’ve encountered a lot and I’m hoping there’s some advice/tricks you may have to resolve it. I do a lot of videos where I’ll have onboard camera audio (Mini-DV) that I need to sync with a sound board feed that was recorded into a separate SD/CF field recording device as an .aif/.wav/.mp3 file. In my head these two should have no issue lining up in post (i.e. log and capture your video, import your .aif file, line them up once toward the beginning so things are in synch and be done with it) but without fail they will slowly slip out of sync after a few minutes, becoming more noticeable the longer the video runs (to the point of almost a second or two delay by the end in some cases). This makes the editing process extremely tedious.
So I’m wondering two things:
1.) Can someone explain why I’m encountering this issue? Is it a frame rate issue (29.97fps versus whatever an audio field recorder records at), a tape slippage issue where the DV tapes are not playing back at true speed (even though DV is digital perhaps it suffers from the same problems VHS had in this respect/scenario), or something else I’m not aware of?
2.) Does anyone have a solution that will quickly fix/resolve this issue (aside from razor blading every 5-10 minutes and re-synching the .aif file)? If not does anyone have a better suggestion on how to capture this audio setup in the field? I currently use the field recorder because I can set it and forget it for the duration of a 2 hour event… it becomes the audio anchor and I synch the video to it in post – I wanted to avoid running board audio into the camera because sometimes I am operating a two camera shoot so I need a non-stop audio feed for post.
As always, thank you very much for your help!
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1 Reply
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Pretty simple problem. Basically think of it as Mini DV runs at 29.97 fps, but the sound board runs at 30.00
so you gotta slow down that sound file. 99.9% or thereabouts.
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