Topic: Easiest file size for syncing

[kskreider]

A buddy of mine archives audio for a big festival and has for many years.  He began doing video a couple of years ago too and I offered to sync up the sbd audio with the audience video. 

It is easiest to do this if I have one long track of video and one long track of sbd audio, right?  Or should I have him chop it all up as normal and then work with the small pieces.  Please keep in mind that it potentially could be a lot of stuff as it is a 3-day festival.

tyia,

...Kk

[BayTaynt3d]

Long tracks are definately easier because you can sync huge sections in one effort -- more sections = more manual syncing. Also, if you are going to mix in any audio capped to the cam (matrix style), sometimes it helps to make sure the two audio sources are the same format -- that can help keep the sync for longer stretches. So if the cam caught 16/48, but your audio is something else, it can help to get your audio down to 16/48 in an external editor before bringing into the video timeline in your NLE.

[BayTaynt3d]

Vegas will work fine as will other high end NLE's like Premiere or Final Cut. One note of caution, if you are working from a DVD, you're going to have other complications. For starters, you'll be getting MPEG2 video, which after your done editing you'll probably have to render again, which is less than ideal -- it's kind of like ripping an MP3, then ripping a new MP3 from that MP3, two lossy's in row = not good. But you may have no choice. However, if you can get your hands on the original MiniDV or DV footage (DV in avi wrapper on PC, DV in mov wrapper on Mac), you'd be MUCH BETTER off. Second problem with working off the DVD is the audio will be seperate from the video and might be encoded into a number of different formats. For example, if the DVD audio is in AC3 format (like many DVDs), Vegas won't be happy when you drop the AC3 into the timeline (not sure about other NLE's, but may have the same problem). This means you might have to convert the AC3 into WAV or something first, which could get your original DVD master audio/video out of sync before you even try to bring in the other audio. If you are just going to throw away the audio on the DVD, then this won';t be a problem because Vegas will just let you drop the MPEG2 video into the timeline and then you can drop your "good" audio into the timeline and concentrate on syncing those two without worrying about the DVD audio. Not sure, but those are things to think about.