Audio Format Questions

meakinsl wrote on 6/5/2007, 5:52 AM

Hello,

I am very new to movie making and vegas (purchased the
platinum edition), I am attempting to make a short educational
documentary that going to burn to dvd (seems along way off
at the moment !).

I had some questions on audio that I am hoping someone will
be able to answer. I am working to a very small budget and
the camcorder I have bought (sony DCR-HC47E) has a built
in microphone. I am aware this will not give good quality
especially as will be doing a lot of filming on a boat where
wind and engine noise will play a part. I am trying to get
the best audio I can and getting a bit confused on some
areas :

1) The camcorder instructions say the default setting for sound
is 12 bit which allows a second soundtrack later (think this is
what it is saying) or can go for 16 bit. I am assuming that
I should go for the 16bit to get the best audio possible if
anything from the camcorder is useable ?

2) I was planning on adding audio when back at home by connecting
a micropohone to my laptop and recording the documentary speech
that way. I am assuming with Vegas this is easily done ?
(thining of the Sony ECM-MS907 microphone which is about in my
budget)

3) I would like to try and get some sounds from the on-boat
filming and have toyed with taking the laptop and using the
microphone above with me but not always practical when on the
move (laptop not the mic). I have thought about portable
recording devices and looking through the forums can see
minidisc cropping up. I am in the market for an mp3 player
and was looking at the Archos 402

http://www.archos.com/products/video/gmini_402/tech_specs.html?country=gb&lang=en

And here is where more confsuion come in for me. The specs of
the above device that seems to allow you to plug your own mic
in via an adapter, tech spec says "analog source in stereo
sound" - can I plug a digital mic in ? Also the format is WAV
(PCM & ADPCM) and wondered if this format is a good format
(I believe the latter to be more compressed so guess the PCM
is the setting to use) or am I barking up the wrong tree ?

Any help greatly appreciated as only have couple of weeks to
get all the footage on the boat and not much time to play with
stuff before hand.

Many thanks

Lawrence

Comments

jbolley wrote on 6/5/2007, 12:53 PM

Hi,
Hope I can shine some light on your issues...
1) yes, you want 16 bit audio
2) The ECM is a stereo mic that requires power from it's source. Your laptop may not provide this power AND it is not stereo. I would strongly suggest another mic for this use - either a cheap windows PC mic or a USB microphone.
3) I don't believe there is really such a thing as a digital microphone. At least not in the context of this thread. Your device may record some audio but try something from zoom:
http://www.samsontech.com/products/brandPage.cfm?brandID=4
look for their "personal processing / recording" devices such as the H-4.
And finally, yes, you want to record PCM - this is uncompressed wav file resolution. Since your DV will record audio at 48KHz you should set your portable recorder to the same sample rate and also your vegas project...

Jesse

Chienworks wrote on 6/5/2007, 3:04 PM

I'll add to 2) that the mic input on the laptop is most likely to be vastly worse quality than the mic on the camcorder. No matter how good a mic you plug into the laptop the recording will probably be crud. You'd do better speaking into the camcorder mic and then capturing that through firewire. Alternatively look into an external audio input device for the computer.

meakinsl wrote on 6/7/2007, 9:52 AM

Many thanks for reply, like the look of the zoom H-4 and also
the Edirol R-09 which look very similar. Bit torn whether to
splash out on sound device but am concerned about the camcorder
built in mic so getting ever closer. Have changed camcorder to be
16bit at what I guess will be 48khz. I have searched the forums
for an answer to my next question and it seems to have been done
to death but most of the posts relate to CD. If I assume some
of my audio will come from the camcorder at 16bit 48khz and I
had a zoom 4 should I go for 24bit 48khz on the zoom 4 and have
vegas project at 24bit - will it just end up as a mixture of 16
and 24 bit or will it attempt to up the 16bit to 24bit ? My target
format is a DVD movie and wondered if that can handle 24 bit ? Or
am I better off at 16bit throughout ?

Many thanks,

Lawrence

Chienworks wrote on 6/7/2007, 10:36 AM

Vegas pretty much "does the right thing" when combining different audio formats and you usually don't have to think about it at all. It will resample them to the output rate and bit depth when rendering. Generally you're better off giving it as many bits as possible to begin with so that Vegas has more resolution to work with when mixing and resampling.