[Joshua Engel]

You are doing something wrong then.

I record at a dance recital. I record the audio from a mixed board and sync it to the camera audio. I like to not stop recording so I only have to sync once (I do stop for intermission – so twice). This means on average I have 90 minutes (or more) of continues shooting for each half of the long recitals.

The audio syncs up 100% exactly. There’s no creep at all. What you are likely experiencing is again those goofy file splits that people seem to keep forgetting about. If you record something and there’s not a lot of audio or movement during the moment that split happens – you may not notice it except for that your audio (which won’t have the same split going on) no longer matches up with what your camera recorded past a certain period of time. [Whenever you hit that 4GB file size your audio will then be off past that point]

Of course it will match up at the beginning just fine. Try concatenating your video files into 1 file and see if that solves your issue.

Of course I have no idea how you are recording your audio, but more than likely that’s not the issue.

[Joshua Engel]

Yes, I should have got the 4GB file correct. I should have my computer science degree revoked.

Thanks for cleaning up my post. I didn’t even know I could use Vegas to pull in a single large file, I always end up just concatenating.

Whenever I see new users especially with the HMC40 my first reaction is to always tell them about the file splits. Your software is not broken and your camera is recording everything, and there is no drop out.

[Joshua Engel]

One more item of note that you’ll want to be aware of if you’re shooting long (LOOOONG) shots which if you’re filming football you might end up doing. There is a bit of an odd quirk that happens at least with the HMC40, it splits the files with each file being I believe 2 GB in size. Now if you go into your editing software and notice that there is a hiccup or a bit of a ‘dropout’ or stutter that happens, it’s likely because of these file splits. It’s only because the video and matching audio are on separate sides of the split.

If you’re fine with a little windows command line, there’s a simple way to join all these files together. Open up a windows terminal, change directory to where all your .MTS files are, and you can run this command to join them all into one file called output.MTS.

copy /b .*MTS .OutputFile.MTS

(/b means binary copy, the .*MTS defines the input as all files ending in .MTS, and .OutputFile.MTS defines the output file name for all the individual MTS files to join into)

Now there are other utilities to join the files, I do believe, and some video editing software will handle those ‘splits’ in the files gracefully. However if you run into any issues, just join them all together into one big file and it should solve the mystery and problems associated with shooting long shots.