-
FCP Audio/Video Sync DVCPRO HD
I’ll say it up front that I appreciate any help on this matter. I’ve digitized about 12 hours of DVCPRO HD footage in FCP, in about 10min chunks, and am now organizing it. However, I have a clip that doesn’t seem to have synced audio. I’ve had the experience before where there a drift happens on import over FireWire when there are timecode breaks etc., but when I checked the Quicktime itself outside of FCP, the audio was fine.
The more bizarre fact is that when I Export> QuickTime Movie, and open that clip outside of FCP in Quicktime, the export is fine as well and when I re-import the exported file into FCP, it’s synced up.
It also seems that it’s the video’s fault, as the audio in the chunk I exported starts at the same place, but the video shuttles. Even more bizarre, is that in FCP, the in and out points are at 01:27:00:54 – 01:27:07:04, and in Quicktime the out point is at 01:27:07:05. Furthermore, in FCP it says the duration is 06:06, but Quicktime says 06:12. In MPEG StreamClip, it also corresponds with what FCP says. And when I take it back into FCP and compare the length, it’s the same. So numbers are getting messed up somewhere in there with good old QT. Oh, by the way, the footage was shot on DVCPRO HD 720p @ 29.97 and imported from a deck over FireWire.
As a side not, in FCP, the VidRate says 29.97fps, but the timecode for the footage goes up to 59.94, with every other frame out (all of the odd frames). I did have “Remove Duplicate Frames” checked on the capture.
So, ideas? Is the way I captured the footage? I can’t imagine it is because the other clips work fine. Also, I can’t recapture the tapes again, as we rented the deck, plus I obviously have a workaround if I need it. I would like to get to the bottom of this though, if it’s possible. I’ve looked around, probably not as much as I normally do due to time constraints on this, but I found that other people seem to be having similar issues and no answers, so my apologies if the magic thread exists and I haven’t found it. Oh, right. I’m running FCP 6.0.3 and QT 7.4.5 on a quad core Intel tower with 5GB of RAM. It also has a Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme. Alright, let me know your thoughts Cowmates.
-George Costakis
-
3 Replies
-
Hi George,
You are right about your observation.
But this is not a ig issue.
QT player is just that: a player.
FC is a professional video editing application and needs to manage the TC with full accuracy.
MPEGStreamclip is an auxiliary application, but very well built an able to treat the TC with the same precision than FC.
Rafael -
Thanks for the post Rafael,
QT does have it’s wonderful issues, but I still feel like the issue with FCP and the non-sync issue is no small one, especially considering the platform of which FCP runs, is off of QT. Since the post I made, I’ve found some 20 clips that have the same issue. So right now, I’m having to check each one, export the non-synced ones, and then re-import and relink the clips.Overall, none of this is a huge issue by any means because there is a workaround, but there’s obviously something going on in FCP/QT. This may be just one of those bugs that I have to write off, or that my version of QT isn’t playing nice with my flavor of FCP/OSX/The Voodoo Barbie that lives inside my tower, but my nature is that if there’s a problem, I want to find out what’s causing it and how things work to fix the problem. Hopefully, with the goal of recognizing it in the future and preventing/troublshooting things at that point. Quite honestly, this is the only thing that has kept me my job in the past.
Anyways, thanks for the input Rafael, as this was my first post and I was wondering if anyone would respond. So, cheers! For anyone else out there, any other insights/input are greatly appreciated!
-George Costakis -
George –
There are workflow issues with each and every option when dealing with DVCPRO HD. At 29.97, using firewire input, as you’ve noted you get a frame count of even numbers that goes up to 60 – because Varicams always record 59.97 fps and when flagged at 29.97 fps you are actually importing every other frame. This is more a nuisance then a problem. If you import via SDI the input card will renumber the frames properly.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up