Video playback stuck in fast-forward

Question

For some odd reason, whenever I go to play back any video I've recorded in OnLocation CS5 it plays in a very strange way. It's fine for the first clip that pops up, but whenever I switch over to Source or to another clip, then everything goes south (when I switch back to the original clip, it starts having these problems too). The audio and video both start skipping constantly, and all the audio is very high pitched and fast, like the room we shot in was filled with helium or something. In other words, the video looks and sounds like it's playing in fast forward for some reason, and I can't get it back down to normal speed. (I'm beginning to think that it's skipping because the video is trying to let the timestamp catch up to where it should be relative to what's playing.) Oh, and here's the best part: the files themselves are fine. When I go into the project folder and view the files directly through a media player, they play normally. So this only happens when I try to look through them in OnLocation. The video was recorded in AVI Type 2, and was recorded direct-to-disk from OnLocation, if that helps. This was my first time using OnLocation, so maybe I did something wrong? Please, I've looked everywhere for a solution. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

My first guess is that the camera is set to 12bit audio. OnLocation handles that correctly sometimes, but it other times it basically assumes 16bit audio, which produces a Chipmunks effect. To the best of my recollection, however, when the player is in that funky state, only the audio is affected; there's no stutter or fast play of the video. So you may be running into a different problem entirely, but let's start by ruling out the 12bit explanation. To check this, you can either find the setting on the camera or check the metadata in OL--just type "Audio Sample Type" in the Metadata panel's search box.