Audio loses timing once mpeg clips are joined together

oceanauk · Post by **oceanauk** » Fri May 18, 2007 2:43 pm

I am attempting to join mpeg movie files together and once joined a couple of the clips have the audio timing completely out ie the people are talking ahead of the sound. Why is this happening and how can I correct it? I am using moviefactory 5. It is only on a couple of clips all the others are fine.
Thanks

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Fri May 18, 2007 2:55 pm

Have you installed all the patches and are you running SP2 (service pack2).
Make sure your "Project Settings" equal you source videos.

What type of videos are your working with, are they mpeg or another video format?

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Fri May 18, 2007 5:26 pm

If you can re-capture in AVI-DV and do all of your editing that format, your problem should be solved.

This has been an annoying ongoing problem that sometimes happens with some MPEG files.*

If you search the forum for "sync", you will find lots of discussion and suggestions. You might also try downloading the trial version of MF6. The problem seems to be showing-up less and less here on the forum... So maybe the new versions are improved.

(I don't know... I haven't used Ulead for editing MPEGs since MF3.)

I have an MPEG-only capture card, and my solution was to buy a special-purpose MPEG editor from Womble. That took care off all my weird MPEG problems! (I still use Ulead to author & burn DVDs.)

The more compressed the format, the more common these problems are. DV rarely causes trouble. MPEG-2 sometimes causes trouble, and MPEG-4 frequently causes trouble. None of these lossy MPEG formats were designed to be edited, converted or re-coded. Any modification to these files requres them to be de-compressed and then re-compressed with a 2nd lossy compression step, which degrades the quality. ...But, there is still no excuse for loss of A/V sync!

* The root of the problem may be corruption of the MPEG data-structure. I call it "sneaky corruption" because the file usually plays-back OK, but causes trouble when the file is edited, converted, or re-multiplexed. (In case you don't know about multiplexing, it refers to how the audio & video are interwoven together in one A/V file.)