I'm trying to edit videos shot with a Droid 2 and with a Droid 3 using Adobe Premiere Elements 9, a very powerful editor that among other things lets you apply Photoshop-like corrections to your video.
Sadly, the editor has trouble with cell-phone video and often the time sync of the audio drifts very badly with respect to the audio. Visualize someone singing, and the audio varies from synch'ed to two seconds out-of-sync and back.
Not much luck on the Adobe forums, it appears that Adobe's codec for this sort of highly compressed VBR video does a lousy job mapping it to individual frames with good time sync. I'll share what I know, and let's see what else people have encountered.
Droid 2 produced 720x480 AVCHD video square pixel with variable bit rate up to 30 fps, with fixed-rate AAC audio at 44.1 KHz stereo. File type is .3gp.
Droid 3 produces 720p or 1080p AVCHD square pixel, VBR, same audio. File type is mp4.
Using MediaInfo I see:
- Video codec: avc1 (both Droid 2 and Droid 3)
The time skew problem shows in the preview window of Adobe Premiere Elements 9 (PE9), and shows in output rendered as AVI, FLV, MP4. This is independent of whether any edits have been applied. I have verified that the audio is correct and the video is the problem.
Incidentally PE9 picks the wrong pixel aspect ratio, so I use Interpret Video to force square pixels.
The raw video looks fine in QT (3gp files) or WMP (mpeg4) and looks fine if uploaded to YouTube, but without my desired edits. It looks fine in Windows Live Movie Maker preview, have not tried to render from there since it is useless as an editor.
Changing frame rate settings for source input (Interpret Video settings in PE9) and/or for the rendered output target did not fix anything.
I used Free Video Converter to transcode to a variety of different formats that might be more editable; Mpeg, AVI, with a variety of codecs and settings. Certain AVI versions looked mostly better in the preview but no different in the rendered output.
This should just work. It very thoroughly doesn't.
Any ideas?
Sadly, the editor has trouble with cell-phone video and often the time sync of the audio drifts very badly with respect to the audio. Visualize someone singing, and the audio varies from synch'ed to two seconds out-of-sync and back.
Not much luck on the Adobe forums, it appears that Adobe's codec for this sort of highly compressed VBR video does a lousy job mapping it to individual frames with good time sync. I'll share what I know, and let's see what else people have encountered.
Droid 2 produced 720x480 AVCHD video square pixel with variable bit rate up to 30 fps, with fixed-rate AAC audio at 44.1 KHz stereo. File type is .3gp.
Droid 3 produces 720p or 1080p AVCHD square pixel, VBR, same audio. File type is mp4.
Using MediaInfo I see:
- Video codec: avc1 (both Droid 2 and Droid 3)
The time skew problem shows in the preview window of Adobe Premiere Elements 9 (PE9), and shows in output rendered as AVI, FLV, MP4. This is independent of whether any edits have been applied. I have verified that the audio is correct and the video is the problem.
Incidentally PE9 picks the wrong pixel aspect ratio, so I use Interpret Video to force square pixels.
The raw video looks fine in QT (3gp files) or WMP (mpeg4) and looks fine if uploaded to YouTube, but without my desired edits. It looks fine in Windows Live Movie Maker preview, have not tried to render from there since it is useless as an editor.
Changing frame rate settings for source input (Interpret Video settings in PE9) and/or for the rendered output target did not fix anything.
I used Free Video Converter to transcode to a variety of different formats that might be more editable; Mpeg, AVI, with a variety of codecs and settings. Certain AVI versions looked mostly better in the preview but no different in the rendered output.
This should just work. It very thoroughly doesn't.
Any ideas?