Digitizing from MiniDV tapes, audio is always out of sync

[eappell]

I'm digitizing a bunch of old MiniDV tapes, which play fine in my old DV camcorder, but when I digitize them using iMovie (latest version) or Final Cut Pro (latest version), the audio is always out of sync in the final files. Has anyone seen this before, and know how to resolve this? In FCP I do check the box for analyzing the audio and fixing problems, but it still messes up the audio. BTW, I'm doing this on a relatively new 16" MBP with 8-core i9, 64GB RAM and AMD Radeon Pro 5500M (8GB) graphics. I've done this before on an old MBP and it worked perfectly. This machine certainly has the power, so I'm stumped as to why the audio is always out of sync with the video.

BTW, I'm connecting the Sony camcorder to my MBP with Firewire => TB1 to TB3 apple adapter.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

 

[ColdCase]

I often work with less than pristine video sources and one of the common issues with FCPX is it will drop video but the audio is OK and doesn't drop... so one of the two "tracks" gets shorter and out of sync. The more drops over time, the shorter the video track is and the further out of sync they become. Could the tapes you are now digitizing have degraded since you used the older machine? Its a bit of work to sync things back up manually, so I try to clean up the video before sending it to FCPX. I'm not sure how to do that with tape, however.

On the other hand, I've run into a few issues with newer OS versions. Apple is not including as many of the ffpeg libraries as they once did. Usually FCPX or iMovie will just not recognize the video, perhaps there are some cases like yours where the video/audio may be slightly incompatible. You can add the libraries manually.

Dunno, just guessing, however.

 

[eappell]

Thanks for the advice! Yeah, not much I can do about the video from the camcorder. It plays back smoothly when playing on the camcorder, so I have to assume it's capable of delivering clear video and audio.

My OS version is Catalina 10.15.6, which I believe is the latest released build. I did download the latest stable release of ffmpeg, but not sure how to get FCP or iMovie to use it - it's just a command-line executable that can be used in terminal. I'll see if I can figure out how to get FCP or iMovie to use the newer ffmpeg.

Thanks again!