Vent: It took me 6 hours to fix a 15-minute audio sync issue

Everyone talks about how easy audio syncing is in Premiere Pro, but I had a clip from my Sony A7III that just would not line up no matter what I tried. I spent a whole Saturday afternoon (seriously, from 2pm to 8pm) messing with waveforms and manual adjustments before I realized my camera's recording format added an extra 3 frames of delay that no auto-sync feature catches. Has anyone else run into this weird frame offset problem with Sony cameras?

2 comments

2 Comments

parkerbrown6d ago

I read somewhere that Sony cameras have this known issue with longer GOP formats causing a slight offset in the audio track. The A7III records in XAVC S which can introduce that extra delay, but the auto-sync in Premiere doesn't account for it because it assumes every format is the same. You might need to manually adjust your audio by about 3 frames every time you bring in a clip from that camera. A buddy of mine switched to recording in the All-I format on his A7IV and the problem went away, since that mode keeps the audio perfectly matched. Might be worth testing if your camera gives you that option before your next big project.

avery_jackson6d ago

Three frames sounds exactly right for what I was fighting with on my A7III. I actually saw a YouTube breakdown from a colorist named Juan Melara who tested a bunch of Sony bodies and found the XAVC S long GOP codec adds that exact 3 frame gap in the audio prerecord. @parkerbrown is spot on about the All-I fix, I switched to that on a shoot last month and never had to touch a single sync point afterward. Kinda wild that Premiere's auto-sync just assumes every codec handles audio the same way. Makes you wonder why Adobe doesn't just add a simple offset tool for known camera quirks.