Audio Drift / 24PA Questions
 

I just captured a 40-minute tape (as all one big chunk of video) off my XL2 and was surprised to find the audio was wayyyyyy off. Sometimes on a really long tape it's off by a few seconds or up to a minute or so... but this time it was off by about 7.5 minutes... the audio starts about where it should - as far as I can tell.. but when I watch the video track, the last 7.5 minutes are black as the audio track continues with audio that should've been playing during the video track.

After two hours of tinkering, I couldn't manually sync the sound (no slate or loud noises - just a lot of dialogue).

I shot in 24PA and captured with the 24PA pulldown removal... (i notice when I do this... clip/timeline/etc settings still say 29.97 fps... shoudn't it be 23.97 fps? or 24?) Is this part of the problem?

I have quite a bit of footage like this that I'll be capturing in the future and I want to make sure I understand the problems here so I can get everything right later on...

Get used to it. I shot a feature with the XL-2 and any time I captured over 30 min via firewire, most of the time the audio is out of sync.

I had to re digitize 34 hour long tapes.

So your work around options are as follows:
1) Break up the clip while digitizing
2) Use a DV deck to transfer the tape via firewire (if you shot 24p your frame handling will still be processed!)

Hope this helps and I know your pain.

-C