Audio Sync Problem

[Tom Meegan]

The first thing to isolate when troubleshooting lip sync is your monitoring. You need to make sure your monitoring is true.

I assume you are playing back from the time line. How are you monitoring the audio and the video?

If you connect a fw cable to your deck (or camera) then monitor the outputs of the camera for both audio and video you can be sure that this is not the issue. However, in this set up the video in your canvas could actually be slightly ahead of the audio and video coming from the fw connection.

If this is the problem go to Help > Final Cut Pro User Manual and search frame offset. You will get the idea in just a few pages.

If you are monitoring correctly…

Is the lip sync problem consistent, or does it drift? Capturing very long clips from inexpensive camcorders can create a noticable drift in lip sync over the course of the clip. It starts out fine but gets worse as you go along.

This issue has been discussed quite a lot on the Cow and a search would bear some fruit. You will also learn some of the hows and whys of this issue.

Your solution, if sync drift is your issue, will depend on your deadline, how far along in the project you are, and how complicated your edits were.

If you are very early on, I would re-capture and keep your clips short (under five minutes.)

The other solutions get a bit involved… you will either discover them in your search or you can come back here with more information about your situation.

If your whole video is out of sync consistently and you captured from a DV device, I would strongly suggest that your monitoring is suspect.

The sure test is to output to a dvd or a vhs and play it back on you home tv. How does it look?

Let us know what you find out.

Tom