Audio OR Video going out of sync over 2 years?

[John Rofrano]

What has changed on your PC in 2 years? I’ll bet a lot of things changed. Did you update DivX at all? or update Vegas? Vegas doesn’t support DivX so I’m surprised the video worked the first time. In the future, you should not work in DivX if you want to use Vegas. DivX is a delivery format, not an editing format.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Adam Fajny]

Well, obviously some things changed.
But I’m quite conservative and I don’t upgrade things if the versions that I already have are handy enough.

But in these 2 years I bought a new computer.
In this new PC I tried to recreate the very same environment I had on my old PC. Of course it was not feasible in 100% because, for example, the processor is now a different technology, but the software is quite the same.

And I keep the software limited to the efficient minimum.
So all I have is the Divx 5.0.5 which I use to encode videos, I have a ffdshow pack, mp3, and virtually that’s it.

What the whole issue revolves around is Youtube. I produce clips to subsequently publish them on youtube. Today it’s all nice & easy because I can upload videos with uncompressed audio [WAV]. But 2 years ago due to the limits, I was forced to use the fraunhofer Mp3.
Everything I’ve done and still do is with the use of VEGAS 3 (Build 138, YES – from the year 2002 – and I’m not crazy;)

And up to now everything worked fine on youtube. But recently some clips are having problems on youtube. And these are the very same clips that I have problems with here on my HDD.

Did I update Divx? I used another PC with the latest Divx7 and the problem is still there.

What do you mean Vegas doesn’t support Divx ? It supports it perfectly fine, I can load Divx files into the Vegas and render clips from Vegas into Divx (I’m a bit confused here).

Are you suggesting that I should erase from my PC all software that is post-2007, or that I should update all my software to the newest 2009 versions?

[Steve Rhoden]

Archiving your work (for future edits)using the DivX format
was the first mistake….That is whats causing your present
sync problems.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Project Samples at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Adam Fajny]

“Archiving your work (for future edits)using the DivX format
was the first mistake….That is whats causing your present
sync problems. ”

Well, I always anticipated that Divx is not the most professional tool there is, and thanks for confirming me in this belief with your words, but in the light of the current problem it’s a bit like saying;

“buying a Hyundai instead of Audi was the first mistake” whereas all I need to know is why my yellow Hyundai that spent the last night in its garage is today green.

As I said – it’s all about Youtube. I needed to choose some codec to make the videos smaller than 100MB. Even Youtube themselves recommend Divx+mp3 for best final results.

[John Rofrano]

> What do you mean Vegas doesn’t support Divx ? It supports it perfectly fine, I can load Divx files into the Vegas and render clips from Vegas into Divx (I’m a bit confused here).

Maybe DivX worked better in Vegas 3 but in later releases you would get green squares blocks randomly appearing and the answer from Sony was, “we don’t support DivX”. So “officially” it is not supported and it has been the cause of all sorts of corruption and render problems for people.

> Are you suggesting that I should erase from my PC all software that is post-2007, or that I should update all my software to the newest 2009 versions?

I was suggesting to get your PC back to the versions that once worked but you don’t even have the same PC anymore so that’s impossible at this point.

> Well, I always anticipated that Divx is not the most professional tool there is, and thanks for confirming me in this belief with your words, …

The real point that Steve is trying to make and the one that you should take away from this conversation, is that it doesn’t matter what your delivery format is… or what YouTube required several years ago… you always archive to the highest quality source format that you have.

For example: I have lots on DV files that I shot with my miniDV camcorder. I made DVD’s from these files. I did not archive the DVD MPEG-2 files. I archived the source DV media files. This way if I need to re-purpose for the web, I start with my original high quality DV files (compressed at 5:1) instead of the much lower quality DVD MPEG2 files (compressed at 25:1). So archiving DixV because YouTube needed DivX was not the best approach. Always archive to the highest quality possible. You’d be surprise how many people keep the DVD as an archive and delete their original high quality footage and then come here complaining that they can’t get good quality for a compilation video their doing for grandpa’s 90th birthday. 😉

I realize that you probably only worked in DivX back then but you could have used other free codecs like Huffyuv which have high quality lossless compression at the expense of using more disk space and disk space was way more expensive back then than it is now so you probably made the best trade-off at the time given what you had to work with.

Your best option now is to stop worrying about what caused the audio to be out of sync and just spend that time putting the audio back in sync. One thing to try would be to re-encode the DivX files with a tool like Super(c) to Huffyuv or M-JPEG or some other format that edits better in Vegas. Then substitute those files for the original in your project and see if it syncs up. Worth a shot.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Adam Fajny]

Wow, that’s pretty curious news for me.
It’s like a car manufacturer saying “We don’t support Asian roads so you cannot drive your car there”… Bold.
So now I know why even in Vegas 3 I sometimes get these blackouts [in Vegas 8 the ‘holes’ are red and more frequent).

I understand and support your policy of keeping archives in best/loseless quality, but as you say, I had to find the golden mean. Hard drives used to have 40GB, Youtube used to have size limits, other codecs made the work uncomfortable, Divx was hugely popular, that’s the reason of it all.

So I gather my current problem is a software change problem.
I still don’t understand why only 2 clips are out of sync whereas the rest that has been rendered with the same options is fine.

[Steve Rhoden]

I still don’t understand why only 2 clips are out of sync whereas the rest that has been rendered with the same options is fine.

That’s technology for you…just re-sync your media and start
working within and with the proper formats from now on.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Project Samples at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys