What are your preferred audio synch & stretch workflows & solutions?

cyro wrote on 11/12/2025, 1:32 PM

Situation: Long-time Vegas Pro user here and lately the content of my videos has shifted to longer lecture-type edits, often with a single take and minimal cuts. As a result, separately recorded audio (with Zoom H1 XLR) drifting out of synch from the video/audio (Lumix S9 or Lumix GH5/GH5-2) is becoming more of an issue.

My solution so far: has been to line up the audio track with the video/audio track at the start and then Ctrl-Drag the audio track end until it matches up again with the video/audio track. Works great but is an extra step and sometimes I'm even forced to cut longer recording sessions into multiple segments and adjust them individually. And sometimes it does get a bit time consuming.

A hardware solution during recording would be fairly pricy due to the cameras and audio recorders not taking external timecodes, so new or extra gear would be required. I'd rather not do that.

Any other and better ideas? Any plugins etc. that do that automatically or automagically? I'd love to hear what other folks are doing in similar situations, thanks!

Comments

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 11/12/2025, 3:09 PM

I tend to record concert audio to an external multi-track Sound Devices flash recorder and its audio never drifts out of sync with continuously recorded video. I don't use any fancy time sync, preferring to just align flash-audio near the beginning of a video soundtrack from an on-stage camera which is physically the closest to on-stage mics and instruments... a ptz next to a drum mic is perfect. Crystal time-bases just don't drift out of sync over periods of an hour or two unless they're misconfigured or defective. Some cameras and devices, however, use encoding libraries that are known to have sync-drift issues over time. If you see the audio track in your camera ending up shorter than the video track, just stay away from using that audio for anything important very far into the video unless you stretch it with an app like ffmpeg to a matching length... my Zcam does that but not any of my Canons or JVCs. I demonstrated a correction once for the president of Zcam but he's never cared to fix it. I don't really care either, because I relegate camera audio to audience applause and crowd noise.