.wmv audio and .mov video out of sync

Question

I'm a total amateur at this video stuff. I'm actually a web developer trying to create a video for work and I've run into a problem. Hoping those of you who know stuff about videography can help me out. All of this to say, I apologize for the ignorance that follows:

I have video/audio recorded as .wmv and another video recorded as .mov. I'm trying to overlap the .wmv audio with the .mov video. It syncs up at the beginning of the video, but a few minutes in and it's off. I have not cut the video yet except to line it up at the beginning. I've successfully made a couple of basic videos like this in the past but I suspect it has something to do with the two different formats. I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro. Google has no advice for me. Does anyone know what I can do to fix this?

Answer 1

There are several possibilities here. It could be that one device or both dropped frames and thus ended up out of sync, it could be a difference in frame rate or it could simply be that one or both devices have inaccurate internal clocks for recording. Your best bet is to identify a point at the beginning and at the end of each video that should be the same. Figure out the offset and then do a speed adjustment to one of the clips to make it line up with the other.

After you do this, the beginning and end should both match up, but you still want to make sure to watch the entire video closely to make sure it stays lined up the entire way through. If the loss of sync was due to dropped frames rather than a difference in clock speed, the rate adjustment will not fix the problem and you'll see sync issues emerge somewhere in the middle of your video.

If it is due to loss of frames, there isn't a lot you can easily do to recover from the problem because you are missing the information that should be in those frames. If it is an internal clock rate issue or an FPS issue, then there is a decent chance that the rate adjustment should fix it for you.