iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Exporting Troubles

Now suppose that you’re able to capture the video successfully, and even edit it into a masterful work of art. The big moment arrives: You’re ready to play the movie back onto the tape, or export it as a QuickTime movie, so that you can then play it for friends and venture capitalists. Here are a few things that can go wrong.

Video and Audio Aren’t In Sync

On some longer movie projects (20 minutes or more), everything plays fine in iMovie—but when you turn your project into a QuickTime movie or burn it to a DVD, the audio and video grow slowly, horrifyingly out of sync. The longer the movie plays, the farther apart they drift.

To find your solution, follow this list in order:

• The most important thing to check is the audio recording settings of your camcorder. As described at the beginning of this chapter, most camcorders come set to record 12-bit audio, which lies at the heart of the video/ audio drift problem. Change it to 16-bit audio, using the camcorder’s own menus. (If you use a video converter like the Formac Studio or Dazzle Hollywood Bridge, make sure it, too, is set to import 16-bit audio, not 12-bit.)

• If it’s too late for that step, here’s one possible fix: Extract the audio from the video (page 606). Separating the audio from the video makes your project very hard to edit, however, so make this the last edit of your project. (Or make a duplicate of your entire project folder and work on that.) Just extracting the audio into a separate clip solves the audio ...