audio where there are no waves...

This is totally weird. Just thought I would ask if anyone had this problem too. I have FCP5 running on G5 dual 2 gig processor, 2 gig ram, Tiger OSX 10.3.4
O.K. here the deal. I just burned a disk and watched it and the audio was out of sync with the video. Fare enough (although I couldn't believe I would have done that on a master edit), so when I went in to look at the audio in FCP everything appeared to be in sync but played out of sync. In other words, where there were audio waves, no audio and where there were audio waves> no audio. I even opened it up in the audio viewer and where there were supposed to be audio (waves were present) there was none yet in places where there was no audio (no waves) there it was. HUGE GLITCH! I wish I knew what the problem was. To remedy this I totally removed the audio from the timeline and replaced it with the same audio that was in the browser. I should note that this is NOT the first time I have experienced this GLITCH. Anyone else had this problem?

<<<Tiger OSX 10.3.4>>>

Isn't Tiger 10.4?

You may be listening to the show wrong. If you are listening to and watching the computer and have View, External Video, All Frames selected, then the computer sound will be out of sync with the computer video.

If you are watching on an external monitor and *don't* have that selected, the external monitor(s) will be out of sync.

If you are watching an external monitor but listening to the computer, everything will always be out of sync.

Koz

I've had that problem. I use the same solution as you. I find that I seldom have it with captured video (I use Blackmagic 8Bit and NTSC-DV25), but it happens more often with CD's I capture via iTunes and bring over as AIFFs.

Sometimes a reboot will fix it... sometimes clearing out my render files and completely re-rending will fix it... and sometimes I have to delete the audio and start over. Sometimes, when I chop up a song, there are places that it will glitch even on the recut, and I find if I move the cut a measure up or down, that it won't glitch anymore.

I don't know what causes it. But you're not alone.

<<<I don't know what causes it>>>

An unstable machine can do that. Are you editing with multiple FireWire drives or crossed program versions? Do you have drives filling up? Have your repaired permisisons or trashed preferences lately? Boot from the CD and run First Aid? Just plain restart the machine? (Some of our machines don't restart for months.)

Any of these or a combination can cause the machine to jerk and lurch and drop frames, go out of sync or other odd behavior.

You can also get that if you have damaged audio files (or video files) or are trying to use MP3 files in your project. Especially that last one will seem to work now and kill you later. People who use mixed sound files (48/44.1) post here that it works just fine, but then others post that it creates nothing but troubles. Convert everything to 48 aiff files in iTunes or QuickTime Pro before importing.

Koz

None of those situations really apply to me. In fact, I laugh when people describe their system with daisy-chained firewire drives, and then ask why they're having trouble.

I use a 1TB HugeDrive RAID. Nothing screwy with my setup, so to speak. I do have one voice guy who insists on giving me MP3's, but I always convert them in iTunes before I use them in FCP.

I've had the problem mic described two or three times over a year period... I cut a lot of :30 commercials, and my audio problems were in those. The audio that gives me fits (like I said) are usually music tracks ripped from CD's, they're usually 1:00 with a cutdown in the middle somewhere. If I had an hour long feature film I would probably work harder to find out what's going on, but as it is, I'm working with a 1 minute file that's chopped down to :30 -- I find it more efficient to just delete it and start over.

Incidentially, I wasn't really looking for a solution -- it hasn't happened to me in months. Just comisserating with Mic. :-)

<<<s. Just comisserating with Mic. :-)>>>

Who we haven't heard from in hours.....

Koz

Koz, sorry dude your right...I am running Mac os 10.4.7
No I do not use firewire drives mainly due to what you are explaing. They can't keep up. A matter of fact I just bought a Terabyte Sata II raid drive. The problem that I had was not that it was LATENT or anything to the fact. The problem was having the audio in the timeline>showing waves>and playing audio where there is obviously NO waves and or vise versa. Almost like it wasn't reading the file properly. Yes, this was a imported wave audio that was supposed to match the video camera audio. Again, It's not a latency problem with linking the audio, it is a glitch that the computer/software is having with reading the material. If this has happened to you, you will know exactly what I'm talking about. If not you would be clueless to what I'm explaining. Picture this: no audio waves in viewer yet you hear audio playing.....OR, seeing audio waves and hearing nothing. Does this make sense? Anyways, I just removed the audio from the timline and replaced it with the exact same audio. What do ya know...It fixed itself. Sometime you have to play games with these computers and I don't know why?

I can hear other posters screaming to trash your preferences. The picture of the audio is a different file than the actual audio. I've haven't known many programs to get them out of sync, but I guess it's possible. If the preferences get corrupted, Final Cut could be be trying to coordinate the wrong two files, or the wrong two *versions* of the files--the picture is from two or three edits ago.

Koz

thanx for your thoughts and understandings everyone, mic