Help! My Movie Music Is Screwed Up!!!!, disaster....fear and loathing... Options

[tokyoroland]

I finished editing my music into my brother's movie in imovie ( the latest one ) on OSX. I burned it to dvd-r and when I play it, the sound totally screws up halfway through the movie!!! This is odd because it works just fine imovie and the qucktime movie is fine, too.

I thought it was a faulty dvd-r, but I tried another one and it did the exact same thing! help! possible errors:

1) the sound was mastered wrong. ( the girl who transferred it to cd from minidisc mastered it at a low level, so I turned up the volume ( normalized it) in Spark.

2) Maybe I didn't format the dvd-r. Do I need to?

It isn't my computer because it messes up on my external dvd player as well as when I put it in my computer and play it.

PLEASE HELP! I don't know what to do, and I really want to finish this film. Should I go back to the music and NOT normalize it??

ANY suggestions will help...

- Jeffro

[Levon River]

Hi, tokyoroland.

I'm somewhat at a disadvantage here because I'm not sure what formats you've had that audio in, or in which app. My suggestion about converting to 44.1 was somewhat a shot in the dark; other rates can sometimes cause problems between apps. Since you say one app is calling it 44 and another is calling it 48, that tells me that there is *something* going on with the file that ain't right. Based on that alone, I'd say that's a good trail to keep sniffing down. So here we go...

I recommended SoundApp only because it has always been *very* reliable in its conversions for me (I usually use it for batch conversions), and I haven't used Spark for conversion/resampling enough to have a useful opinion. But, sure, use Spark for downsampling. It's a professional audio program by professional audio people, and it should be fine.

You say you only have an exported QT file for the audio? I'm not sure what you mean by that, but just to get back to basics, here's the only thing I can recommend: that you back up to your *original* audio file--the one you started with, from whoever transferred/recorded it, in whatever format it's in. Load it into Spark, normalize it, and save it, all by itself, as a 44.1 AIFF file (renaming it to whatever degree necessary--maybe just an .aif extension?--not to overwrite your original file). *All* the apps that are going to be involved should then recogize that as a 44.1 AIFF file. And at that point, you should be on safe, solid, cross-app, media-compliant firm ground.

Only then (if I were you--and I realize I'm not ) would I pull the new, clean, normalized, 44.1 AIFF audio file into iMovie (*first* clearing out the iffy audio you had in there!), and commence editing.

Theoretically, that ought to work with everything across the boards. If that doesn't work, you're out of my league at that point. Good luck with it! I know how frustrating it can be.