[Tom Meegan]

If you are capturing to a firewire drive I would get a pcmcia fw800 card to keep the deck and the drive on separate buses. I would not suggest capturing to the system drive.

Best,

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

If your timeline is on the right hand monitor , drag it up and then to the left until it is on both screens.

Any luck?

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Monitoring is relative

[Tom Meegan]

If you were reasonably happy with the work as you viewed it on the NTSC monitor through firewire, and then unhappy when it was recorded

[Tom Meegan]

AJA and Black Magic Design make products that will allow you to capture SDI out of the digi which will preserve the quality. Take a look at their web sites if the budget allows.

If you need to use the DV converter because of cost, just take one of the composite video outs and the analog audio outs from the digi machine to the converter. You will need a BNC to RCA adaptor for the video and XLR to RCA adaptor for the audio. If you need to capture four channels from the digi you will likely need to do it in two passes.

You will take a quality hit. How much is acceptable depends on the context

[Tom Meegan]

I came across this recently, and thought this might be a good time to share it…

https://www.paudio.com/Pages/learning_Moulton_So_Ya.html

It is not directly on topics, but it helped clarify my thinking on the nature of education.

I understand what you are saying about bluffing and hoping for the straight that comes down the river.

Sometimes jumping into the deep end of the pool is the only way to learn how to swim.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

It is likely that you are dealing with “unlocked audio.” If my answer below rings true at all, you should read this link for a deeper understanding of what might be going on.

https://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-tech.html#LockedAudio

It sounds like the tapes in question were shot with an inexpensive camera, and that the audio rate might be a bit different (unlocked.) Right click on the clip in the browser and go to Item Properties > Format. Aud Rate should be 48.0 KHz. I’m going to guess it is close but not quite

[Tom Meegan]

The first thing to isolate when troubleshooting lip sync is your monitoring. You need to make sure your monitoring is true.

I assume you are playing back from the time line. How are you monitoring the audio and the video?

If you connect a fw cable to your deck (or camera) then monitor the outputs of the camera for both audio and video you can be sure that this is not the issue. However, in this set up the video in your canvas could actually be slightly ahead of the audio and video coming from the fw connection.

If this is the problem go to Help > Final Cut Pro User Manual and search frame offset. You will get the idea in just a few pages.

If you are monitoring correctly…

Is the lip sync problem consistent, or does it drift? Capturing very long clips from inexpensive camcorders can create a noticable drift in lip sync over the course of the clip. It starts out fine but gets worse as you go along.

This issue has been discussed quite a lot on the Cow and a search would bear some fruit. You will also learn some of the hows and whys of this issue.

Your solution, if sync drift is your issue, will depend on your deadline, how far along in the project you are, and how complicated your edits were.

If you are very early on, I would re-capture and keep your clips short (under five minutes.)

The other solutions get a bit involved… you will either discover them in your search or you can come back here with more information about your situation.

If your whole video is out of sync consistently and you captured from a DV device, I would strongly suggest that your monitoring is suspect.

The sure test is to output to a dvd or a vhs and play it back on you home tv. How does it look?

Let us know what you find out.

Tom

[Tom Meegan]

Hi Erik,

If you get an out of sync message on the time line, Right-Click (or Control-Click) on the red marker and choose the appropriate solution. If you are not sure, experiment. If you don’t like what you see, Command-Z to undo.

Is your video out of sync with the video even when it is not reportedly out of sync in the time line? How are you viewing your video and listening to you audio? Where is your footage acquired from? I’m not sure that I know what fs48K is.

Sorry about all the questions

[Tom Meegan]

Panasonic Vari-Cam vs Sony HDcam. There are several flavors of Sony HDcam, so this comparison is not really possible with the information given.

Digi has fewer lines than HDV, but most of the information in HDV is virtual