Sound Synching Troubles

Blackadder wrote on 12/19/2005, 5:03 PM

I have a large video file (captured from VHS and prepared in Vegas Movie Studio) that I am trying to burn to DVD. I have tried a few times to burn it to DVD, and each time, the burn is successful - however during playback, the sound does not play at the same rate as the video. At the beginning of the DVD, the sound and the video are synchronized - but over the course of playback, the gap between sound and video widens, and by the end of the DVD, the sound is a few seconds out of synch. I have tested playback of the burned DVD on both my DVD player and on my PC, and the same problem arises in both cases. When I play the actual source video file on my PC however, the video and sound are synchronized from start to finish. Even in the preview window in both Vegas Movie Studio and DVD Architect Studio, the sound is perfectly synched all of the way through. To make things more interesting, I have also tried burning my project through Pinnacle Studio Plus v.10, and have had the same trouble - the footage is synched on my PC, but once burned to DVD, the problem arises.

It seems like it may be a hardware issue, but I can't be certain - does anyone have any suggestions?

Comments

Blackadder wrote on 12/19/2005, 5:44 PM

By the way, I have not added any chapter points at all when burning the footage to DVD - the entire footage (approx 1 1/2 hours) is contained as a single chapter on the disc. Infact, I have not divided the footage into chapters for any of the attempts I've made at burning to DVD. Does that make any difference to my situation? Would adding chapters force the video and audio to stay in synch for the entire duration of the DVD? Just curious. I'd really appreciate any help anyone can offer, because this is frustrating the crap out of me.

ottowr wrote on 12/19/2005, 10:28 PM

There are dropped video frames in your capture. This isn't noticeable when playing the captured file itself as the audio and video are interleaved and remain in sync. When DVDA splits the audio and video and re-muxes them, then there are sync issues. If you zoom right in on the clip's timeline in DVDA you will probably see that the end points of the video and audio don't line up anymore.

You may need to capture through a timebase corrector, or a better source (hard if it's vhs), or your capture hardware may be dropping video frames due to bus contention issues etc. There are better explanations around, but hopefully it'll give you some idea of what's going on.

see also http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=22&MessageID=340999

Blackadder wrote on 12/20/2005, 3:32 PM

Okay. I have done a lot of testing, and have created a sizeable number of coasters in the process - but I have come to a conclusion. The DVD burner that came with my eMachines PC is a piece of crap, and is the source of all of my synchronisation troubles. I just burned my project on a second DVD burner that I own (an external LiteOn DVD drive), and the project burned perfectly. The sound and video are in perfect synch from start to finish. I even burned my project through Pinnacle Studio Plus 10 on the same DVD burner, and it too was successful. Now I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere.