Video sync in Cakewalk: padding at the start of MP4/MOV

[Jono J Grant]

When importing MP4/MOV files, Cakewalk  adds a frame or two of silence/black at the very beginning of playback (padding). Everything locks inside of Sonar but any audio gets exported with the added padding, so it's a frame or two late when imported into other programs.

I understand Cakewalk currently relies on Microsoft’s Media Foundation for video handling. Other DAWs (Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, etc.) use their own video engines (often FFmpeg-based) and don’t have this issue.

Would the developers ever consider integrating a dedicated video engine (e.g. FFmpeg) instead of relying on Media Foundation? Or at least providing an option to bypass the padding behavior?

This would make Cakewalk far more reliable for composers working to picture, where frame accuracy is critical. 

I know the workarounds but it would be great to resolve this.  It hasn't been addressed in the new Sonar. 

Thanks

J 

Edited August 21 by Jono J Grant

[Noel Borthwick]

We havent had the bandwidth to look at video recently. Ffmpeg is an option but it's a huge amount of work to integrate. We can take a look at your issue at some point.

 

[Jono J Grant]

On 8/21/2025 at 10:13 PM, Noel Borthwick said:

We havent had the bandwidth to look at video recently. Ffmpeg is an option but it's a huge amount of work to integrate. We can take a look at your issue at some point.

 

Hey Noel. we've had several posts about this in the past. I think it would be worth doing for the composer community. Speed in workflow is so essential, and converting every video is time consuming, especially for long form projects. 

Failing that, I feel like someone could figure out a great workaround or way to compensate for the issue, somehow in an update.

Anyhow. 

Maybe worth a discussion? 

 

[Michael Andreas]

Upping the video handling capability of Sonar would be a godsend.  As of now, it's frustrating at the best and useless at the worst... especially when compared to most of the Mac based programs.

[OutrageProductions]

6 minutes ago, Michael Andreas said:

... especially when compared to most of the Mac based programs.

Or even a couple of the much better Windows based DAWs that can cut/paste/replace & slip edit video directly in the DAW.