Cinelerra Audio Sync Problem on Ubuntu Jaunty
Everytime I try to set up Cinelerra on a new project or on a new system configuration, it takes a while to get everything working well. In my case, I have several new variables to contend with: I’m starting with HDV footage from a new camera, I have a new machine, I’m using a new version of Ubuntu and of Cinelerra.
This time around, I’ve had trouble with audio sync during playback. The symptom is that when I play a dv clip (which is fine on its own in VLC) in the Compositor Window in Cinelerra, I get a 10 second audio time lag which seems impossible to correct by nudging or setting the audio offset value.
Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to affect rendering, but it still makes it tough to edit properly. After a great deal of fiddling, I finally discovered (via a note here) that I could use the Pulseaudio sound driver in Ubuntu (select “Esound” and port 7007 in the Cinelerra Playback settings) instead of ALSA. Suddenly, my project sounded much better. The audio track was still out slightly, but I used the technique described in Secrets of Cinelerra to sync the sound using the nudge value of the audio tracks. There is additional helpful info on audio syncing here.
I was surprised that this simple matter took so much searching to solve. Here’s hoping that this post will pop up in future searches.
To summarize, if you are running Cinelerra on Ubuntu and have audio sync problems, try switching your audio driver to “esound” on port 7007 and you may be pleasantly surprised.
UPDATE: This is very weird, but the above config works fine when I run Cinelerra as a user, but NOT when I run it as root! Obviously, I’ve got the PulseAudio settings messed up somewhere, but at least it works.
Comments are closed.
February 20, 2010 - 4:50 pm
For the benefit of google I’ll add that I had a similar problem. A/V sync was horribly off… the problem turned out to be that I shot 24p but didn’t specify that to dvgrab so it captured it as 29.97…and put that in a 60p container…
the proper command for 24p HDV for cinelerra apparently is:
dvgrab -24p -f hdv -showstatus -size 800
the -size 800 limits file sizes to around 800MB because I can’t get anything larger than ~1010MB to import.
February 26, 2010 - 8:02 am
Have you try to reduce the audio buffer, in the preferences??? It worked for me.
Félix
June 22, 2010 - 12:46 pm
Thank you very very very much. “esound” on port 7007 worked for me too.
November 23, 2010 - 3:31 am
Audio Buffer & esound both improved a 16 frame sync issue for me. Thanks Felix for the Einstein moment (of course!).