Audio Drift Dilemma — Makes no sense, but VERY serious nonetheless

[Terry Grace]

Further to my previous message — I just re-imported the audio that was exported from STP back into STP… And it is exactly the length that it should be. So I confirm that something weird is happening when importing back to FCP.

[Terry Grace]

This material was shot with the Canon 5D Mark ii and am now thinking that (as rumored) the camera actually shoots 29.97 even though the metadata states 30 fps. This corresponds exactly to my 8 frame loss. So even with all settings matched at 30 fps, the output of Soundtrack Pro or the input into FCP is reading the material as 29.97. I tried exporting the movie as 29.97 but there is still a sync issue. Very weird. I read elsewhere that people have changed the metadata of the original clips (in Cinema Tools) to 29.97 and the audio drift is gone. Too bad I didn’t find that info out earlier.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Did you use the easy setup method I outlined earlier?

[Steve Tottingham]

I don’t know if you got anywhere with this but I was having the same problem bringing in 25fps audio into a fcp. In the end we found that by exporting the audio from Soundtrack Pro as an SD2 file it would import into fcp at the correct duration – and hence, problem solved…well for me at least.

[Tom Sharman]

I’ve just stumbled across this god awful problem. Settings all match throughout F.C. and soundbooth…48K, 16 bit , 25fps

I export audio to soundbooth to clean it up and sort out EQ. That seems to work fine, but yep, when I sent it back to final cut i have drifting issues.

About 2 thirds of the way through (a 3 min live recording of a band playing acoustic) it starts going out of synch.
This is a major ball ache as well as quite a let down, as I had big plans to mix films with soundtrack and well, if you can never ‘sweeten’ your audio and send it back to final cut without drifting this is a major problem, for us all!

I did manage to solve this problem, but i overcame it with the obvious method of reducing the speed of the faulty audio clip to 98.89%, giving it that extra bit of length so it matched the duration of the video. The audio and video seem to stay in synch for the whole duration of the 3 min video.

Has anyone solved this problem yet, does this occur in all Final Cut Studio packages?

And EPIC FAIL Apple!

Tom