Can capturing DV cause out of sync audio/video?

[DigitalMan43]

I am capturing my old 8mm analog tapes to burn to DVD. My setup is I use my new Sony TRV-22 MiniDV camcorder's analog pass thru capability to convert the analog video from my old 8mm camcorder to DV format on the computer.

My problem is that after I capture using Pinnacle Studio 8, if I view the resulting DV format AVI file, the audio and video is just ever so slightly out of sync. It looks like a Kung Fu movie. There are not too many scenes on my tape of people talking, but when there are the lip movement is just barely out of sync with the sounds. When I view the source 8mm tape on my old camcorder, they are in sync. So the problem seems to be somewhere between the source analog camcorder and the captured AVI file.

Any suggestions on what to try? I've been reading about many sync issues with Studio 8, so tonight when I get home I am going to try capturing with DVIO or DVapp to see if that fixes the problem.

However, my question is does the capture program really matter when capturing DV video? I thought that with DV it's not really capturing, but simply transferring the DV data across the 1394 interface. If this is the case, then does the capture program even matter? Could the capture program cause a sync problem?

Thanks,
DigitalMan

[cooel]

You are correct that digital video via a firewire port is a transfer, not a capture. As a transfer the audio and video are locked together and can not go out of sync. Well so much for theory as I also am having very slight sync problems, from a JVC digital camcorder and I am using Adobe Premiere to transfer. The error is very very small, but consistant thoughout the length of a 60min tape. I am going to do some tests to try and find out what the cause is, but I shall also watch this post in case anyone can shed some light on this. If I figure it first I shall post here, so watch this space.

[Keith Wiebe]

I was having audio sync problems too transfering older Hi-8 tapes with my Sony digital 8 camera and here's what I did to solve it. I was using a Canopus Raptor card to transfer the video into the computer using what Canopus calls avi reference files which are mulitiple files of up to 4 gig each which allow an unlimited time to be captured as long as you have hd space. Well, I found out that if one tries to capture too long of files (I'm running win 98se btw) that the audio will go out of sync. The fix was to capture in less than 9 min sections either using rev avi files or not (again a 4 gig limit) and edit them in Ulead mediastudio 6.52 and create an mpeg file within Ulead and burning with Ulead MovieFactory 2.12 and all is well now. Trick is to not capture all at once (like you could if you had a generic firewire card with Win XP). I have captured a hr of dv video and edited 2 together on the timeline and all was in sync fine when outputting to dv tape again but with older analog recordings, there are too many corrupted files causing audio sync problems. I'm even limiting myself to 1 hr on dvd at the highest quality settings with 2 mpge files so I can get past the 4 gig mpeg file limit with Win 98. I also have good success increasing the contrast and color saturation to more match the original tape. If you don't increase contrast the picture will look washed out unless you're using tmpge and check the YUV box. (forget exactly what it's called)