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“Long Frames” and drifting audio sync!
We’ve done a lot of multi camera event shooting and scientific documenting in a research group and have had a lot of problems with audio sync with FCP4/5.
This means that we shoot 1-3 hours events with 3-5 cameras and I also get hours of decument/interview material to capture & compress & archive/deliver. Most of material is minidv-sp, some dvcam.
So capturing whole tapes is essential and this fcp5’s new multicamera editing feature would be perfect for me.
Problem is that some of the material seems to be out of sync from the start and most of material seems to be out of sync towards the end of tape after capture.
Problem isn’t just playback issue, because exported lossless compression masters and compressed h.264-movs have the problem also with all resolutions.
I finally got tired of it and started to find out what’s wrong.
I found very little info about how to fix this problem, just some suggestions about hardware issues and thrashing fcp preferences and analyzing footage with “Long frame” tool.I checked lots of old projects with long frame tool and almost all captured clips had a long frame at the beginning with duration of zero frames. Some also had a long frame at the end of a clip with duration from few frames to few seconds.
Few also had a long frame at the beginning of the clip with duration of few frames. These were usually clips that were off sync from the beginning.
No clips had long frames in middle of them.
Is the problem our old minidv cameras that we use for capturing as they are not so good for shooting any more?
Can these long frames also cause audio off sync that increases towards the end of the clip?
Why this sync issue is so hard to FCP?
I’ve used about a decade avid and premiere and they never had any sync issues. -
3 Replies
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The phenomenon concerning the long frames issue was something I’ve only heard of once before, so it’s not something I can advise you on. However, if you take the time to read the link below to a previous post concerning the issue it may be of some help. This post also points to some references in the FCP user manuals, which also might be helpful.
Sorry I can’t be of more help to you, but at least this might be something for you to go on.
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=8&postid=873476
– Don
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Thanks, but I googled that thread already.
Odd, that this audio sync issue doesn’t come up more often.
Do people just capture short parts and forget about these
helpful automatic scene recognition functions?Once again apple’s documentation about long frames is a joke.
They just tell that if you get one, then you are in trouble
and should fix something.So, nothing even about what these long frames mean.
If you have long frame with duration of 5 frames, is the sync
then off 4 frames?
How about long frame with duration of zero?Have you people checked your clips with Long frames tool and
don’t have any of them?Or is this a common but not so noticed problem?
Or just one of these “we know it does not work now, so we don’t
complain or use it and will check out the thing again with next
future version”?I’ve had just a similiar experience with compressor+qmaster.
It just isn’t stable enough, so people just don’t use it and
apple’s support discussions are echoing empty.
Well maybe we get first user guide to qmaster with version 3,
it will start working with v3.5 and will be good after 4.02.
Just patience… -
Yep, just another unsolved apple mystery…
Somebody in apple’s forum suspected that the problem lies in the heart of quicktime format.
He had had problems with fcp and also Affinity and they both use qt.
Another opinion I heard was that apple has never cared about PAL sync as long as NTSC is working.
No-one of us have had problems with sync in avid or premiere and they both don’t use qt…
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