"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.
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.
Mac OS X (10.4.3)
