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]

I only did all of that 48 hz crap after I originally did it all in 41.1 hz. The result is that my movie works perfect in imovie, but screw up when I export to idvd.

Okay. I didn't realize you had gone through all those steps. I think the information you just gave above about exporting from iMovie to iDVD may be narrowing this down.

Here's the only clue that came to mind when you mentioned that, which I went hunting for and found in the Final Cut Pro User's Guide:

"Note: If working with a DV sequence, convert audio CD files from 44.1 kHz to 48 or 32 kHz before importing them into your sequence. If you import CD audio files directly, you will experience audible distortions in the audio."

You had earlier said "the audio was recorded at 48." But you also said "in imovie, it says that it is 48" after saying Spark identified it as being 44.1.

It got awfully confusing.

My suggestion for converting it to 44.1 with a reliable app was based on knowing that iMovie will cheerfully import a 44.1 AIFF, and, when you choose export for Quicktime, it converts the audio down to 22, and when you choose to export to iDVD, it says it's exporting the audio at 48 (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain). Now, though, it's looking like an "undocumented feature" of iMovie might be reflected in the quote of note from the Final Cut Pro manual above: that you need to *start* with a 48 or 32 kHz file if you're working with a "DV sequence"--*not* let iMovie do the resampling on export to iDVD.

In that case you were on the right track earlier in this thread when you said you were going to resample from 44.1 to 48. If I then steered you wrong and cost you more time, I deeply apologize. But I had gotten the impression earlier (and may have been wrong) that the problem was originally with it being 48, and/or munged (because of it being seen as 44.1 in one place, 48 somewhere else). That sounded like an inherent problem with the file.

I'm still confused (or perhaps more than ever) where the problem originally entered, though, if your audio was recorded at 48 to begin with. Maybe when you originally normalized it, you might have saved it as 44.1, and then you saw 48 in iMovie only at export to iDVD? Is that where the two different kHz rates came into this? Oh, well.

I hope the note from the FCP manual helps unravel this. For my sake as much as yours.