audio skips on export to DV, AVI

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wade G. Pemberton
  • Start date Start date
W

Wade G. Pemberton

I took the same movie mentioned in the earlier thread and tried to save
it back to the Sony TRV900, which resulted in a fine quality video with
audio that skipped and popped across the cuts as mentioned in an earlier
thread on here. I have around 15 cuts, and a noticible skip on 3 of
them, with the rest being smooth. I can't see any difference in the
offending cuts and those that don't pop, and the audio stream is one
continous song without any editing in the audio track.

I took the hint of someone on the thread, and tried to first save the
movie as a complete .AVI file. However, this also resulted in a skip
over two of the cuts, but not the same cuts as produced the problem for
the output to DV tape.

Has anyone successfully solved the problem of sound skipping when using
MM2 to save to DV tape? Is it a function of my computer speed, or is it
indigenous to MM2? Is there a setting I should adjust, or a crutch to
work around the problem? Is there some clue, since nowhere near all
the cuts produce the problem, and there don't appear to be any
transitions or video effects in play either.

Help? Ideas?


Wade
 
This may happen if you use a low bit rate MP3 audio file. There is one work
around:
- Try to publish your movie to WMV first. Choose the highest possible
quality (720x480 NTSC)
- Then import the movie you just published back into Movie Maker, add
the it to the timeline, and publish it to tape.

This should work.

- Olivier
 
Olivier said:
This may happen if you use a low bit rate MP3 audio file. There is one work
around:
- Try to publish your movie to WMV first. Choose the highest possible
quality (720x480 NTSC)
- Then import the movie you just published back into Movie Maker, add
the it to the timeline, and publish it to tape.

This should work.

- Olivier
Click to expand...

This is not true. I posted a thread about 3 weeks ago saying that I get
this problem with all types of audio file. The worst offender was a high
quality .wma file created from a CD via Media Player 9. When I replaced it
with a lower-quality (160Kbps) .mp3 file also ripped from the same CD the
problem was still apparent but greatly reduced.

I will try that workaround that you mention to see if I get any improved
results, but I imagine that I'll get a noticeable loss of quality by putting
the production through several levels of encoding/decoding. However, since
the final target will be mpeg2 on DVD I *should* get away with it.

Jake
 
Olivier said:
This may happen if you use a low bit rate MP3 audio file. There is one work
around:
- Try to publish your movie to WMV first. Choose the highest possible
quality (720x480 NTSC)
Click to expand...

As mentioned above, I did that. I used the MM2 setting for best replay. It
still skips on the audio during replay, but at different cuts than when saving
directly to tape.
- Then import the movie you just published back into Movie Maker, add
the it to the timeline, and publish it to tape.
Click to expand...

This won't work if the new .WMV movie has skips in the audio, which is the
case. They'll just propogate to the tape.

Thanks for the suggestion, but we need to find the reason the audio is skipping
in the first place.

It is possible the MM2 software is just plain flawed, but then everyone would
have the problem, and either I don't see that in the threads. More likely is
it only fails under certain conditions, and if I avoid the conditions, it'll be
okay.

I don't know how MM2 handles audio that was on the original video, vs a song
track just layed into the audio timeline. What I want is that the original
audio be completely ignored, and the song track to be the only audio in the
final version. No mixing, adding, summing, etc.

The audio on the original video is mostly silent anyway, with an occasional
clunk or squeak from the equipment, as it's taken underwater. Hence I'd not
notice any mishandling of it, and haven't done anything, settings wise, to
inhibit it. I just put the desired song into the audio track. MM2 might
be hiccuping trying to sum the two audios, instead of just playing the song,
which is what I want. It would seem impossible to screw up the soundtrack when
it's just one continous song, but the skips are obvious, and reported elsewhere
on here too.

Ideas?

Is audio skipping a common problem with users, just accepted by the users, or
is it some exception or setting condition that needs to be ferreted out?


Wade
 
You are not alone.
This bug affecting the save to dv-avi function of MM2 is well known and has
been very often reported in this newsgroup.
 
MM2 might
be hiccuping trying to sum the two audios, instead of just playing the song,
which is what I want. It would seem impossible to screw up the soundtrack when
it's just one continous song, but the skips are obvious, and reported elsewhere
on here too.
Click to expand...

I found the mute button for the native audio clip, also zeroed the volume of each
clip, re-rendered the movie to DV-AVI, and got 3 audio skips, this time in
different places than the original skips. I'm concluding the software just
doesn't handle the audio all that well in any form except WMV, and the WMV form
used just isn't readable by enough users to make it useful.


Wade
 
I agree with your statement that it only happens under certain conditions. I
haven't experienced it.

I'm still collecting info and clues - and putting them on the Problem
Solving... Audio Issues page.

PapaJohn
 
Thanks for the feedback, it is definitely something that we are going to
investigate deeper. You should not see any quality difference if you choose
the best profile. If you feel more confortable, you can also create a custom
profile that is close to lossless. But again, the quality loss should not be
noticeable.

- Olivier
 
I'm still collecting info and clues - and putting them on the Problem
Solving... Audio Issues page.
Click to expand...

I was seeing skipping with every audio format I tried, but only during
2 transitions within a short movie. Finally I gave up and did a 2
pass creation of the movie. Using a copy of the completed MM2
project:

1) Remove the audio/music track
2) Save movie as DV-AVI (has audio from video clips only)
3) Restore completed movie project
4) Delete all video clips
5) Import movie saved in step 2 as one video clip
6) Save completed DV-AVI (has video and mixed audio)

This seems to work with no loss of quality and no skips. Apparently
its doing the audio mixing and video transitions at the same time
that's buggy.

-Philip
 
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