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Author Topic: the sound mess  (Read 2629 times)

fredjeang

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the sound mess
« on: March 22, 2011, 12:00:12 pm »

Sound part



I'm practising with a footage that I imported directly from camera in Adobe Audition because I wanted to clean and enhace the sound.
After editing successfully and the ego feeling happy and confident, I exported the sound in WMA arbitrary.

When I opened the Avid Media Composer 5, it won't work with that format.


So, my question is about sound. When editing sound for separate, what's the format we should export for bringing it back to the NLE with maximum compatibility between platforms (Premiere, Eduis, MC, Vegas, FC) and lossless ?

« Last Edit: March 24, 2011, 10:01:28 am by fredjeang »
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: the sound mess
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2011, 12:56:01 pm »

After editing successfully and the ego feeling happy and confident, I exported the sound in WMA arbitrary.

When I opened the Avid Media Composer 5, it won't work with that format. Aaaaarrrrggggggggg

Hi Fred,

Doesn't the software specify which audio-formats it can import? Or is the presumed compatible format not compatible afterall?

Cheers,
Bart
« Last Edit: March 22, 2011, 01:06:43 pm by BartvanderWolf »
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== If you do what you did, you'll get what you got. ==

bjammin

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Re: the sound mess
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2011, 12:57:40 pm »

It's always a good idea to try and capture audio and manipulate it at the highest practical bit depth and using the file format that degrades the quality the least.  For that reason, either the WAVE or AIFF file format at 48 KHz, 16 bit or greater should be your goal.  Audio on DSLRs is really an afterthought and not suitable, in my opinion for critical work.  I always use a Zoom H4n recorder in tandem with my DSLR to avoid that issue.  I synch the camera and the recorder with a slate (though you can use the headphone output of the Zoom recorder to link the two together.)  The sound and audio can be joined in your NLE manually by lining up the audio waveforms or using software such as (Plural Eyes.)  All of this takes a little extra time, but the results are so much better.

To go a bit deeper, professional audio for video is captured at 48 Khz in either 16 bit or 24 bit (the standards are AES and EBU, look 'em up if you like.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES3)  The higher bit depth helps a tiny bit with detail, but most folks can hardly hear the difference, just as it can be often be challenging to distinguish between visual images at 8 bit and 16 bit.  Once you have done all the work you need to do, you can down-sample the audio to whatever format you need for your delivery needs.

Good listening!

Bjammin
« Last Edit: March 22, 2011, 01:00:38 pm by bjammin »
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fredjeang

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Re: the sound mess
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2011, 04:40:29 pm »

Yes, I'm not using normally dslrs mics but this time I wanted to practise specially with that because the sound is crap and my goal was aimed to bring it to life from a bad file. See what I could do. That was the practise of the day I self assigned to me so I needed to check from the basic sound of the camera on purpose.
The export was done in not the AIFF wich is what I normally use but WMA wich is a common format. That is why I was so surprise when Avid refused it, but it might be for a reason.

Thanks for the imput. Did ignore the Plural Eyes and will check that.



Cheers.
« Last Edit: March 24, 2011, 10:01:46 am by fredjeang »
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EPd

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Re: the sound mess
« Reply #4 on: March 23, 2011, 06:09:39 am »

Bjammin is right. Sound for video and film is highly standardized: AIF or WAV in 48kHz 16bit, also called PCM audio. These are fully compatible even with 24bit, which I recommend to use, especially as long as you have to make your mix.

Compare it to PSD or TIFF at 16bit. These are working formats. You would only convert an image file to 8bit at final output, never if you still had to work with it. WMA, AAC, MP3 encoding is similar to JPEG in imaging terms. Lossy compressions. You would never turn something into JPEG if you still had to work with it.

Personally I work with 96kHz 24bit files including the output of the final mix. Then I downconvert the final mix to 48kHz 16bit to make it compatible with broadcast formats. This results in the best sound quality, but 96kHz is very heavy for your computer to work with, especially when you have more than 24 tracks.
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