Question / Help Sound Delay - Issue Corrected

[shansmi]

H Everyone,

My name is Shannon and I am a newbie to recording. I started drumming again after 30 years of being a way. I am now learning all of this again with videos from sites like Drumeo and Rob Brown. I was able to get 2 Logitech "Streamcam"cameras as well as a Blue Yeti Studio microphone up and running pretty easily in OBS. I have one camera watching the kit from above and the other watching my feet. Yes this is just like what you will see many times on Drumeo. However I noticed the sound and video were out of Sync. I played with bit and frame rates both of which had little affect. I wound up setting those back to the max and playing with the Sound Sync offset in the Advanced Audio Options. After some trial and error, I was able to get things in Sync by delaying the mic at 136 ms as well as the desktop and "window" (the metronome) audio input to 141 ms. This lined things up very nicely. I have all the other input / outut devices especialy the microphones on the cameras disabled in the Sound Control Panel.

I wanted to post how I did this not only to thank the forum members that wrote the tutorials but also to give back. It may not be just one tweak to get things running as you like. Watch the sound meters and see what is registering and when. The play with the offsets accordingly.

I can't post a video here and apparently my snippet is too large as well. :-(

I learned all of these tweaks from tutorials in these very forums. Thanks!!!!

 

[KJANDYO]

Thanks for letting everybody know. I was having the same issue when streaming through OBS to YouTube. I bet those values will work out nicely for me. I play drums too which is why your post was double cool!! Thanks again!!

 

[JimCrozier]

I am doing a live show where one of the features is playing bass live with videos that my friends create and send to me. I set the scene with a split screen and play along with the mp4 file playing back. I have the Media Source set to monitor (monitor and output - I don't think there is a distinction in my setup.) I am using a couple mics plugged into a mixer and into a Roland Edirol UA-4FX - I am not monitoring this source only listening in the room. I listen to the playback of the video on headphones - I have the speakers turned off. So, I have a sync issue which I believe is caused by the difference between playback and record processing times. I am able to get pretty close to sync between them in the output by messing with the sync setting, but I am totally hacking. I have not been able to find any explanation about this feature - what exactly does this setting do? What factors determine what this value needs to be. At the moment I have a -112ms value on the 4FX audio adapter which is pretty close. is there anyway other than repeatedly testing until it's perfect. Also, how much variance can I expect from video clip to video clip? Is it generally better to adjust the live audio input, as I have done, or the media source (there are potentially several of these in a single show)? Thank for any light you can shed on the issue.

 

[carlmmii]

It's not really a hack at all. This is very much an intended feature, because trying to combine multiple audio and video sources requires some level of expectation that not everything will have the same latency coming into the computer. Audio thankfully is the easiest thing to adjust for sync, and also happens to be the most perceptible when it's out of sync.

As far as potential variance, it depends on your setup, but the most important factor is going to be the actual devices that are handling the signal conversion to get audio to the windows processing (such as any audio interfaces or mixers you have connected over usb, or your motherboard's audio processing if connecting directly via analog).

In practice, devices that don't use ASIO are going to be the most susceptible to potential drift. But the most you could probably expect is on the order of 5-10ms.

As far as how to get it sync'd, that's going to depend on your setup. As a last-ditch effort, trial recordings and listening back will always guarantee getting there eventually. But, since you can adjust audio sync on th efly, something I normally do is have the advanced audio options open during a recording sync test, and voice over "130" as I switch to 130, then "140" as I switch to 140, and keep going for the range I want. Then I just listen back and see where the crossover point happens.

If you want to be super scientific about things, you can set up a multi-track recording, with each of your inputs on a different track. Do a test recording. Then pull your recording into a DAW or video edtor that accepts multitrack (Resolve does this, and is free), and see how far you need to shift your input exactly.