Question / Help Audio cuts out on clips recorded with OBS when imported to iMovie

wizardarrac

New Member
Hi everyone,

I've recently started recording clips in OBS and then importing them to iMovie. Everything I record is an .mp4, and when I do Get Info on the output files I see that the codecs are H.264 and AAC. When I watch the movies via Preview or QuickTime, they always play perfectly.

However, when I import clips into iMovie, some clips will occasionally lose the last 1-3 seconds of audio. It appears that the clips this happens to is somewhat random, and upon re-importing different clips might have the audio dropped, and I notice the dropped audio even immediately upon import, before even adding clips to the timeline. During all of this, I have the wavelengths visible, and it shows that there is audio in the clip - it just isn't playing. Additionally, even if I try to trim around the dropped audio, trimming a clip that I add to iMovie can cause other clips I've already trimmed to drop even more audio, which is making iMovie pretty much unusable.

The reason I suspect this might be an OBS issue rather than an iMovie issue is because once I re-encode all of the clips via Handbrake, the problem appears to go away and all imported clips play fine even with trimming. It makes it seem like there's something weird happening in the output I'm getting from OBS.

I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone had seen similar behavior, or had some potential thoughts to try? As long as re-encoding with Handbrake continues to work then I should be good to go, but it would be great to not have that additional step. Thanks!

(relevant thread I opened up on Apple support about the issue: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251372902)
 

martintanis

New Member
i have exactly the same problem. drives me crazy. If anyone knows how to fix this, that would be highly appreciated! It seems to happen less often when uploading the clips one by one, and waiting really long in between the uploads.
 

Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
I'm a newbie, and not a Mac user. With that said, over last 5+ months I've seen plenty of comments about NOT recording in OBS using MP4 format. All of these emails STRONGLY recommend alternate formats, then re-encoding after recording session if need be to an alternate format.
Sorry I can't help with this specific issue, just suggesting a possible work-around (recognizing that it will may be resource & time intensive)
 
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