I recently ran into some A/V synchronization issues with Womble MPEG Video Wizard, which I had never experienced before. By trial and error it appears that I also may have found a "work around" for these issues. LS please provide your comments if you wish. Here are the details:
I have been in the process of transferring 8mm home movies from previous vacations (mostly national parks) to DVDs. All of my previous videos have been about 2 hours in length (using 2 hr. 8mm tapes as source) and I have found the MPEG2 encodings (352x480, using ATI-AIW 9000 Pro & MMC 9.03) to be about the right size to put on single layer 4.7GB DVD blanks. Using one of the nice features of MPEG Video Wizard, I developed a "The End" title transition that I have been using at the end of all of my edits. As I have gotten better using MVW, I have also been using more simple fade ins and fade outs between scenes as well as fairly extensive use of the sound line editor (for ex. to dampen background automobile noise from footage taken from near the road). This has always appeared to work well.
While recently working on a total of 6 (approx. 2 hour) videos from a previous vacation, I decided to break up some of the videos for better distribution for authoring, etc., so I made some preliminary exports from MVW without the "The End" title transition. Not expecting any problems, I went ahead and performed all "editing" (fade-ins/outs and sound line edits) for all videos prior to breaking them up. I noticed on practically all of my videos that A/V was out of sync by about 1 second (very noticeable). Very perplexed and disappointed (as I had spent many hours "editing"), I wondered how this could be. Not wanting to "start from scratch" with re-editing, I tried several ways to try to fix this (as MVW does not have an A/V "slider" function like VideoReDo where you can pretty easily fix A/V sync issues). I ended up finding that temporarily adding my "The End" title transition to the end of all of my preliminary exports appeared to fix the problems! Therefore it appears that when you fairly extensively edit a video/clip with MVW you can (and probably will) create A/V sync issues, but apparently adding a temporary file/clip/title to the end prior to exporting (and then cutting this file/clip/title off before a final export), it appears to fix the problems (apparently locks the sync back in from the previous drift).
Note: I am using the Dec. 22, 2004 release of MVW. I have noticed from
http://womble.com/update.mvw/index.html that there have been a couple of later releases, but per review of the release notes, there do not appear to have been any recent bug fixes for A/V sync issues.
P.S. - I will have some additional observations/questions regarding fades that I will plan to add soon to this topic.