Hi I’ve been experiencing a bad video bug in both cubase 12.0.70 and cubase 13.0.41 on Mac OS 11.7.10. Whenever I import a video to be used for scoring, etc cubase is adding time and black to the top of the video. I’ve included two screenshots of the same video, one in Pro Tools and one in Cubase 13. You can see that Pro Tools imports the video properly and the 2pop’s waveform begins perfectly at the beginning of the file. Cubase adds about 1/2 a frame of black. I’m at a loss for why this is happening and didn’t see anything on the forum about this bug or any kind of auto frame generation.
There is definitely a bug in Cubase 13 which has not been rectified yet. I have videos that played in Cubase 12 but not 13. There is a workaround on this firum where you copy across two files from Cubase 12. I’m not near my computer to tell you there name.
No guarantee though as yours may be incompatible for some other reason.
@jjb0737 , the issue you mentioned has nothing to do with the video, it only happens with the audio stream the comes with a highly compressed video such as H264 with aac or mp3 audio. This is a well known issue with AVC and other compressed video codes.
Until recently PT showed the same results as Steinberg software, and still is with some video codecs. But they try to tackled this problem by cropping the audio beginning before import (more often they even crop too much), something Steinberg never do. That is exactly why 2 pop is still important.
@stingray , Shutter Encoder will never fix that issue by converting the video into anything else because it doesn’t recognize the issue and therefore never attempt to fix it.
I created a software that not only converts the video, but also tackles this issue with H264 during conversion into ProRes or DNxHD. It called “ER Media ToolKit”, but note that only the Pro version is fixing this.
You can google search it and try it free for 20 days.
Regardless, if you see a black frame that was not there in the original video (when placing it on the Cubase timeline). That means you place the video outside of a video frames grid, something you can never do in PT, as PT will always lock video movements to video frame grid and Cubase lets users place videos on audio samples grid which is wrong and may confuse users who are not familiar with video professional handling.
Hello… my issue (bug) with the video in Cubase 13, is it will load a 30fps video, but will not load a 23.98fps video. So I have to use Cubase 12 to work with a 23.98fps video project
Thanks
However, am curious if this ‘issue’ is still open.? i.e. did you ever receive back a sample video file to investigate further.? If so, can you say what was the outcome.?
If not, perhaps I can tag in @Sagi here… Maybe there’s already a suitable resource/test file to hand that was used to engineer the fix inside (the excellent) ER Media Tool.
Seeing as Avid found a way to ‘correct’ the matter in PT, is there greater chance (left unattended) of it surfacing amongst the Nuendo post-production, sound/game design community too.?
My point was more hoping the SB staff above might respond here with an update and/or to request (again) a test file to investigate… i.e. a native Cubendo solution (like PT seems to have done) would be something to aim for…
In the meantime, yes - your toolkit is a ready alternative.
@Puma0382 . I have not received the video. @jjb0737 Would you be able to share this video? The H264 specification contains the elst atom, which contains information about the syncing of video and audio and sometimes implements some delay. It would be good to look into the original video file.
Hence why I tagged @Sagi in the meantime, hoping he might have access to a ‘testfile’ of the sort you need, that he might kindly attach/forward to you.? Sometimes, only the original will do, I know… But, maybe this time the OP will respond…?
Hi everyone, sadly I cannot share the video due to copyright/IP reasons (I’m a film composer working on unreleased projects). With that said, this issue happens to any and all videos with h264 codecs. Surely steinberg must have one floating around? When I’m in the studio later today I’ll see if I can find an older video that won’t get me sued for sharing….
You may be surprised at how many small (technical) variables can be at play under-the-hood with video files, that can cause glitches/problems etc… Sometimes yes, as you say, an issue can be seen by ‘any H264’ coded file - on this occasion however, I fear not, since the SB staff responding here would have said otherwise (the matter was in hand, etc…).
So, if you can replicate the exact problem with a ‘dummy’ file, please help out by attaching it (zip it up first - or if too big, upload to a file-sharing site and post the link to download). Thanks.
h264 with 2pop.mov.zip (23.2 KB)
Hi Everyone, I’ve attached a trimmed version of the original file. I have many other files that I could upload if this one doesn’t do the job. As I mentioned, it seems to be any file with h264…
Seeing the issue may also be linked to what software is being used to create the H264 video file. For example, AFAIK H264 files created in Resolve do not display this issue in Cubase. What software was originally used to create this video file?
I’m not sure what software was used to create it, I just receive whatever my clients sends. This particular file is from August and I have no way of contacting the editor to ask, as I was never in touch with them. Only executives/producers. I trimmed it in QuickTime but just saved (as opposed to re-exporting) so it shouldn’t have altered anything, as far as I’m aware. My guess is that the vast majority of files I’m sent are being edited in adobe or avid software.
The above media is the worst H264 example anyone can give. (sorry)
The attached video was created with the oldest AVC codec profile (Main@L3.1), it was part of the original release of the standard and has been present since 2003!
Most up-to-date software uses at least 4.0, if not a higher profile.
The video bitrate is so tiny that it is compressed to a level that extreme processing is needed to play it back, which requires time, which requires audio time shift so it will playback ‘in-sync’ with the visual. A good practice is to export H264 with at least 3 Mb/s
It looks like the video is a rerender of another (original) H264 video, so the audio shift was done twice, which makes it impossible to determine the correct total audio offset just by analyzing the container’s metadata.
In short, if I receive such material from a client, I always say, “Sorry, it is unusable.”, Please send me a higher-quality video.
Nevertheless, for all of the above (and many more reasons), never (ever) trust the audio sync for a video that comes embedded with an H264 video. That is exactly why professionals invented 2-pop!
If you want something you can 100 percent trust, ask for DNxHD or ProRes videos. Those are the only professional codecs that were designed for pro production. H264 is nice to have for its small size, but it was created for end-users as a final product, not for studio collaboration.
Just my two-cent opinion.
Edit:
That said. If you convert the sample video above with my ProResER Pro app using the settings below. You will get separate video and audio files. Importing both video and audio files into Cubase/Nuendo or any other DAW will give you perfectly synced audio if the audio is aligned exactly with the video start.
