Video and audio seriously out of alignment

kirsol wrote on 6/11/2003, 2:19 PM
I'm using VideoFactory 2.0, and I've encountered a strange problem. I have a less-than-half minute movie project that won't render correctly. The problem is the video and audio start out when they should (essentially at the same time), but the video gets way out of sync and ends up about 15 seconds behind the video.

The kicker is that the problem occurs ONLY when rendering to MPEG-1 (and possibly to MPEG-2, haven't tried it) but DOES NOT OCCUR when rendering to .avi, .wmv, or .mov. It also does not occur when previewing the movie.

There's nothing "fancy" in the movie. Just the video and music tracks, with a few textboxes.

When rendering, I'm accepting all the defaults, using no advanced configuration settings that I'm aware of.

The audio is on the music track, and it's not part of the original video recording (it's an edited .wav file). I'm not using the original audio that went with the movie clips.

By the way, I've successfully rendered other VF2.0 projects to MPEG-1 with no problems whatsoever. And nothing about this project jumps out at me as different from others I've done with VF2.0.

I'm stumped. Anyone encountered this before? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mitch Kirschner

Comments

kirsol wrote on 6/11/2003, 2:21 PM

Oops - typo. I meant to say the video gets about 15 seconds behind the audio (instead of the nonsensical "video gets behind...video").

Mitch
JohnnyRoy wrote on 6/11/2003, 3:01 PM
Just a guess but perhaps the WAV is not at the right sampling rate? MPEG-1 audio is 44K. If the wav isn't 44K, try converting it manually and see if that helps. This is just a shot in the dark.

~jr
kirsol wrote on 6/11/2003, 11:21 PM
Well, I completely mislead myself and others about the origin of this problem. The problem appears to be Windows Media Player. When I play the mpg file on another computer that has WMP 6.4.something, it plays fine. When I play it on my main computer that has WMP 7.01.something, it's all messed up. Go figure. At least I'm on the right track for getting this resolved. Thanks for the response.

Mitch
JimClark wrote on 6/11/2003, 11:46 PM
Windows Media player is up to 9.0 now
kirsol wrote on 6/12/2003, 12:01 AM
I know, I just upgraded to 9.0 - and the problem still exists! So scratch my diagnosis that it's WMP.

I suspect something is hosed on my machine in general when it comes to playing back mpg files encoded to MPEG1.

Whether it's video card, codec problem, or something else, I don't know. My workaround for now (given that time is scarce) is to test playback of MPEG-1 encoded mpg's on my other machine.

Mitch
PS - I'm \relieved (and not really surprised) to find out that VF2.0 ain't the problem.
Steve Grisetti wrote on 6/12/2003, 8:05 AM

I run three NLE programs (Screenblast, Pinnacle Studio 7 and Windows MovieMaker2) because I've found that what one doesn't do well another does.

If you've got XP, MovieMaker2 is a free download, a highl-underrated program and definitely worth keeping as a back-up. Also, since it was designed by the folks behind Windows, it works more efficiently with that OS than any program I've experienced!

You can output your Video Factory file as an AVI to your hard drive, import that into MovieMaker and then export it from MovieMaker to a WMV file. (Since your movie is relatively short, the whole process should take less than half an hour.)

The resulting WMV file uses the latest codecs and so will play flawlessly on the latest Media Player and look much better than any WMV you could output from any other NLE program!

Hope that helps.
IanG wrote on 6/13/2003, 3:02 AM
>Also, since it was designed by the folks behind Windows

I've heard more convincing recommendations ;-)

Ian G.
jlizerbr wrote on 6/16/2003, 2:19 PM
I've encountered the same problem... I think. My solution was to go into my CMOS settings and select the correct Processor MHz that was installed on my motherboard. My processor is a 550Mhz, but the CMOS was set to use a 333MHz. Just changing it to the correct speed solved the problem, plus more! I was also getting MIDI and MP3 playback problems too, but now those are gone.