It's clock drift, not sample rate. Vegas handles the latter automatically.
I don't like any of the artifacting that occurs with time stretch.

A lengthy, but effective process, is to break the external audio track into ~10 minute chunks. Make your cuts ONLY in quiet areas, and precisely at zero crossings. If you don't know what this means, look it up. It is critically important. Then lock the reference track and use Pluraleyes to precisely sync each chunk. Once mixed, if you can detect mini-gaps (you shouldn't), you can add a little copied ambience to fill. If there are little overlaps, they will crossfade automatically.

Problem solved, no artifacting.

Yes I have tried doing that. unfortunately 10-minute segments won't do it. There's something else happening.. It gets out of sync in a few seconds and between words. The phrasing is goofy. Get a word in sync and the next one occurs before it should. I try stretching a short segment and discover the spacing between words as well as the words themselves are unmatchable. I think this is real strange.

Since I haven't noticed artifacts when I stretch it, I was thinking about going between house sound, on camera recording, and ambient which on this 90 minute program is going to be a lot of work. Fortunately, this isn't a ballet or I'd just be screwed. Lessons learned: Next time I'll provide my own recorder.

Thanks,

"Lock pitch to stretch". Let me try that

Lock Pitch to Step. Where is that?

That's bizarre Rick. I've never heard of anything going out of sync in a few secs. To be moving at that speed, surely it sounds like the wrong pitch? When I used to use a mini-disc recorder, I'd do similar to what MV10 suggests, but even that would sync for maybe 30mins at least!

Have you tried syncing in anything else other than Vegas?

Arthur, I have premier but I don't know how to use it. Should I start the learning curve now? I think I'll muddle through. too bad too. the audio sound great its just impossible to match.

Sounds like the board op who recorded that for you had some form of "skip silence" feature enabled. If that's the case, there is nothing practical that will fix it for you afaik.

"Lock pitch to stretch"

Right-mouse-button click on the audio event and choose Properties. In the properties window choose a time stretch / pitch shift method and then various options & parameters appear. "Lock to stretch" will be one of them.

"It gets out of sync in a few seconds and between words. The phrasing is goofy. Get a word in sync and the next one occurs before it should."

I wonder if the house recording used something that automatically edited out quiet gaps.

I'm wondering if that might be the case. I'm trying to sync it word by word. It doesn't help he's speaking in Nez Perce. Using 'elastic' and 'lock to pitch' seems to help.

All is not lost and I'll get this done. I've learned my lesson. Why do lessons always involve a certain amount of suffering?

well...I think I found the problem....

My young helpful friend has been recording every performance and there's been five of them. So what are the chances he simply gave me a recording of the wrong performance? Pretty good I'd say, and that would explain pretty much everything.

Now I'm thinking this is not a technical issue. Thanks for the help.

Reminds me of the arts school principal who tried to salvage a miserable, but expensive production of "West Side Story" by combining video and audio tracks from three separate shows. Of course, the result was worse than any single performance could possibly have been. Moral? He eventually resigned his job.

Rick Kersey: Pretty good story, I'll bet that's what happened.

But it IS possible to laboriously paste together an audio track from another performance. Several years ago, I recorded a local choir performance of the Durufle "Requiem" with a dozen musicians. Then, about two months later, I recorded the same choir in a different venue but this time only with a wonderful pipe organ accompaniment. I debated which performance to burn to CD, finally realized that I could use both by regarding one as the master and cutting up the second one every few seconds and stretchng/shrinking to match. I used the "Elastique" utility which can do its magic without objectionable artifacts. The results were remarkable--really, really good. An 80-member choir complete with great accompaniment and pipe organ.

By the way, this was syncing two audio tracks. It would be much harder, in my opinion, to sync different audio to just video of spoken parts--the lip syncing would probably drive me insane.

Yes, and in this case parts of it are in a native North American Indian language.

One way or another I'll make it work. Took a while to figure it out. You'd think it would be obvious.

From the sounds of it Rick, I'd bet you're right. No wonder you're trying to do the impossible LOL :-)
Has he got the right one left?