Troubleshooting iMovie 3.0.1: Formac Studio TVR buzzing; Switching between NTSC/PAL permanently; Another audio synch fix

Formac Studio TVR buzzing We previously reported that users attempting to import media with Formac's Studio TVR ended up with a constant buzzing noise from the audio track.

Remy Leroy notes that when using the Formac-provided viewing and recording application, you can specify different sound channels, some of which do not carry the audio buzz.

"If you open Audio Preferences in Formac Studio TVR (the Formac viewing and recording Application), you will see that you can choose between 'first 2 sound channels,' 'last 2 sound channels' or 'Mix 4 channels.' When you choose first 2, the sound is not corrupt, and you can record video and sound within the Formac Application with good quality. If you choose last two channels, you will only hear a buzzing sound, and if you choose 'Mix 4 channels' you will hear the original sound of your video input mixed with the buzzing sound."

Unfortunately, iMovie 3.0.1 seems to record sound from all four mixed channels by default, resulting in the buzzing.

Switching between NTSC/PAL permanently Last week we noted a utility called iMovieVSS that allows switching between the default video standard settings in iMovie - NTSC and PAL.

Today Gerry Douglas offers a manual method for permanently switching between NTSC and PAL (the same process is simply automated by iMovieVSS):

"To Create new movies in PAL format you need to edit the 'Localizable.strings' file with TextEdit, and here's how. Select iMovie and Control click to 'Show package contents' and navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj (or your language option) /Localizable.strings Open file Localizable.strings by dragging to TextEdit.

"Find this text (about line 29, including text wrapping): 'Default to PAL or NTSC" = 'NTSC';

"Edit 'NTSC' in quotes to "PAL" and save file. Line should now read: 'Default to PAL or NTSC' = "PAL"; When you create a new movie it will now be in PAL format."

Another audio synchronization workaround Manfred Zorn offers another workaround for the previously reported audio synchronization problems that are exhibited in many iMovie 3.0.1 processes.

In Zorn's case, the audio synchronization problem happened when attempting to write back to a digital video camcorder. His workaround involves extracting the audio clips so they are rest to the original start point, and then re-joining them with the video stream.

"I had serious problems with iMovie 3 and iDVD 3. In iMovie 3 writing the movie back out to the DV camcorder results in drifting audio or sometimes complete dropouts, e.g., audio and video seem to start at different times. I wasted two DVDs where the audio lags about 2 seconds behind the video.

"As an experiment, I extracted the audio of all my clips in the final movie and wrote it to DV. After all the editing was done, I selected all the movie clips in the time-line, and selected "Extract audio" from the "Advanced" menu. It takes a while to extract all audio from all clips, but the resulting audio clips are locked at the original start time-code. I then unselected the audio track from the original movie clips just to be on the safe side."

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