Excerpts
from Ralf Mardorf's message of 2011-06-10 19:24:54 +0200:
> On Fri, 2011-06-10 at 18:57 +0200, Renato wrote:
> > On Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:58:46 +0200
> > Philipp <hollunder(a)lavabit.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > > sorry for abusing this list for a mostly video editing question,
but
> I
> > > didn't find a proper list and knew that we have some video people
on
> > > this list.
> > >
> > > I'd like to fix some videos that have partially out of sync video
> and
> > > audio, meaning that beginning at a certain point in the video the
> > > audio is suddenly out of sync by a couple of seconds. There's no
> > > constant change, the delay seems fixed once it's there.
> > >
> > > I wonder how to fix such a thing. The files are xvid encoded
videos
> > > and vbr mp3 audio inside avi
containers. I thought it should be
> > > reasonably easy to cut and move the audio (re-encode if
unavoidable,
> > > but I know it's in principle
possible without) and put it back in
a
> > > container, but I didn't
manage.
> > >
> > > Can someone recommend a program/workflow that would allow this?
> > >
> > > I tried:
> > > - Avidemux: seems like actual editing is not what this program
was
> > > written for, couldn't figure
it out, but it seems close
> > >
> > > - openshot: couldn't figure out how to separate video/audio
> > >
> > > - kino: seems to only work with DV-files, apparently takes ages
to
> > > decode the file, doesn't seem
to be what I need
> > >
> > > - openmovieeditor: I figured it might work by dragging the file
to
> > > both a video and an audio track,
but I got extremely garbled
audio
> > > output, no idea what's wrong
> > >
> > > - cinelerra-cv: Doesn't start. No error message, it simply shows
no
> > > window, nothing. Well, it does
something with the screen, but
it
> > > shows nothing.
> > >
> > > - pitivi: Doesn't seem like it can play back the video. I can
drag
> the
> > > video to the tracks and it starts to draw a waveform, I guess
no
> > > video thumbnails because of:
gst.ElementNotFoundError: pngenc
> > > Doesn't seem to be able to play the video.
> > >
> > > - kdenlive: would require me to install 30 additional packages,
> total
> > > about 200MB, no thanks.
> > >
> > > I thought it would be a simple task, really nothing fancy. Seems
> like
> > > I was wrong.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Philipp
> > >
> >
> > Hi, unfortunately can't give you a full solution, but only a hint:
in
> > mplayer with "-" and
"+" you can adjust audio/video syncronization
by
>
multiples of 100ms (maybe you cand do finer, but I'm not sure).
>
> maybe you could then somehow record the output to a new file?
Thanks Renato, I've played with that already and know the approximate
offsets, but that doesn't help much. I'm not sure screen recorders
typically can pause and resume, and even then it would be less than
optimal anyway due to the transcoding of both audio and video.
Also, to clarify, those offsets are constant but only appear beginning
at a certain point in the file, imaginary example: after 97 Minutes
the
offset is suddenly approximately -9600ms. Hence
shifting the offset of
the whole file doesn't help.
I went through this a couple of years back with pretty much the same
result. The general consensus round here was that it is not possible to
shrink a video to fit with an audio track. Instead you should stretch
the
audio track to fit the video.
I ended up using Blender to edit the video into chunks and align chunks
of
audio to fit as best as possible.
I don't understand why it is not possible to resize a video track. It
seems to me that dropping video frames is significantly easier
programatically than time stretching audio.
I've only done this with one video so far, so I don't know whether it
works fine in general, but in this case mencoder dropped a couple of
seconds that were just black anyway, so no real loss. It was a fade out
to black and I jugged down the time the moment it was black. I somewhat
wonder how it was messed up, I suspect files were put together and some
black frames were added without caring for audio, or something like
that. Anyways, there's no loss of content with this file, which was with
almost ten seconds delay by far the worst of the bunch. Ok, according to
mplayer the file is now 13 seconds shorter instead of 9.55, but who
cares as long as the result is fine.
So it seems mencoder can just drop video frames.