I am trying to make an instructional VCD for Chinese market. Edited the video using Final Cut Pro, encoded with M.Pack and burned the VCD with Toast. The MPEG movie exported by Final Cut Pro was fine (no V&A unsynchronizing problem), but after encoding and making the VCDs, the audio is lag behind video?

Any one had similar problems? Please help.

Thanks

-- Jian Han (jhan@genaco.com), August 23, 1999

Answers

The problem could be anywhere. If it's the s/w, then it may be Toast. This is the one that cuts the final VCD, right? Another could be the video capture h/w and s/w. Capturing long stretches of video on some setups cause out-of-sync problems the longer they go on (>30mins). It's not evident on playback of the captured clip because everything starts out in sync, then towards the middle the gets more and more out of. You may be misled into concluding everything is OK if you just check the beginning. As an alternative, capture in 15 minute clips, encode to MPEG, then join these clips together. Assuming the resulting VCD is fine, the VCD player may be the one at fault. Try another VCD player. Some VCD players are notorious for out of sync video and audio, like some of the Konka models made in China (which shouldn't surprise anyone: they cost less than $100 each in Hong Kong). If this is bad you should also know that the newer Pioneer DV414 and DV717 players occasionally exhibit out of sync in varying degrees, both with DVDs and VCDs. Have a nice day.... :)

-- Emmanuel Martinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), August 28, 1999.

The problem has been fixed with Mpack 3.5.1

-- Colin Ho-Shing (bearpawNY@aol.com), February 14, 2000.