I am working with Vegas Movie Studio 6.0 Platinum edition to create several "books on CD" using my video camera. I record my audio on D8 tape and transfer it to my computer with a firewire. I then delete the video, retaining the audio on the voice track. I use background music on the music track, and a voice introduction on the sound effects track. The music fades to a low level for the intro and then continues in the background for a while when the narration starts. When finished, I render it into a WAV file to burn onto a CD.

Everything matches on the work track, but after rendering, the music track starts to wander. The music fades out completely and the voice track comes in only after the music fades away...the music is suppose to continue in the background for about ten to fifteen seconds after the voice over starts, but the V/O starts late.

At the half hour mark the music is suppose to fade in under the background for about ten seconds and then come in full when the voice over stops. Instead the music came in about three minutes early, leaving dead air three minutes later. Again, this all matched up on my work track but drifted wildly after the render into a WAV file.

Another thing. I've noticed that the finished timeline is also way off. It is suppose to end at one hour, which it does. However, the audio is about ten minutes behind, so it just ends in mid-sentence at the one hour mark. It is almost like everything is compressed when editing, but then expands during render.

Just to experiment, I also made a version with the video put back in and rendered it into a mpg and AVI file, the results are the same. I am stumped.

My computer is a Dell Optiplex with two 120g harddrives, Pentium 4 3.00ghz, 2.99ghz, 1.00GB RAM.

First, load the narration. Render it as a wav. Use that new wav file only as the base for your production. Just a guess, but it might be that even though you delete the video track itself, it is still a sound track that's cued to a video, even though you are ignoring it on the timeline. It may be that timecodes and sample rate differences are causing problems and unexpected fx. If that's the case, the above experiment might work.