Audio and Video Out of Sync from mini-DV capture

[Jerry Hofmann]

Check to make sure the LaCie is formatted Mac OS Extended. If not, reformat it.

Turn Off the “Warn after Capture” on dropping frames. If on, you’ll drop frames, and sync could become an issue. When it plays back roughly, you’ve likely dropped frames.

It doesn’t matter where you route the audio except that it should be routed internal if monitoring sync from your computer display, and should be routed externally if you’re monitoring externally on a video monitor.

Jerry

[Tom Matthies]

You are also capturing to the LaCie using the Firewire connection and NOT the USB connection?
Just checking…
Tom

[Jeff Carpenter]

Sorry, I have no answers, but I’m going to add on to this problem.

I usually use a DV deck over firewire and I’ve never had a problem like this. However, I’ve been using a borrowed DVCPRO deck recently and capturing a lot of high school sports games with it (over firewire). So, usually 1-hour long captures at a time.

About every 3rd or 4th clip I capture, the audio comes in at something like 48.212 khz or 48.0282135 or something. It’s different every time and totally random as to which clip it will happen to.

The only solution I’ve found is to erase the clip and re-capture. Even though I’ve changed nothing, it usually works the 2nd time.

It’s totally inconsistent and you can fix it by changing nothing and just re-doing the work. This makes it almost impossible to track down the problem with experimentation.

Anyway, sorry for not having an answer either, but it’s not just you!

[Film Mom]

Jerry:

Haven’t heard about the MAC OS Extended. Since I’m working on a MacPro Book, I didn’t do any formatting of the LaCie. Just plug and play.

Anyways, how do I re-format it?

I’ll try turning off the warn after capture function…

I’m using my laptop for playback, so I should select “built in?’ Right now its on “default”–what would that go to?

Tom:

I’m plugged into firewire 800.

Jeff:

I’ve tried re-capturing and no dice.

Everyone:

I had one clip that worked, everything else is wonked. One thing I noticed is that with most of the 7 or 8 tapes I captured, after the tape had reached the end, capture now was “searching for media” and/or “time-code break” even though the tape had reached the end. There wouldn’t be any timecode breaks–I never rewound the tape. To deal with this I just hit esc and capture now wrapped up. But I wonder if this would be make sense if there was an audio/video sync issue…

Any more ideas, here?

Could I have a buggy version of FCP 6.0 or could it be my Canon XL 1?

Thanks for your help thus far!

[Jerry Hofmann]

Select the LaCie on your desktop and type cmd+i… in the info window that opens it will show you how it’s formatted. If it’s MS DOS Fat 32, you need to reformat the drive. It’s a matter of saving the stuff you have to on another drive on a temp basis…Because doing this erases the drive… THEN open up the Disk Utility app in the utilities folder in your applications folder.

Select the Lacie in the list that will appear, then click on the “erase” tab. Select Mac OS Extended and go for it…

Won’t take long, but most all LaCies come formatted for PC’s… the Mac is smart enough to read them, it’s having to run thru hoops to read and write to them which slows things down a ton… that’s why you’re dropping frames I’ll bet.

Jerry