Mike Baldwin

Enjoy

2 am on Jefferson St Trailer from Mike Baldwin on Vimeo.

So I know it has been awhile since I’ve blogged, apologies, just haven’t had anything to blog about..until now…

It all started with a concert video. Yeah you’ve seen it a billion times at any major concert, every digital camera toting teen that HAS to record the song for youtube. Well I happened to have a better audio source than the wimpy mono 33.1khz audio so I thought I would sync the better audio with the poor video.

And that is where trouble began…

The original resolution was poor (320×240,) and the framerate appeared to be a weird 22.69. My intial thought was to use MPEGStreamclip and transcode to DV SD 720×480 29.97 MOV file (yes ignore the upscaling, sometimes you gotta work with what you got.) But it didn’t quite work like that. What ended up coming out was a 12 fps file which upon ingestion in FCP was shortened from 4 minutes and 38 seconds to 4 minutes and 17 seconds. So how do you edit 12 fps in a typically 24 – 60 fps FCP environment? You don’t.

Even if you were to convert the 12 fps to 29.97 in Quicktime, FCP will shorten the clip. This made the sync impossible. Although the audio would sync with no problems, the video just wouldn’t cooperate. 

Then I watched the video again. Turns out it was playing back at 24 fps. So it was as simple as converting the original AVI to a QT 24p file. The result? A perfect sync.

So the moral of the story is, don’t use a terrible AVI to edit with. But if you do, check the real playback fps, it could hold the key to success.