DVD to Sony Vegas synch / jitter problems

[Mike Toole]

Hi all,

I'm putting together a segment using Sony Vegas 6.0. A lot of the footage I'm using is from DVDs; I'm using TMPEGEnc to rip the mpeg stream directly from the discs. Large file sizes, sure, but it allows me to work quickly.

The problem is, some (not all!) of the clips I'm getting play back just fine in MPC, but when I import them into Vegas and preview them on the timeline, they jitter like crazy and drift out of synch almost immediately.

Like I said, I'm having a hard time figuring out what the issue is because it affects some of the discs I'm using, but not all of them. Anyone got any thoughts? I searched the forum but could not find any answers, or even a vague description similar to the problem I'm having.

Thanks in advance!

[guns1inger]

They could be different framerates - some NTSC will be 23.976 fps with pulldown, some will be 29.970 fps native. G-spot can confirm his for you.

DVD is not a great format to edit without specialty tools, and Vegas 6 is probably not the best version for mpeg work either. All versions of Vegas expand mpeg to the timeline, rather than work with it as native mpeg. You could try converting the footage to either a losslessly compressed format such as lagarith or huffyuv, or a minimally lossy format such as DV. Vegas 6 will work with either of these more easily than mpeg.

One question : are these issues only present in the preview, or do you see them when you render as well ?

[Mike Toole]

The issues are present in both the preview and the final render. Actually, the 'jitter' disappears in the final render, but the audio still slides out of synch quickly. I think your 23.976 frames theory might be correct.

What would be the best way to convert the MPEG (or DVD ISOs, as I rip all the discs I'm using to ISO before editing) files to huffyuv or DV?

[guns1inger]

Virtualdub-mpeg2 and the cenocida or panasonic DV codecs, or Lagarith or Huffyuv codecs. Lagarith output is a little smaller than huffyuv, but both are visually lossless.