Video editing - cleaning up an ancient video file w/ out of sync audio?

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RanceJustice

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 9, 2003
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Hello everyone. It has been a long time since I've done any even semi-serious video editing so I thought I'd ask here for anyone more proficient. I should preface this by saying I usually prefer open source software when possible and i know there have been a lot of video/audio processing FLOSS software in recent development, but i'm also just open to techniques in general and if its necessary/much easier to get some proprietary software for the job I can certainly look into it.

Essentially, I've come across an old .avi file that I'd like to "clean up" as much as possible. From a video standpoint its an old mpeg4 at 320x240 and even at that seems like older generation camera footage so its kind of grainy / "vertical lines" atop it, rather dark and not particularly clear. Audio wise, it has a mp3 track and it seems to be out of sync; I can recall that VLC used to show a graph about it being out of sync when one attempted to play (it would still play) but for some reason no longer does; perhaps if I can get that graph back it would tell me how much I need to shift things one way or the other?

Ideally, I'd like to clean up the image as much as possible for better color/clarity, upscaling would be nice too. Audio wise the sync is the main thing but cleaning up the audio, dealing with the lower quality recording and enhancing clarity/levels etc... would all be nice. As far as final format I'm open to just about any major, open container/codec but since we're trying to increase quality I don't want to lose anything in the transcoding .

Anyone have some suggestions of tutorials, where to start....? Thanks.
 
This might help you with the audio if you can get your hands on these programs (they may have trials)? Rip the audio from the .avi using Wondershare Video Converter. You can rip to MP3 or Wave. Then open the audio track in GoldWave. Then depending if the audio was ahead of the video, add some silence to the beginning of the audio. Just take a silent part of the audio (or from any other audio) and add it to the beginning of the video. The length will depend on how far ahead it was. If it was behind the video, delete some silent audio from the beginning of the audio. This may take some trial and error to align the audio with the video. Save it. Then go to VLC. Click Media, then Convert / Save. Add your video. Then check show more options. Then check Play another media synchronously. Browse to your ripped audio and add it. Then click Convert/Save at the bottom and save your video. Your video will then have 2 audio tracks. Open your new video in Wondershare. You can then convert the video, removing the out-of-sync audio, keep the new one and also clean up the video a bit (brightness, etc.). Good Luck!
 
How big is it? is it something you don't want others to see?
you can upload it somewhere and I'll download and it take a look at it and see if I can do something to clean it up and re-sync the audio
 
RanceJustice said:
Hello everyone. It has been a long time since I've done any even semi-serious video editing so I thought I'd ask here for anyone more proficient. I should preface this by saying I usually prefer open source software when possible and i know there have been a lot of video/audio processing FLOSS software in recent development, but i'm also just open to techniques in general and if its necessary/much easier to get some proprietary software for the job I can certainly look into it.

Essentially, I've come across an old .avi file that I'd like to "clean up" as much as possible. From a video standpoint its an old mpeg4 at 320x240 and even at that seems like older generation camera footage so its kind of grainy / "vertical lines" atop it, rather dark and not particularly clear. Audio wise, it has a mp3 track and it seems to be out of sync; I can recall that VLC used to show a graph about it being out of sync when one attempted to play (it would still play) but for some reason no longer does; perhaps if I can get that graph back it would tell me how much I need to shift things one way or the other?

Ideally, I'd like to clean up the image as much as possible for better color/clarity, upscaling would be nice too. Audio wise the sync is the main thing but cleaning up the audio, dealing with the lower quality recording and enhancing clarity/levels etc... would all be nice. As far as final format I'm open to just about any major, open container/codec but since we're trying to increase quality I don't want to lose anything in the transcoding .

Anyone have some suggestions of tutorials, where to start....? Thanks.
Click to expand...
Does the audio start out of sync, or start in time but continually get worse and worse? If it gradually gets worse and worse it's likely you just need to re-interpret the footage to the right speed (probably 29.97fps or 59.94fps if it was an american market camera that shot the original video) to fix.

For software I'd recommend Davinci Resolve - it's not open source, but the base version is free. As far as your output codec goes - I'd go with mkv or mp4.
 
Sorry it has taken me time to get back to this and I thank you all for your input!

The video is around 2GB and while it isn't anything extremely incriminating (its kind of home movies-ish, stuff for others ) etc, I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing it because it contains identifiable images/voice of others (including those I rarely see/communicate with) and I wouldn't want to upload anything without their consent. I thank you and appreciate the offer, however.

You know, I'll have to check if it becomes progressively worse. This may be an error in memory but back when VLC used to show that "error" screen before playing with two diverging curves related to the audio, I am thinking this may be the case? Due to the quality of the video and content (ie people not always close to the camera, turned away when speaking, poor camera placement as well as just the technical quality of the picture itself.) its sometimes difficult to tell exactly if someone is speaking at the "right" time. There are certainly times when I know the sync is off such as as sounds of someone playing with a toy when they clearly aren't at that moment etc. However, its not easy to always identify when things are in-sync properly if ever. I've heard good things about Davinci Resolve and avidemux and shall look into Wondershare too, so I will certainly give it a try - I am thinking I may have to just poke around and at least for the audio separate the two and then try to see what fits. If anything maybe I can go through and find certain events on the video and try to match them up with the audio, but like others have mentioned that will only work if I can find the correct sync/rate.

Thanks again for everyone's help!
 
RanceJustice said:
Sorry it has taken me time to get back to this and I thank you all for your input!

The video is around 2GB and while it isn't anything extremely incriminating (its kind of home movies-ish, stuff for others ) etc, I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing it because it contains identifiable images/voice of others (including those I rarely see/communicate with) and I wouldn't want to upload anything without their consent. I thank you and appreciate the offer, however.

You know, I'll have to check if it becomes progressively worse. This may be an error in memory but back when VLC used to show that "error" screen before playing with two diverging curves related to the audio, I am thinking this may be the case? Due to the quality of the video and content (ie people not always close to the camera, turned away when speaking, poor camera placement as well as just the technical quality of the picture itself.) its sometimes difficult to tell exactly if someone is speaking at the "right" time. There are certainly times when I know the sync is off such as as sounds of someone playing with a toy when they clearly aren't at that moment etc. However, its not easy to always identify when things are in-sync properly if ever. I've heard good things about Davinci Resolve and avidemux and shall look into Wondershare too, so I will certainly give it a try - I am thinking I may have to just poke around and at least for the audio separate the two and then try to see what fits. If anything maybe I can go through and find certain events on the video and try to match them up with the audio, but like others have mentioned that will only work if I can find the correct sync/rate.

Thanks again for everyone's help!
Click to expand...

Not sure if you're still trying to solve this issue, but you can run mediainfo on the file and check if the audio and video are the same length. Depending on how it's encoded, it could just be your media player that's struggling to play it, so you could try opening it in MPV or MPC-QT instead.


As for the upscaling part, I'm actually working on something just for that atm:

https://github.com/AlphaAtlas/vs_mxnet_helper

if you paste the mediainfo text for your video, I can send you a .vpy script tailored just for it, but the default "ExampleAuto" script should work pretty well.
 
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