Solving audio and video syncing problems

Q I recently retired my old PC for a new super-duper machine with 4GB of memory, quad-core processor and massive hard drive in order to speed up editing home videos. A video that used to take nine hours to render can now be done in about two. However, the final result gradually goes out of sync with the audio and video. I’m using Ulead Videostudio 10 with all the updates.

I’ve done much research into why a project with only AVI video clips that are in sync in Ulead go out of sync when I try to output it to hard drive video format folders. One of the suggested cures was to make sure that the soundcard was not on the motherboard but freestanding. Is this true? I can’t see what the soundcard’s role is in rendering but please tell me if I’m wrong and I’ll happily buy one.

If I render to MPEG and then convert that to DVD format then the sound stays in sync. If I render it on my old PC it still stays in sync (though as I said takes nine hours), which suggests some problem with my new setup.

Roy Houghton

A Generally, video and audio sync problems arise because, as part of the MPEG2 encoding process, the video and audio streams in an AVI file need to be separated, or demuxed. There are a number of reasons the two might go out of sync; the question is what can you do about it?

It’s unlikely your soundcard is the cause of the problem. It’s more likely to be connected to the codecs you are using to capture the original material and encode the MPEG2 video. You don’t say what the source material is, but if you plan to edit, try capturing using the DV-AVI codec, then encoding to DVD-compliant MPEG2 prior to burning (Videostudio can combine encoding and burning in one step).