A/V Sync Issue in Latest XDR/nano Firmware
 

We just discovered an audio/video sync problem in which the audio slowly drifts out of sync over time and may actually get corrupted.

Therefore we are temporarily pulling the latest firmware for the nano (1.1.150) and XDR (1.1.148) from the website until this issue is resolved (hopefully tomorrow). If you have a critical shoot we recommend that you roll-back to the previous version of firmware.

We apologize for any problems this may have caused. We are modifying our test procedures to do a more comprehensive test of A/V sync in the future.

Best-

Mike, I think I might be experiencing this problem. I noticed audio out of sync for the first time since I've owned the XDR. It wasn't over a long period of time though, this was on a 30 minute recording!

I'm still not sure of the cause. I am going to do some testing RIGHT NOW. I have an important shoot coming up and I can't have this issue to worry about.

Can I downgrade firmware?

Hi Aaron-
Yes, you can downgrade the firmware, no problem. We think the problem is now corrected, but will spend today in test, just to confirm. Hopefully we can post new code tomorrow.

Sorry for the headaches.

Best-

Ok Mike, I've tested it. This is a serious issue and it's much worse than a couple of frames out of sync. I pointed my camera at the TV and let it fill up 4 cards. I took the 4th card and measured the the audio drift.

It's 128 frames at the HEAD of the card. I'd say that's a little more than a small drift problem. You should be notifying every single one of your customers about this ASAP.

I'm going to downgrade my XDR right now. I can't express how disappointed I am about this. I'd be even more disappointed if I had been working for a client and discovered this after a shoot had wrapped.

Hi Aaron-
Understood, it appears the firmware fix is working properly. Hope to release tomorrow. We are sending an e-mail this afternoon to all the nano/XDR users.

I apologize for the problem.

Best-

With all the vocal people we have on this forum, I'm really surprised that I'm the only person who posted in this thread.

Perhaps we should wait for them to get home from work first???

I'm just glad no one ruined a shoot because of this issue.

I've rolled back my XDR firmware and tested with a 2 hour continuous record and everything looks and sounds A ok.

Hello Aaron,
I posted my problem with the audio sync issue on the 29th November in the MPEG-2 Audio Sync thread. I also advised CD by email of my issue while it was a problem I was also recording to Dvcam tape as I had not proven the system works with my hardware setup. I was able to still complete my work although I would have preferred the image quality of the Nano.

Whoa Lance. I see that you did. I need to pay better attention to the forums from now on.

I've got a 10 day shoot for a short starting on MONDAY. It's a really low budget short but I can't imagine explaining to the client that their scratch tracks are really just that, scratch. They'll have to sync up their audio manually. That would not be a fun conversation and I'd probably even offer them some money back.

Hello Aaron,
I have found that the audio drift was not as bad with the prerecord buffer turned off but because the audio in channel two was intermittent and drifting at a different rate to channel one it was a nightmare to try to resync so it was quicker to re ingest from tape.

Yeah I ruined a recording the other night and I wasn't sure what the cause was. It was an ingest from tape via an AJA component to SDI. No prerecord buffer but the audio was totally messed up. I figured it was my AJA component to SDI causing the problem and it's a pain to drag all that stuff out and hook it back up to try and track down what was going wrong.

At least now I don't have to.

A/V Sync Issue Resolved
 

We passed all the A/V sync tests today with the new XDR/nano firmware. We did a number of short and long term tests. The audio stayed in sync and was not corrupted.

We have a few more tests tomorrow morning. Assuming everything passes, we will post the new code on Friday afternoon.

I apologize for the mistake. However, you will be happy to hear that HDMI pull-down removal is now working. We also added the 2:3:3:2 pull-down cadence (previously we only supported 2:3:2:3). Hopefully, we can now detect the pull-down cadence on the JVC 700 camera.

Loop recording, hot-swap and 8-channel audio are planned in the next major release.

Best-

Glad CD Was On Top of This One
 

HI Mike:
I'm glad you folks at CD were on top of this as quickly as you were. I did the firmware upgrade to this the other day and focused my testing on the new Jam Sync feature and not the audio testing. Please be advised that the Jam Sync feature is also not working on the XDR with 24 F but works well at 59.94i. I hope you folks will resolve the Jam Sync issue with 24 F soon.

Respectfully,

Dear Mark,

Thank you for the report.

We will test this today.