Sony DSC-W7 Audio Sync Problem

[ScottJames]

I use the W7 to shoot in-studio live performances at our radio station; they're usually about 4 or 5 minutes long. Since the camera doesn't have an external audio input (I guess I should have checked that a little more closely before I bought it), we record the audio through our board to Sound Forge and produce a stereo WAV file.

Then I load the video into Cool Edit, line up the beginning of the stereo WAV with the mono track from the camera, and then remove the mono track.

The problem is that by the end of the clip, the audio is out of sync with the video by a second or so. I think this might be because in order to work with the video in Cool Edit, I have to convert it to AVI first; Cool Edit will load an MPG, but when I try to re-save it, I get a compression failure error. I'm guessing the MPG to AVI conversion process is messing with the runtime of the video in some way.

This also seems to happen with Adobe Audition.

Has anyone experienced this and found a fix?

Thanks,
Scott

[MJS]

It sure seems that since you are recording each track in real time, that you shouldn't have a problem syncing them up, but as you found out, that can be a problem. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer to your problem as I am unfamiliar with your equipment. Do you have a mic in on the camera? You might be able to have one of the enineers rig up an audio pad to a cable that will convert the signal to a mic level input. Shure makes an inline balanced adapter (XLR female to male) line to mic adapter. then take the right length of mic cable and change the male end to the appropriate jack for the camera input.

Good luck.