Streaming audio doesn't sync over time to animation.

[jacobmasinick]

I am creating a long animation over 16000 frames on top of pre-rendered video and audio from After Effects. My audio and video layers are beneath my animation layers in Animate CC. As I continue to scroll through the animation, I've noticed my audio is deviating from my frames. Halfway through the timeline, I've found a difference of 24-25 frames between the audio and video files. My embedded video is rendered at 24 frames per second and Animate CC's timeline is set to 24 frames per second.

In After Effects there isn't any delay or sync issues, only in Animate. I could really use some help since I want to make sure my lip sync is accurate to my needs.

[ClayUUID]

Is your audio imported as WAV or MP3?

[jacobmasinick]

It is a WAV file.

[n. tilcheff]

Hi mate,

Check your WAV outside of Animate in an audio application. It has to be 44.1kHz. If it's 48kHz this could be causing the offset.

In Flanimate if you import 48kHz sound, it doesn't know it's 48. It will show it as 44.

First thing to try is to render the audio out of AE as 44.1kHz, import again and drag from library to stage on frame 1 to see if it maps differently onto the frames.

[jacobmasinick]

I've tried every configuration and file extension I could think of with no avail. All of my audio, image sequences, videos and external files are perfect outside the program. The moment I bring the audio into Animate CC, however, the audio begins to drift over time, upwards to a second before the images.

For any future user with this same issue, I did manage to discover a workaround. I broke up my audio file into parts. Instead of rendering a single audio file, I divided it up into 23 separate audio renders worth 1,000 frames of animation. By doing this, the audio drift would be reset to zero at every 1,000 frames.

Not the ideal solution I was looking for, but it works for the time being and I can continue working.

[n. tilcheff · Accepted solution]

Thanks very much for the update, mate!

I was about to mention something else yesterday, but didn't want to give unspecific information in the first post.

Just because of the nature of my work I have not experienced what you describe, but I have often come across the opposite:

Exported audio gets progressively longer than the image sequence. I've always thought it had to do something with the way it renders audio out - a feature last available in CS6 - and not how it maps audio samples onto frames.

For a 4-5 min. animation the offset can get beyond 1 second.

What I do in this case is in Premiere I just force audio length to be exactly the same as the image sequence and all matches perfectly in the final video render.

Another thing that I wanted to mention is that if you use SWF previews, I have noticed that MP3 does not sync well and your previewing will get progressively inaccurate. ADPCM has other issues but syncs well in previews.

Again, the nature of my work is such that I use tiny sound effects and longer WAV voice overs, but they are cut, never minutes long, that is why I have not experienced what you described.

Thanks for sharing. Very useful information.

Good luck with your work!

NT