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Vegas 15 audio/video sync problem with h.264
Hello all,
I only work with occasional video projects, I’m mostly an audio guy. I do have licenses for Vegas 12 through Vegas 15. (pro) In the last week I’ve been working with a simple project replacing the audio on some single camera footage with my own recorded audio.
I was initially using Vegas 15 for the project and found to my dismay that when I simply imported the h.246 video that the camera’s own audio was out of sync with the video. (I usually use the camera audio as a reference to line up my own audio) If I just played the video I was trying to import with Windows media player or the Media Player Classic that comes with the K-Lite codec pack that the sync was perfect. When I imported it into Vegas 15 the audio was ahead of the video by up to 1/2 second. I could align it by eye (I shouldn’t have to do that) but often when I did that, Vegas would lock up. I had it in full-screen mode, couldn’t close its window, and couldn’t make the task manager visible to kill it, so I had to do a Windows restart.
I went to the Magix site and noticed there was a newer build than mine so I updated my installation; this made no difference.
Out of curiosity I tried the same import with my older installation of Vegas 14 and to my surprise the audio/video sync was now perfect. I wonder if Vegas 14 uses a different codec for h.264 files?
Anyway, sorry for the lengthy dissertation. I wonder if anyone else has seen this and I wonder if its fixed in later versions of Vegas. Since the files I’m trying to import play fine in media players, if there’s something wrong with them its not obvious. Is there an easy way to check h.264 files (mp4) for integrity?
Thanks in advance,
–Bill
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5 Replies
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Hi Bill,
The problem you see is very common with later versions of Vegas (15-18). Starting in V15, Magix introduced a new decoder dll, named S04compoundplug.dll. The new decoder was designed to decode newer camera formats and is evolving to this day. The audio sync problem was very common, especially for certain camera footage including GoPro clips. To use the same decoder that is used in v14 named compoundplug.dll, you need to open the Internal tab under preferences and search for “so4”. To see the Interenal tab, you must hold down the Shift key when clicking on Preferences. You will see 4 entries. Just select the entry of choice (probably the AVC entry) and enter FALSE into the value. Doing so will enable the older compoundplug.dll which is pretty much the same as V14. To confirm and see which decoder is being used, right-click on a timeline event and select properties. Then select the General tab. Scroll down to “Plug-in” and it will show what decoder is being used. Hope this helps.
Wayne
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Hi Wayne,
That’s pretty amazing. Its also amazing that Magix has let the problem persist through V18! I’m glad I’ve stopped upgrading, I don’t do enough video work to make it worth the money.
I followed your very clear instructions and now everything works like it should. I never would have got there on my own. I didn’t know about holding <SHIFT> while hitting Preferences to expose “internal” options. Did you figure that out yourself? Nice work!
The other thing I noticed is that the preview is much smoother, it was jumpy before, and I no longer seem to get the frequent Vegas lockups when moving the audio clip.
Thanks again so much!
–Bill
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Hi Bill,
Glad to be of help. No, I didn’t learn the Shift-Click on my own. It’s fairly common knowledge.
Wayne
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Also, accessing the internal settings now in Vegas 18 is slightly different. ” pressing the shift key while selecting options“….. Well i should hope they iron out this decoding issue with some camera output soon, So its not really that Magix had let the problem persist throughout.
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Its interesting that this issue only seems to happen with *some* camera output files. So some h.264/AAC mp4 files work fine and others trigger the problem? In this case, the amount of sync error varied among several files but was always there to some extent.
Are the problem files are bad or is it an issue with the decoder?
Is there a way to analyze the mp4 files that would point to the problem?
–Bill
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