Inexplicably PD8's timeline is randomly putting audio out of synch with the video that it was captured with. I've read about this problem elsewhere on these forums, but haven't seen much in the way of answers, explanations or fixes. I did find a (sort of ) fix. Read below. So here's a rundown of my situation:

I have an i7, 4GB ram, 9800 GT vid card. Running Win7 64bit.
PD8 - Build 2704.
Camera - Panasonic HDC-TM10 - outputting HD mts files.

After having some drama with black colourboards wasting a few hours of my time (see this thread - http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/0/10644.page#47329 ) , and subsequently abandoning use of shadow editing files, I have now put together a little 7 minute video of my snow trip to Meribel in France. A link to my video on youtube is at bottom of this post. Whilst I am semi-happy with the project so far, it has been a frustrating journey, and PD8 does not inspire me with a lot of confidence if it gives this many headaches when compiling a 7 minute music video type affair. Such a pity for a program that is so intuitive, and user friendly on the surface, to be riddled with so many bugs; some of them apparently carry-overs from PD7 and earlier.

After putting together my 7 minute project and rendering it as a wmv file, I decided to re-edit the project, to alter one of the video clips - the second last one I used in the video. It was some footage of people dancing to a cover band in a bar - and I decided to use a different clip from the same song. I deleted the existing clip from the timeline, then re-dragged the full length mts file from the toolbox, onto the timeline. I then trimmed it to be left with the portion I wanted included in my video. Clip length of 20 seconds or so. At this point, PD8 went haywire; When I went to play the new clip on timeline, the audio was now out of synch with the video. It's audio now began halfway through the previous clip (which appears to have totally LOST it's own audio), and therefore all audio was out of synch for the remaining 30 seconds of the video.

My video had one audio track that had played at the beginning - but didn't feature in the last half of the video. At the point where this malfunction occured, no other tracks were in play - only the main video timeline.

I have isolated the problem as far as I can - it definitely occurs with the addition of this single 20 second clip - taken from the same mts file as the clip it replaced. I can replicate the problem over and over, as I have a saved pds file from before making the change, and every time I delete and re-add this clip, the same problem results. It is clearly a bug. Surely this type of technical issue has to be a priority for Cyberlink to sort out. Quite unforgivable for editing software!


Some notable oddities:

- When the video bar reached the end of the timeline, it stopped, but the audio kept on playing for the remaining 5 seconds of audio that.
- I tried splitting the audio from the video in the affected clips. This didn't work, as, even after removing the audio from the video clip and muting the "split" audio, I still had out of synch audio playing with my video.
- I tried deleting the newly inserted clip, and found that even with it gone from the timeline altogether, the other clips were still using IT's audio (completely out of synch of course!)
- I tried deleting all transitions from the film - but this made no difference.


Somehow PD8 was referencing audio samples from files that were not even in the timeline, or running audio out of synch with the corresponding video footage.

I finally managed to solve the problem due to some random googling and random messing with the program. Stumbled upon this youtube vid which describes a simple "fix".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHTCBdUVD8k

Basically it involves selecting all clips prior to the one where the audio loses synch, deleting them, then undoing the delete action - and somehow the problem is supposed to go away. It should be noted that the fix was supplied in reference to this same problem in PD7.

It didn't work immediately for me, but I found that by experimenting around with the method, I eventually fluked a solution. I ended up removing the final transition that concluded my video, then deleted EVERYTHING on my timeline, then undid that action, and then re-added the concluding transition. Amazingly it worked, and I managed to save and complete the project.

I'm unhappy about using PD8 for more projects, particularly larger ones, given the uncertainty I now feel about this audio synch issue - I just was lucky that I found a fix through trial and error that got me out of trouble in this situation.

Two other issues:

1. I'm also a bit perplexed by the thin green horizontal line that appears along bottom edge of screen from 5:10 to about 6:05. It only appeared when I used the FIX/ENHANCE "Video denoise" tool to improve the quality of the low light footage. Interestingly, didn't seem to affect the last clip.

2. The title screen uses a perspective scroll titling effect. For some reason I cannot seem to get rid of the diagonal black line that has implanted itself on the top left hand corner of my screen, spoiling a lovely winter backdrop! This black line appears to follow the contour of the scroll, and disappears if I remove the title effect.

Check out my video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVVKRQ4o2-c
PD8, Build 2704.
i7 860 2.8 Ghz, 4G RAM,
Palit brand 9800GT GPU
Win7 - 64bit.
Camera: Panasonic HDC-TM10 - outputs mts files.