I just finished my latest video project, which is an hour and 25 minutes long. The video was captured from a Canon HV40 using HDVSplit, and imported into multiple subprojects (about 30 of them). I exported each of the subprojects as MPEG2 files, and then imported them into the master project. There are no audio tracks from any sources other than the camcorder.
I finished the project the day before yesterday, and burned it to a DVD. After watching the DVD, I found a few things I needed to tweak. I added a couple of dissolve transitions in the master file, moved three of the scene markers by a couple of frames, and made two minor changes in subprojects, which I then exported to MPEG2 files and re-imported into the master file.
As I was reviewing the files I had re-imported, I noticed that the audio was out of sync with the video by about 5 frames. I reviewed the newly created MPEGs on my hard disk, and they were fine. When you import a new file to PRE7 with the same name as a previously imported file, PRE7 does not index and conform the new file. (Apparently, it goes by the filename, and assumes it's the same file.) So I deleted the new files from the master project, renamed the MPEGs, and re-imported them. It indexed and conformed the new MPEGs but, when I played them in the timeline, the audio was still out of sync. I defragmented the disk, rebooted, and tried again, with the same results. Then I tried reviewing some of the other MPEGs in the project and found the audio to be out of sync throughout the project!
I checked the DVD I had burned two days ago, and the audio is in sync in the DVD. So the sync issue in the master project occurred after burning the DVD.
The tweaks I made to the project after burning the DVD were pretty minor, so I could just use the DVD I already burned to make copies, and forget about the minor tweaks. But I've committed to break it out into 12 episodes and upload them to YouTube. So, unless I can fix the sync problem, all of the YouTube episodes will have the audio out of sync.
I'm burning a new DVD now in the hopes that the sync problem is an anomoly in the editor and won't show up in the DVD, but I think that's probably a vain hope. The next thing I plan to try is unlinking the audio track from the video track in each individual clip in the master project and moving the audio tracks by five frames to sync them up with the video tracks. This does not seem like a good solution, as it doesn't address the underlying problem, and might actually make things worse. But I don't know what else to do.
Has anybody ever experienced anything like this? Does anybody have any suggestions on how I might fix it? About half of the video is interviews, so it's very noticeable that the sound doesn't sync up with the moving lips.
Thank you for any help you can offer!