Properties show audio and video as different lengths?

XanderHarris wrote on 4/1/2003, 10:39 AM
I have four large mpeg-2 files (about 800 MB each) I'm trying to join and then burn to DVD. They playback perfectly individually in WMP, e.g. When I import them into Vegas, the audio comes back as longer than the video, and preview is waaaaaaaaay out of sync, accordingly. How the heck do I get Vegas to accurately read the video length (since the audio length seems to be the one that is accurate)?

And I haven't found a single joining program that can handle joining these four files. The resulting file is like 3.2 GB, and never plays back correctly afterwards. Either I can't skip ahead in the file, or when I try to, playback crashes. Sigh.

Help for this newbie with either of these issues would be great!

-Mike

WinXP with SP1
Athlon XP 2700+ XP
1 GB of Corsair DDR333
3 Maxtor 80 GB HDs

Comments

XanderHarris wrote on 4/1/2003, 12:37 PM
Here's an example of some of the specifics:

The properties for the video say 480x480x32, 00:32:33:17, format MPEG-2, frame rate 29.970 (NTSC)

The properties for the corresponding audio track (from the SAME mpg file) say 44.1 kHz, Stereo, 00:43:11:29, format MPEG Layer 2. Note the big difference in time length.

This file, like I said, plays perfectly in sync (with the audio and video being the SAME length) when played with Windows Media Player.

Why can't Vegas correctly import this file as to the video length? Any suggestions?

-Mike
XanderHarris wrote on 4/1/2003, 5:23 PM
bump! :)
XanderHarris wrote on 4/2/2003, 12:52 AM
Anyone? please?
SonyEPM wrote on 4/2/2003, 10:11 AM
Where did these files come from originally? not Vegas I'm guessing...

anyway, painful as it sounds, your best bet is to load each file on the timeline, render each one as DV avi (unedited- important) then load all the .avis on the timeline, reorder/trim/edit/resize etc as needed, then render to MPEG.

Yes this is time consuming and yes it'll take lots of disk space.
XanderHarris wrote on 4/2/2003, 2:04 PM
Thanks so much for the response, Sonic.

No, the files didn't come from Vegas. I'm doing this project as a favor for a friend, who gave them to me on a DVD as data.

If I render them as DV avi, is it going to fix the fact that the audio track shows up longer than the video in the timeline? Or is it just going to give me a rendered version of the mismatched video/audio lengths? Or are you suggesting this because the .avi files would be more "editable" in a way that would allow me to fix the property problems, perhaps? Like I said, newbie here. :)
XanderHarris wrote on 4/3/2003, 7:31 PM
bump?
SonyDennis wrote on 4/3/2003, 10:33 PM
By what ratio is the audio different than the video? Is the video 4/5 the size of the audio, perchance? If so, it sounds similar to an issue we fixed in the MPEG plug-in that will be in the forthcoming 4.0b update. It was for MPEG-2 that contained the TFF and RFF flags.

In the meantime, you can turn on "ignore event grouping" and Ctrl+edge drag the video or audio to match the one that's correct (very likely the video, to match the audio).

///d@
XanderHarris wrote on 4/5/2003, 11:32 PM
Thanks, SonicDennis, I'll give that a try! That ratio sounds close. The video is always shorter than the audio.
AFSDMS wrote on 4/6/2003, 10:23 AM
Can you check and see if the MPEG-2 uses variable bitrate? I've never experienced the 4/5 issue, mine has always been off just a tiny bit, like 850 ms, and it was constant throughout a 45 - 90 minute project.

This has happened so much to me, and in Spades for variable bitrate brought into Vegas 3, that it seemed like a given. I've always been disappointed at this happening, but have been repeatedly told that the issue seems to be in the complexity of the MPEG-2 encoding and decoding when brought into Vegas, or any other tool for that matter.

All the MPEG-2s I started working with came from a Dazzle DVC-II MPEG board. This hardware (not their low-end stuff) has stunning output and works beautifully when I get the capture tight and can go straight to DVD. Editing it is a nightmare.

My solution, and this hurts, is to render to .AVI then resync the audio track with the video track once dragged back into Vegas. Took a heck of a lot of CPU cycles for all the rendering and re-rendering, but the result was better than nothing. That workaround was for projects where the original was no longer available to me. Now I just convert directly to AVI.

Please someone, you can now tell me this a bug that has been fixed and my workaround can go away :-)

Good luck!

Wayne