First of all, the length of the Firewire cable has nothing to do with it. I've also never heard of the "well-known 2-frames thing."

How are you judging the audio/video sync? There should not be any audio/video sync issues induced in the Firewire transfer.

It is possible that the audio delay is acoustic rather than electrical. If your microphone is any distance away from the source, there will be a delay in the audio relative to the video. Light travels close to 186,000 miles per second, but sound only travels at roughly 772 miles per hour @ 72F or 22C degrees. This is about 1.132 feet per millisecond. If your microphone was 33 feet from the source, the audio would be delayed about 1 NTSC frame relative to the video. 66 feet = 2 frames, etc. This usually isn't a problem since humans have always had to deal with the visual/aural discontinuity. You see the firework explode or the lightning bolt before you hear it. It is only when the audio arrives before the visual that we sense something isn't right. Unfortunately, this happens a lot with digital television since the audio and video may have passed through different devices along the way which induce different delays. The trip from your camcorder to the computer is not going to be one of those instances.

I had a sync problem recently cutting some fast paced video to music. I wanted the cuts to all happen on the beat, and I found when I rendered that they were all off a little.

To solve the offset, I looped a bit of playback that had an obvious drum hit that I could also see in the Peaks display in the audio track. Then, like a drummer, I tapped the space bar when my ears heard that drum hit. the cursor stopped and i could see that it was a few frames off the peak displayed.

I went into Options / Preferences / Audio Device / Advanced / Interpolate Position and adjusted the slider and tried again. After a few tries I got the cursor to stop exactly on the drum hit.

Subsequent renders showed the cuts right on the beat.

In my case, I noticed a significant difference on my external monitor when I switched from Vegas 6 to Vegas 7.
My solution was to go Options - Prefs - Preview Device and change the "Sync Offset (frames) " to the max setting of 12 frames (default is 4 frames).

Mike

For me, this just started. All of a sudden it happened. have had no sync problems since Vegas 3! yes, I have unlocked the clips and set them off until they sync, but I'm looking for a solution because I shouldn't have to do this. I use either the mike on my camera or a lapel mike plugged into the camera. Both out of sync. As I said, everything was OK until a month ago and the only change that I can remember is buying a longer firewire, which is why I asked about it.
I'll try changing the preferences on Sunday and we'll see if that works. If anyone has an idea, it's appreciated.
Thank you,
Burt