I have been using your excellent audio restore guide to apply filters on some .wmv files which I have captured from VHS tape using a Canopus ADVC-1394 capture card. The Canopus card has built in locked audio mode circuitry to keep the captured audio and video in sync. The captured audio is mono and in need of hiss removal and normalization.

My problem is that although the filtering appears to greatly improve the audio track, the filtering seems to invariably take the audio slightly out of synchronization with the video signal. This is most obvious and marked with dialogue. Is there a setting in Soundforge I need to play around with to prevent this?

Also, even though I have a well specified pc ( P4 @ 3.4ghz, 2mb ram, 10,000 rpm sata drives which are regularly defragged), Soundforge 8.0 seems to take an age to actually save the modified file (hours for a 1gb file) – could I be doing something wrong here???

Any advice greatly appreciated...

your additions from e-mail:

I could have sworn the original message or your e-mail had described the software you used for transferring the DV data from the Canopus device to the computer hard drive, but I guess not.

What are you using right now?

And how do you arrive at WMV files? The Canopus device should be creating DV streams, which are dumped into AVI files on the drive. I can only wonder if you're using Windows Movie Maker.

Yes, at the moment it's Windows Movie Maker - it seems to work for me. I could initially save to .avi but I save to .wmv; as the only video editing I am subsequently doing is basically removing commercials and unwanted bits at the beginning and end I had assumed that saving to .avi was not needed and this way I end up with a smaller intermediary file. Final output is to .mpg or .vob

I think your entire issue is going to be resolved by simply using a software that is more appropriate to DV capturing.

Like most everything else that comes with Windows, Windows Movie Maker is pretty pathetic. It's a weak little program, a pale shadow of other tools that exist. Just think about how Wordpad is no replacement for Word. Or how Solitaire is no replacement for pretty much any other game.

The WMV format is also what I refer to as an "end product" format, it's meant to never be edited again, due to compression and other tech flaws.

It's very tempting to want to take a shortcut with the computer, encoding a video can often seem long and time-consuming. But what happens is you get in situations like this, where quality is simply not there. The only real way to "cheat" at speed is to use a DVD recorder (which operates like a VCR).

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With what you have right now, all we need to do is transfer the DV from the device to the computer as AVI files.

The "locked audio/video" of the Canopus is kind of misleading. Once the video leaves the box, there's really nothing stopping a/v from losing sync. Then again, Canopus is well known for being a tad misleading and smoke-blowing about it products. A little too much hype and hoopla for my blood.

The speed of saving your audio file is undoubtedly related to some sort of compression being done on the file. I doubt you're saving a WAV (PCM) file, which is the native uncompressed format of digital audio, and processes and saves much faster.

I actually covered WinDV capturing in another post on the support forum, but I've quoted it below for your convenience.

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If this were my project, and were on a budget of cheap or free tools, I'd approach it from this method:
1. Transfer DV to hard drive in an AVI file, using WinDV.

FORK IN THE ROAD......

OPTION #1

2. Encode the entire AVI file over to an MPEG. There are several encoders to choose from, including TMPGEnc Plus, CCE Basic, and Procoder Express.

3. Use an MPEG editor to remove the commercials. TMPGEnc can do it for free, albeit slower and little less accurate that some of the paid options. Womble MPEG-VCR and VideoReDo are two more excellent options.

4. Demux the a/v streams, convert the audio to WAV with the freeware tool Besweet (or FFMPEG, either way) and then restore the audio in SoundForge. Save the WAV, then use Besweet (or FFMPEG) to convert back to AC3 or MP2 audio.

5. Author your disc in authoring software, something easy like TMPGEnc DVD Author is cheap and not hard at all to use.

OPTION #2

2. Use VirtualDub to save sections of the video stream without re-encoding. Or frameserve from VirtualDub into an MPEG encoder. Repeat as needed, re-assemble the MPEG files later, in an MPEG editor.

3. Demux the a/v streams, convert the audio to WAV with the freeware tool Besweet (or FFMPEG, either way) and then restore the audio in SoundForge. Save the WAV, then use Besweet (or FFMPEG) to convert back to AC3 or MP2 audio.

4. Author your disc in authoring software, something easy like TMPGEnc DVD Author is cheap and not hard at all to use.

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You may want to let me know what software you already own (like SoundForge, Premiere, Procoder, etc).

Thanks for the reply. A lot to answer – where to start?

What I’m doing is copying 80’s and 90’s TV from VHS tape to computer. The Canopus is an analogue capture card and
I have been forced to use Windows Movie Maker for analogue capture as it is the only tool I have which will work. The procedure I have adopted is to use WMM to produce a wmv file, convert this to mpg using ImToo MPEG Encoder and then edit out the commercials etc. using VideoRedo. This has worked well on tapes with ‘Hi-Fi’ sound, but the stuff which is mono normally needs work to improve the sound to make it listenable. I have subsequently realized that the synchronization problems with Soundforge were happening with one file in particular, subsequent files have been better in this respect.

As this is a hobby all software has to be cheap! I well as the software above I have Soundforge 8.0 and Premiere 6.0. I have not to date been able to perform a capture from VHS using Premiere. The ImTOO MPEG encoder is pretty flawed as it falls over on any file over about 30 minutes (it is the registered version) so I will experiment with the alternate encoders you mention. The WinDV software will not work for me either but I can still capture to avi using WMM.

Over the weekend I will experiment with your suggestions and see how I get on.

Many thanks

Another tool to try is Scenalyzer, for DV capture.

The problem you're having (and it appears you're not yet seeing it) is that your source video is interlaced. You are losing massive amounts of quality by using WMV files, because it requires a deinterlace, and is highly compressed video. The audio is also highly compressed and very lossy. We need to get you as far as from WMM as possible.

Had you been able to actually make it from the tape to a final DVD that played on the tv, I think more and more of these issues would be evident to you.

Premiere 6.0 is a good editor. Not as good as 6.5, but it should still work about the same. These days, Premiere has adopted a new method of numbering, but on the old system it would be on version 8.0 now, with 7.0 and 7.5 before it.

imTOO MPEG encoder is one of those cheapie garbage encoders based on free open-source software with some fluff added, so they charge $25 or whatever for it. It always stinks to have to buy more stuff, but if we can get your DV files transferred over as AVI, and get you to edit those in Premiere, the next logical step is a plug-in MPEG encoder for Premiere. MainConcept, Procoder and CinemaCraft (CCE) all have some available in the $40-50 range. I suggest Procoder Express, create 720x480 DVDs. Another option is to purchase the Adobe Premiere 6.5 upgrade, which includes the MainConcept MPEG Encoder. I see an upgrade on eBay for $69.

I had a person here about a year ago, very similar needs to what you're wanting. Take a look at the discussion he and I had back and forth, which ended in a success: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=80

Well I'm glad to say that capturing to .avi and working with that has worked out fine. I ran the file through Soundforge and saved to .mpg. The audio is now much better and the whole process didn't take too long either. Thanks for the help.

If you're encoding the video in SoundForge, I still have a sneaking suspicion that you're having your video deinterlaced (and thus not getting 100% optimal video quality .... I'd have to see a video clip to be sure), but at least the audio/video sound sync issue has been resolved.

Sounds good. http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/smileys/smiley32.gif