Firewire is suppose to be isochronous, meaning within the scope of your question it is suppose to guarantee no latency problems; FireWire provides a high-speed serial bus with data transfer rates up to 400Mbps or plenty fast enough for real time video.

Maybe your firewire card is using a shared IRQ?

Thanks guys!
Hey Dave,
"The sync offset is supposed to put the audio in sync. Is that not what it is doing?"
I don't know Dave, but I do know if I slide it all the way to the right, the audio plays only slightly ahead of the video; at default there's
close to a second of latency in the video.

"What device are you using to transcode the DV to your monitor?"
I'm guessing it's not relevant because I get the (exact) same results using a Canon XL1S, TVone A/D converter (like Canopus), and a JVC Mini DV deck.

Hey BB, I trust you're well on your way to recovery now?; according to System Info/ Hardware Resources/IRQs, it's on 22 all by itself (FWIW though I noticed my dual video card, an NVIDIA Ge Force4 MX440, is sharing with Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller 24D2 AND 24DE).

Thanks again guys,
Randy

The firewire might not showing any latency, but you have the computer processing the video and a camera decoding. Those both enter a delay. Otherwise, there would be no reason to have an audio offset adjustment.

Let me check mine this weekend and see how it syncs. Get back to you.

Dave T2

Hey thanks Dave, I'm not quite sure what you mean but I'd certainly appreciate you getting back to me.
Thanks again,
Randy

It may be my imagination but it seems to me that the audio lags when I first start playing on an external monitor but then 'catches up' after a short time (20 seconds or so). And I left the latency setting at the default. I didn't even know this was supposed to be a problem (or isn't it?).

By the way, that's with the computer speakers providing the audio.

Jake

I've noticed this a lot but I don't think you can do much about it.
The video and audio are going down two separate paths and get varying amounts of proessing on the way depending on FX etc. What I see is a variable offset depending on what's happening. If its only straight playback of rendered video its fine, whne the source is a WMV file it's really bad but then there's a lot of processing going on.

which audio device type are you selecting? I was having a big latency issue using the ASIO driver with a Gina sound card, it turned out I had my soundcard latency set way to small to make Vegas happy. When I increased me GSIF buffer size (it's at 2,048 samples right now)in the Gina control panel everything was happy and I could move my sync offset slider to 6 and have perfect sync. Douglas Spotted Eagle was the guy that turned me on to this solution. He also recommended trying the windows classic wave driver as my audio device type & Vegas seems pretty happy with it.

I know this is a kind of Gina-centric answer (great sound card by the way) but hopefully it will help you out a bit.

God luck
Yoyodyne

Jake is right--if you read the manual Sonic actually discusses the latency on external monitor issue. I have learned to live with it--just use my external monitor for color correction, prerendered and ram rendered fx-----

Well my problem appears to be resolved unless I jump around on the timeline several times during playback; I can certainly live with that and if I pause/start, it gets back in sync again. The solution was twofold I think; someone at another forum suggested putting my temp files on my 2nd HD (I thought they already were) which makes since. The other was Yoyodyne's suggestion (thanks to DSE); when using a pro sound card like Yoyodyne's Gina or my Delta 1010 (where you can get a buffer size as fast as 64) you need to set it around 2048 or it will be too fast. What confuses me though is on my older, slower machine I never had this problem and I never changed the default C: drive storage of the temp files nor the Delta's buffer settings of 128 samples...hmmm.
A big thanks to everyone for your help!
Contented (for now),
Randy

Randy
Glad that DSE tip helped (he is an amazing resource - Sonic Foundry/Sony should be erecting a shrine to the guy). If I select Best (full) in my vid preview settings my sync is very consistent no matter how much I jump around on the timeline during playback. If I select auto sometimes things get a little out of whack and I have to do the stop/start thing.

Hope this helps & good luck,
Yoyodyne