[Kevin Lacy]

I know the original question here is years old but I have spent the last three days researching and finally discovering a solution. I had a video editor give me an OMF of a FCP project in which the session framerate was 25fps (PAL — I know! Don’t ask!). The OMF contained 48K/16 Bit audio files. No Problem teher. Imported into Nuendo 3.x, dix my mixing/sweetening and exported a 48K/16Bit wav file. When this file was imported back into FCP, it slowly drifet out of sync, further and further out of sync as more and more time elapsed.

It turns out that in FCP, capture settings are independant of session settings and since the las this she had captured in FCP (for another project) was at 24fps, the wav file was incorrectly stretched by FCP because it wanted the “cptured” data to lock against a video with a higher framerate. It’s a dumb piece of software. By that, I don’t mean it’s bad, it’s just dumb in the sense that it does things without telling you and witout asking questions. It makes assumptions; usually the right ones but sometime the wrong ones. So, teh solution here was to make sure the capture settings were the same as the session settings and re-import.

Another solution was for me to take my nice original 48K/16Bit wav file mix and marry it to the QuickTime MOV file using QTPro. As long as you specifcy the same frame rate as the session is in FCP, you can import this MOV into FCP and it won’t convert anything since the MOV file matches the session settings of your FCP project. Discard the imported MOV image and only keep the audio from teh MOV file. Voila! It doesn’t do any conversion and you are back in business.

It took 3 d ays of searching for the answer to this one. Hopefully someone in my situation will find this post after only an hour of shaking their head when faced with this issue and this post will save them days of rendering and rerendering mixes and QT MOV files, trying to figure it out.

I promise, it works! 🙂

[Kevin Lacy]

It certainly won’t be perfect but you might try re-digitizing the audio cassettes by playing them from the device that they were originally recorded on (if that’s not how they were originally digitized). Cassette players can vary widely but doing this will at least get you closer to the speed it was recorded at originally. The drift will still happen but should be a bit less. You’ll still have to watch every second of every minute to make it match but you will probably have to cut and/or stretch less this way.