audio track missing on mpeg

Hi. I am puzzled, baffled and ready to give up. 3 days trying to
figure this out mostly so it won't happen again cuz of course I
didn't even know of the problem until I happened onto the psa on our
channel.

I've made a simple psa with a track of music and a track of voice
over. Also 2 tracks of video that I have the audio turned off. (I
have since tried unlinking and deleteing that audio and it makes no
difference).

Anyway...back to the problem...It exports fine to quicktime and burns
fine on a dvd. Plays great from the dvd on a TV or computer. However
when I convert it to mp2 or mp4 for TV broadcast or "you tube" I lose
the voice over track altogether (well, that's not altogether true,
there's a tiny scratchy sound that indicates there was something there).

I figure it is in FCP from the start that I have this problem.
original in building this psa my boss "fixed" the voice over in
cubase and gave me an aif, the music, which he also gave me is an
aiff. I thought maybe the lack of another f was the problem I went
back and got another copy out of cubase with an aiff extension. This
did not seem to be the problem, I have checked all my audio settings,
that I can think of, and all are at 48khz as was the cubase audio.

It just seems to me if it's on the dvd it should rip all tracks and
give me my voice!!!

What am I doing wrong? I have even tried real timing the piece in
from dvd through an analog converter and then outputting. It comes
out fine until I convert to mpeg.

So? The psa is a moot point as of Oct 6 so I am trying to solve this,
but golly, I am perplexed. thank goodness all the other stations use
leightronix and play straight out of the dvd.

Oh, I am using FCP 4.5, thank you for any insight, Darla Bayer

An MPEG-2 for DVD will have video and audio on separate files. Since you say your video DVD works fine, you probably already know this. I can't really see how your MPEG-4 would have a problem, though. When you export that from FCP, your sound should gets mixed onto the movie file.

Perhaps you are doing things backwards and using a software to extract video from the DVD? If so, your audio could be muxed with the resulting files and those won't import into FCP or QuickTime, or re-export the audio if you do further conversion. This workflow makes no sense since you're taking a huge quality hit from the video DVD conversion for no reason. If by some off chance you're doing this, don't -- export any movie files you want straight from your FCP timeline and bypass the video DVD stage. What you hear on the timeline should end up on the movie file and you shouldn't have audio missing.

Another thing: Make sure you do an Audio Mixdown (OPTION-APPLE-R) on your timeline before you export anything.


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