Audio Capture Problems -- Please Help!

mrjeffrivera wrote on 1/22/2004, 7:14 PM

I've gone through the tutorial, I've gone through the Douglas Spotted Eagle thing, and I can't figure this out:

Whenever I try to capture from my Mini DV camera the audio keeps dropping, the video is fine and I can hear the audio perfectly well from the camera speakers but when I try to capture it, or try to play it back through Vegas 4.0 all I can say is that it sounds "spotty" the audio drops in and out.

Help!

mrjeffrivera@yahoo.com

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 1/22/2004, 7:30 PM

You may well need to turn off audio monitoring. Is it spotty during CAPTURE, or after capture? Your system might not be fast enough to playback audio, display graphics, and produce good sound DURING capture, but the file is most likely fine after.
Next thing to look for is if your graphics card is sharing resources with your soundcard.

Flack wrote on 1/22/2004, 8:19 PM

I agree with Spot he sounds " SPOT ON".. but more info on System Spec and Os would help.

Flack..

TorS wrote on 1/22/2004, 11:21 PM

Whenever I hear that type of audio it reminds me to turn off audio preview (I turn off video preview too, for good measure - use the camera LCD to see where I am) and to defrag my disk.
And it would appear both during capture and afterwards because of what spot said: Capacity problems during capture.
You might also want to open your sound card's controller and mute whatever input and output that is not needed at the time. Make a habit of it.
Shared resource conflict is less likely. In my experience a shared resource problem would cause one of the cards to lock up completely and not keep retrying the connection to produce stutter. But maybe a modern and advanced motherboard would make a difference in that respect.
Tor

leistico wrote on 1/24/2004, 8:35 PM

I'm having the same sort of problem. it's intermittent, depends on whether or not an external microphone was used in a particular shot or not .. sony dcr-trv330. the audio sounds great on the camera, sounds great on capture preview, but when i capture it it's like one or more times a second the audio will drop to nothing and fade quickly back to full, and it's amazingly noticable on the captured footage. it's like somebody's having a fieldday with the mic cable, but it's not the mic! audio is fine in every other aspect.

also, i tried a freeware prog called windv to see if that would aid the capture of the audio... discovered an interesting problem... at the point where the audio would go wavy on me in vegas, it would simply be gone in windv .. no audio recorded at all. it would just stop dead, while the video kept on truckin'.

anyone have an idea?

thanks..
sean

PeterWright wrote on 1/24/2004, 10:42 PM

A couple of thoughts - do you have a camera which allows double track stereo sound recording at reduced quality? Just wondered if that may cause capture complications.

Secondly, in case it takes longer than you want to solve this, you can capture the sound separately by connecting your audio outs to your sound card and capturing analogue with an audio editor, or straight to the timeline in Vegas.

leistico wrote on 1/24/2004, 11:31 PM

Now that you mention it, I'm fair certain that it's got a double-track whachamacallit, where you can punch in audio as a dub... the guy that shot the original footage recorded the audio for some segments of the movie with the extermal mic plugged into the camera in the 1/8" jack...

...And when it captures into Vegas, the good audio is stereo with the audio on left-track only for some reason, but when it goes to wah-wah sound, Vegas only records a mono track, and starts a new clip in the capture when it does that. I'm thinking it might be something in the camera, trying to read something weird... but then, it sounds just fine and dandy just watching on a tv, and monitoring it in the capture window, and even as it's capturing, but then the captured waveform is all kinds of messed up, and it shows and is very audible when playing the captured footage. Could be that that's how it was recorded on the tape, now that I think about it, and it's not being "un-messed-up" as it's being recorded onto the computer.

I might just have to do that, where i record the sound analog and sync it up by hand, though the prospect does bite a lot.

Thanks.

--if anyone could diagnose this, please let me know, or better, post it here! Thanks!

farss wrote on 1/25/2004, 1:43 AM

I wonder if parts of it were recorded at 32Khz and others at 48KHz, that could cause things to go very strange.
Or was were parts of it recorded in LP?

TorS wrote on 1/25/2004, 5:05 AM

Jeff and Leistico,
If the sound is OK at the camera, here's one thing you can do: Plug a cable from line out on the camera to line in on your soundcard. Then record the sound in Vegas (or even better: Sound Forge). If it turns out that the recording has several standards or formats on the same tape and this is the reason capturing plays up, then at least you should get some OK audio to repair the captured one with this way. It might not be entirely sync, but not far away either (he said, crossing his fingers behind his back).
Tor