Troubleshooting: Video Changing Speed?

This might have been better served on a message board, but I had to post it here as a testament to how weird technology can get when trying to perform a complex task – like editing a movie trailer. 

This morning I was sitting at my computer, working on finishing up my score for my trailer project, when I noticed some of the musical accents no longer lined up with the scene changes.

“What the…” 

I moved to an earlier part of the video, then back again. Sure enough, about a third of the trailer was now behind the music score – and I hadn’t touched the master tempo in months.

Oh, you are KIDDING me!

“How far back has this been a problem?” With increasing worry, I started loading old backups, trying to find the source of the issue.

February 5th seemed fine, but the February 7th video was late by about half a second… Bingo.

Spirits lifting, I checked my notes for what I’d done that day. No luck however – just a comment that I’d finished the mixing process.

Wait… What if the problem wasn’t with the audio? What if the VIDEO had gotten messed up somehow?

'My God Watson! It was under my nose the entire time!'

So I rendered the videos from the 5th and the 7th and played them side-by-side to see where things went wrong. 

And there it was: About 50 seconds in, the video from the 7th slowed down, so its frames were slightly behind the video from the 5th, leaving the audio unchanged.

After that, it was simply a matter of adding the older version of the video to the latest backup, and everything worked perfectly.

The weirdest part though, was I hadn’t done anything to the video after I’d uploaded it – somehow, it had managed to glitch all on it’s own.

The moral: Sometimes you do everything right, and sh*t breaks anyway. Just don’t assume you know what the problem is before you check – it could save you hours of stress.

Credits:

‘Black Camera Recorder’ by Donald Tong from Pexels

‘A Person in a Suit Looking at Pictures’ by cottonbro from Pexels

‘Yelling formal man watching news on laptop’ by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

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