I am converting VHS to my hard drive using a Gadmei USB TV Box UTV330. I bought DVD Movie Factory 5 but it does not recognise the TV Box, so I have to use the software that came with the TV Box in order to capture video and audio, then use MF5 to create chapter and menus, then burn with DVD Decrypter. The capturing is going ok, as is the burning, but when I played it back through mp DVD player I noticed that the sound is out of sync to the audio. I can see from previous threads on here that I might be able to use some software to synchronise them but am confused about the terminology etc etc. As my files have already been created in my hard drive, am I able to manipulate them now or should I have tried to synchronise the audio and video from outset? (I have looked at the Gadmei software but it seems pretty basic and does not give me many options) If I can change a file I already have, how do I go about doing it? All this talk about bit rates and frame rates etc really confuses me! What I would like is a simple piece of software where i can just load the video file, press a button and it will synch for me! Is that possible? I have heard TMPGEnc mentioned a lot on here. Would that help me with my problem? If so, how do I go about it? Sorry if I seem really dumb, but I am new to all this. I thought I had it cracked when I captured the image in my hard drive but during playback I noticed the sychronisation issue. As I have learned how to do chapters and menus with DVD MF5 I am really keen to get the audio/video problem sorted to give me a really good copy of the VHS tape. Any help and advice would be welcome Thanks
Get a DVD recorder! You could learn this and that, and spend the time to get to know your stuff, but if you just want to copy your tapes to a DVD a recorder is by far the easiest route.
What format is your captured video? If you are capturing to an .mpg file then you could use software like VideoRedo Plus to adjust the audio/video sync. With VideoRedo Plus go to Tools, Adjust Audio Syncronization (a small window pops up). If you want the audio to be delayed by a half a second move the slider back to -500 Msec. Hit Close then play the video in VideoRedo to see how it sounds. If you need to adjust it a little more then repeat the steps. When everything sounds OK then go to File, Save Video As, then pick a new filename for your .mpg file. Free trial version of VideoRedo here: http://www.videoredo.com/ If your captured file is an .avi file then you could use Virtualdub to adjust the audio sync.
Thanks Guys! Things are starting to make more sense. I have no re-burnt the mpg file on the best compression rate, right aspect ratio etc etc and I have done a trial smaple of adjusting the audio to sybc it but guess what happens now.... On my full length mpg file (as opposed to the trial sample) the audio is perfectly in sync at the start (it's a 90 minute film). By 30 there is a slip difference in syncing but by the end of the film it is noticeably bad. According to TMPGEnc the video file is 1:30:32:47, yet the audio is only 1:30:32:42. I have adjusted the gap and everything is great at the end of the file, but then the start is out of sync. Please can you let me know how I can get the audio and video to sync for the duration of the film, please? If you need any other info from me please let me know Thanks PS Is it normal for it to take 6 hours to encode a 90 min clip?
If the audio is out of sync by a constant amount throughout a whole file then that's easy to fix. If it's going out of sync gradually then this is a little harder to fix. You really need address this problem at the source, the capture process rather than trying to fix it afterwards on the captured file. I think the most common cause of gradual out of sync on an analog captures is from dropped frames. This means your capture software isn't keeping up and is not able to capture each video frame from the source. As the capture continues the audio sync gets and worse and worse. If you are getting dropped frames the first thing to look at is your capture device. I'm not familiar at all with the Gadmei USB TV Box UTV330. Are you capturing straight to .mpg? Does the UTV330 use hardware compression? Hardware compression is important in general for capture devices, but especially for USB devices. Without hardware compression your CPU has to do all the work of encoding to .mpg while it's saving the video to disk. If you are capturing .mpg at full resolution, then unless you have a very fast CPU and lots of memory it's going to be hard for your PC to keep up without dropping frames. Then that's where the audio starts to go out of sync. It will get progressively worse as the capture continues. If the Gadmei USB TV Box UTV330 is a very inexpensive model then there is a good chance it isn't using hardware compression and that's a limitation you'll have to live with (unless you're prepared to upgrade to a better capture card.) If you're going to stay with the UTV330, and let's just say it isn't using hardware compression, then the next thing I'd do is to free up as much memory as possible before starting a capture. No multi-tasking, shut off all background programs, disable anti-virus etc. Free up as much space as possible on the destination hard drive for the capture. If you have a second internal drive then capture to that rather than your C: drive. The next thing you could do to reduce the load on your CPU is to capture at a lower resolution. With analog captures you can still get decent captures dropping down to 352x480 or 352x240 for NTSC captures or 352x576 or 352x288 for PAL. But, if the UTV330 is a low end USB capture device without hardware compression, and you don't have a super fast PC, then I think audio sync problems will be hard to get rid of. Hauppauge makes a good USB capture device that uses hardware compression. As for the 6 hours to encode, do you mean encoding the .mpg to DVD? No, that shouldn't be taking 6 hours.
