Sound sync issues with FCP... and weird at that.

Hi all.

Ok, recently bought a new mac pro (like yesterday) and reinstalled my FCP suite 2. In fact I had to because my last one broke and i couldn't be without a machine for 10 days (plus having a back up seemed like a sensible idea), so i put my 3 additional HDs in the new one and am using the same equipment/software from the last... which worked perfectly.

After capturing today and starting an edit i noticed that the sound on my rushes was slightly out of sync with the images. So i recaptured it, and chekced my footage to see if it was at source. It wasn't as 2 seperate tapes were the same. With the recapture, the same problem.

I then changed the sound back to the internal speakers to see if the problem was with my speakers, but the out of sync was still there.

I then looked at an older edit that i knew was correct on the old machine and it too was out of sync.

I then opened an old self contained file of a previous project. When i opened it with FCP it was out of sync. When i opened it with QT it was fine.

I then exported an extract of the new captured footage as a self contained QT file, and when i opened that in FCP it was out of sync but when i opened it in QT it was fine.

I'm stumped.

I've never seen this before. I believe i have all my preference settings correct and as before. Any ideas? Anyone experienced this? It would seem there is something wrong with FCP but what a weird thing to happen.

I run in PAL, it's a mac pro 8 core with the standard graphics card and *GB of ram which is more than enough.

It's been a very long week from last thursday when the last mac hiccuped any i earn my living through this, so any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance. Oh, i'm in the UK and off to bed soon (midnight here) so if any questions are posed i wprobably won't be able to answer them till the morning.

Jules

If it helps any, it looks like the picture is slightly behind the sound, and it's only a fraction, so maybe a frame or two.

Mine's a Kona system, and the picture on the graphics monitor is always a few frames out of sync with the sound, due to latency. They're in sync on my broadcast monitor. This is expected behavior on systems like mine.

Does that sound like it could be a clue?

The thing is, on my first gen mac pro, and my G5 before that, I never experienced this in 5 years. I don't hvae an external broadcast monitor set up (i know i should but i'm lacking room and nothing i do goes out on TV but rather dvd).

I had a thought, i also updated to all the patches the mac found online so it's running the latest FCP and OS patches.

Update:

morning

Ok, i did somew more reading online this morning in other forums and experimented with my preferences and got the following:

If in my playback output the video is set to Firewire PAL and the sound is set to Built in line output, the sound drifts out of sync (the latency from Jeff's post above).

If the video is set to Digital Cinema Desktop Preview and the sound to Built in line output then the sound is in sync.

If i set video to Firewire and sound to Firewire I get no sound... though i'm assuming this is because i don't have a deck or external monitor set up for the sound to travel through the firewire.

Now in most ways this resolves my issue (hurrah) although using the Digital Cinema setting does kind of hijack one of my dual displays. If i use the DCD - Main setting the whole of my main screen becomes the player. The File Menu appears when i hover at the top and the Dock appears when i hover at the bottom, but my normal set up (as per my last mac) was to have the Video scopes, Effects, Projects and Viewer on the left display and the player on the right opened up larger but not filling the screen.

This current set up works but isn't what i had, am used to, or ideally want. I'm also confused about setting up with this new mac has meant the same set up as before doesn't work as it did before. I have readjusted my layout so the player is back on the left and duplicated on the right full screen and i see that when you click the full screen player on the right screen it simply disappears and shows the desktop, so basically i have it working, but can anyone offer a suggestion as to how to make it work the way i used to have it, or is this the nature of the new mac pro?

Many thanks, and sorry for all the words, but sometimes when i find posts relating to a question i have and then the writer posts back later saying: ok, i've sorted it... i find that a bit frustrating, as i haven't and i could have done with knowing what they did.

Jules

Excellent post Jules

Thanks

>Mine's a Kona system, and the picture on the graphics monitor is always a few frames out of sync
>with the sound, due to latency. They're in sync on my broadcast monitor.

There's a preference in FCP for that. I think it's called "playback offset" or something. I'm in Color now, so I don't want to run FCP to check (Color can be unstable when FCP is running simultaneously). Basically what that does is that it delays the playback in the computer monitor to match the video is coming out of the Kona.



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