Audio Sync prob on VHS analog to DV "pass through"

[jmolli]

I have a Sony TRV520 and I am trying to do a "pass through" capture of old VHS tapes to MyDVD 4.0. However, I am having audio sync problems after about 40 minutes of capture. By the end of a 2 hour capture (using the MyDVD "better" quality option for output to DVD) the audio leads the video by a very annoying 1 or 2 seconds. I have a 2.0 Ghz Pentium 4 Dell 4400 with 256MB DDR RAM and a 74GB UDMA 7200rpm hard drive writing to a Sony DRU-500A. I've done all of the recommended things (defrag, no anti-virus, ...). I am playing the VHS tape in a recent Sony VCR with sharpening set to off. I am kind of dissappointed in that after investing in the DVD+RW drive primarily to archive our priceless baby videos of my son to DVD that I have apparently hit upon a very common sync problem that is difficult or impossible to work around.

I am also having the same problem using Studio 8 v8.13 doing a full quality DV capture. The S8 mpeq capture drops frames like crazy making it basically unusable.

I would greatly appreciate any input on whether you (or anyone else out there) has encountered the "audio sync" problem.

Regards,

John

[Mr. Twister]

I have encountered essentially the same problem in the past using the same equipment. After hours of trolling thru this forum I have found a couple of fixes that have worked for me.
!. DVD Maestro is far superior to My DVD for authoring. It has an audio sync tab built in that has fixed many of my problems.
2. I've also used an audio editing program ie. Goldwave (my fav) for editing the audio file. Quite easy with home movies. Just cut out small chunks when need be to match up timeline with video. It is a bit of work but fixable.

[yg1968]

I had out of sync problems that were caused by the mpeg-2 encoder provided with certain software (i.e. Dazzle DVD complete and Ulead DMF). My solution has to been to use Windows Movie Maker or DVIO (in the tools section) to capture the DV avi and encode it to mpeg-2 with TMPGEnc. This has solved my out of sync problems.

[chaseru]

I had audio sync problems with a Sony GV-D200, which is a Digital 8 portable tape deck. It probably has the same dv conversion hardware as your TRV520, possibly even the same tape mechanism.

Audio sync would fail when I played back older home videos recorded on Video 8 tapes. I traced the audio sync problems to instances of signal degradation in the Video 8 tapes, e.g., video drop-outs and start and stop points of the home videos. This would occur whether the source Video 8 tape was played in the GV-D200 deck or played in a camcorder connected to the GV-D200. The sync problems would generally start to occur midway through a 2 hour tape.

My solution to the problem was to use my JVC HR-DVS2U, a minidv/SVHS deck. There was no sync problems when I transfered the Video 8 tapes to dv with a camcorder hooked up through the JVC deck.

There must be something in the Sony dv conversion hardware that looses sync upon certain video abnormalities. So this issue may not be related to the PC or software on the PC.