HDe audio out of sync

[Murray Ferguson]

Thanks for the offer Michael. Unfortunately I’m on the other side of the planet to you. And it’s a pretty lonely place for a M100 user I can tell you. Unfortunately the dealer who sold the system to me has left the company and the new person isn’t familiar with M100. FCP rules in these parts. I think he’s doing his best though and spent several hours here yesterday trying to sort it out, without much luck. One thing I didn’t mention in the last post was that one whole bin of 30 or so clips have no audio at all on them, even though I was monitoring and hearing and seeing audio on the meters as it was acquiring. It did the same with one clip while the dealer was here. At the moment I’m replacing and reseating connections in the hope of changing something.

[Murray Ferguson]

“HD or SD?
NTSC or PAL?
What deck?
What machine control?
Embedded SDI Audio, AES/EBU, Analog?

Thanks Wick, I’m using SD XDcam material using the media100 codec 8 bit off a PDW 1500 deck. Machine control is Timecoder 100hd. Audio in is SDI embedded at 48,000hz. Video in is SD Serial Digital. Frame rate 25. Pal. Source standard is SD 720x576i 16:9. Same for media standard. Video output HDe. SDI 1 is set to SD. Analog is set to SD component. Component is set to SMPTE/EBU N10. This morning I tried converting more material and the same problem occured, though only by a few frames, and not the 22 or so of one clip from yesterday. I’ve since reconnected all the leads and the breakout box and tried again and it looked to be fine. When I force redigitize the audio on one of the previously out of sync clips now, they too seem to be in sync. So I guess I’ll batch acquire some of the faulty stuff again and see how it goes. I’ll let you know. Thanks for your help.

[Murray Ferguson]

Still no good. If I batch reacquire one of the faulty clips it appears to be fine but if I do a group of say four, then they get progressively more and more out of sync. If I capture test clips into a bin on the fly then they seem fine. Perhaps I need to discard several days work and start again. What worries me though, is that this is what I did to begin with and nothing has changed. Meanwhile my delivery date gets closer.

[Murray Ferguson]

Problem solved. A technician from a local TV station remembered a similar problem between their Avids and XDcam. He got me to turn off the Auto EE select on the XD deck. It was set to Stop/F forward/F reverse and as I understand it, was stopping on the first frame to be digitized and then not getting up to speed in time. And as the audio takes it’s que from the video, it was lagging behind. Now it works brilliantly. I hope this stops someone else going down this path. I have to say the Guys at Media 100, Marshall and Wick went to enormous lengths to try and solve the issue, as did my local dealer.