Audio/Video out-of-sync when editing from DVD

javaguy wrote on 3/25/2009, 1:45 PM
My chorus has a DVD that was burned by the local cable company (Comcast). It is from one of our concerts. On behalf of the chorus I'm extracting parts for youtube.

When I load VTS_01_1.VOB into a project (.vf) I can edit OK and the audio is in sync with the video. But when I load VTS_01_2.VOB into a project the audio is immediately out-of-sync with the video. The sound is about 1 second late.

Only Vegas Studio has this problem. The Windows Media Player likes the DVD and also likes each of the VOB files once I rename them to .mpeg (after copying to hard disk, of course). And the Magix Movie Edit Pro (download edition) loves the VOB files and properly keeps everything in sync.

I ask the DVD (or the hard disk directory) to select individual VOB files for my project. Or even ask for individual .mpeg files. Same result, either way.

Note that the out-of-sync occurs both in preview and in segments written to disk. And remember that the first VOB is OK, but the later ones are out-of-sync.

Am I loading the data from the DVD wrong? I click on the VOB files (Man! That takes a long time for Vegas Studio to recover from. I click on a file and Vegas goes dormant for a couple of minutes.) individually, rather than on super-index file that might be there.

I don't have access to original data streams. Comcast created this DVD from its three-camera setup (which they edited and mixed), and all I have is this disk.

This is a show-stopper for me, as I have lots of concerts with multiple VOB files.

Any clues? Thanks,
Jerome

Comments

javaguy wrote on 3/25/2009, 2:41 PM
Based on other speculative comments, I used the Magix Movie Edit Pro (download edition) to convert my VOB file into an AVI. I then loaded that AVI file into Vegas Studio. In the preview mode the audio and video is sync'd.

So my problem seems to be how Vegas Studio is handling this mpeg file.

Note that converting files into AVI doesn't seem to be an option for me long term. At present it involves my having two movie editing programs. It seems to me that one of them would be redundant.

Still looking for answers. Thanks,
Jerome.
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 3/25/2009, 4:39 PM
This problem has been reported frequently in this forum. Sony doesn't seem to care about solving the issue.
Use Handbrake (google for it) to rip your dvd to some editable format (wmv) and work with that instead.
javaguy wrote on 3/27/2009, 10:44 AM
Ivan123, perhaps you are right.

I've tried renaming the VOB file (no effect), and various playback options.
I've tried AVC to convert files and the result of that plays back out-of-sync in WMP. So perhaps my source material is funky.
Handbrake seems broken. It will turn out an AVI file for me, but trying something else tends to break. The converters take an hour+ to run on a 1GB VOB file.

Now, the Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 (download edition) works like a charm. I guess I will have to own up that buying the Sony product is a mistake.

So, I'm going to switch to something non-Sony. I won't need to trouble the forum any more. Nonetheless, thanks to Ivan123 for the advice.
javaguy wrote on 4/1/2009, 8:05 PM
So much for resolutions. I'm still looking at Sony because only it can convert a different file I have.

I tried to get my source by using the (Project, Import from DV Disc) menu option. It rapidly ate up the 73 chapters in my DVD (Comcast doesn't know what it is doing here) and put them into the project, all already highlighted. I dragged the mess onto the timeline. All of the chapters went in, one after another -- more on that.

The very good news is that all of the voices are in sync! Even towards the end of the concert.

But with the good I get some bad. The end of each chapter leaves an audio gap. The video itself is seamless. The start of the audio track is aligned properly with the start of the video track for each chapter. But the audio track is too short by about .25 seconds. This leaves a gap in the sound (bad).

I tried dragging the end of the audio to butt up against the next track, but this just ruins the video (Quicktime output).

When doing an output in MPEG-2, I noticed another effect. The first time it is played in Windows Media player it tends to play OK. The second, and succeeding time, it is played as though the horizontal hold on an old TV were messed with. All of the content is diagonal, in little bands. Perhaps the default is interlaced somehow, but why would this work the first time? The generated video says that it uses the MainConcept MPEG Video Decoder.