Audio Drift problems in FCPx with MiniDV tape

[Bill Davis]

[Ellie Krnich] “Has anyone experienced a problem with audio syncing in FCPx when dealing with tape-based footage? I am having some bizarre problems. Sometimes it happens, but othertimes it doesn’t. On the out of sync footage, you can hear several audio pops in the very beginning of the clip, where the sync has occurred. Are they any fixed for this? I do not have this problem in Legacy FCP…..

Thank you!”

I suspect that one reason you didn’t have any “problems” in Legacy is that this was a giant mess for many years before the engineers built enough code into FCP to handle all the squirely audio that resulted from various manufactures approaches to the digital audio “standards.”

Typically the largest problem area has been sample rate conversions. (various “flavors” of DV had sample rates all over the map, from weird “4-track 32khz samples”, to implementations of the 44khz and even 48khz “standards” that weren’t actually quite so locked to those rates. (Back in the day, it was typical to have to export video clips to Quicktime PRO as a separate step in ingest, just to conform audio sample rates!)

I suspect that in building FCP-X for the new “all digital” era, they didn’t feel it quite as necessary to maintain legacy code to support for all the various audio rate issues.

If you’re going to be working with legacy files – I’d highly recommend you put a “conform audio” step in your workflow where you transcode all audio to a single standard so that all the audio tracks that hit your timeline are the same.

I doubt the engineers working on X will make compatibility with historical audio messes a major priority in the early stages and they may NEVER address the needs of those working with formats that aren’t selling significantly any longer.

FWIW.

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