Make my home movies look less like bad kung fu

February 8, 2009 9:34 PM

Why is iDVD ruining the audio of my home movies?

I stitched together about 150 short movie clips from my digital camera into a 50-minute movie on iMovie HD (6.03). On iDVD (6.0.4) I dragged the movie onto the iDVD project panel. Everything looked great. I burned the iDVD project onto a DVD. In fact, I did it four times, because I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to do this that I wanted to send one to everybody in the family.

But when I played the DVD, something very strange happened. The audio lagged the video -- very slightly, enough to notice but not to be a big problem. Then, at about the ten-minute mark, the audio drops out for about thirty seconds. When it returns, it's the audio that goes with the video of minute nineteen. Obviously, at this point, the rest (with video nine minutes behind audio) is unwatchable. All four burned DVDs have the same problem, in the same place. When I watch the movie in iMovie, it's fine. When I watch it in iDVD Preview, it's _almost_ fine -- one thing I note is that the sound cuts out at the same place around the 10-minute mark. But if I pause the preview, then start it again, the sound comes back, and the de-syncing never occurs.

Searching for problems with iDVD audio/video desync yields lots of complaining about iDVD 08, which I don't have, and very slow drift of audio away from video, which isn't my problem. But what is my problem? I'm stumped -- and I'd really like to get this movie off my laptop and to my relatives.

posted by escabeche to computers & internet (2 comments total)

iMovie used to (but I thought they'd fixed it in v6) have problems with files greater than 2GB, which corresponds to ~9 minutes. I wonder if it's related to that? When you were pottering about in iMovie, did you join the first few clips together into something longer than that, export it, then re-import it before continuing?
posted by Pinback at 10:44 PM on February 8

Nope, I just had all the short clips in iMovie, joined them together there, and saved it.

Also, some people say that syncing problems often arise from cameras recording audio in 12-bit format; but again, that seems to lead to slow, steady drift, not the weird problem I'm having.
posted by escabeche at 6:01 AM on February 9