audio normalise switch: mutes

Serena wrote on 6/26/2005, 11:15 PM

I have some live audio recorded at lower level and the audio switch "normalise" is effective at lifting this (background noise OK). However the clips I'm now adding to the timeline (about 60 minutes along) if I set "Normalise" the effect is actually to mute the track. Not affecting clips previously laid down.
Simultaneously the peak audio display is flat (shift+UParrow doesn't change that). The audio is playing fine and might be normalised, but I don't know. Be nice to get the peak display back because there are some noises that need cutting. Looks the same in the trimmer.
So any thoughts on the first question: mute instead of normalise?
The second Q (flat audio display) has arisen before and seemed unknown ealsewhere.

Comments

farss wrote on 6/27/2005, 2:20 AM

That's mighty odd. If you right click the media it'll tell you how much gain the Normalise has added, how much in this case?
Do you have Sound Forge, interesting maybe to see what it makes of it.
Also you could render the audio out to a new .wav and see how that looks.
Bob.

Serena wrote on 6/27/2005, 4:33 AM

In "properties"? There it had -inf, which is pretty close to mute! Telling it to recalculate didn't help.

On the 2nd question, the original tape had the peaks OK (I cut the clips in trimmer) and cutting out another copy of the same clip the peaks are shown correctly. So if I want peaks displayed then I make a 2nd take. This seems to be a separate issue to the -inf gain.

farss wrote on 6/27/2005, 5:07 AM

Wow, -inf, now there's an interesting mathematical concept, I wonder what wierd bug in the code got that answer?
If you render out the original audio track to a new wave file and normalize that do you get the same screwball answer?
All I'm trying to workout if this is something gone really haywire in the original file or in how Vegas is mishandling something or a combination of the two.

But there's nothing I can do to fix this, something is obviously going wrong in vegas, even if an audio file is totally screwed up Vegas shouldn't fo that, sounds to me like one for tech support.
Bob.

Chienworks wrote on 6/27/2005, 6:56 AM

I've had a similar problem occasionally. If i selected the normalize switch before Vegas had finished creating all the waveform displays then i would get flatlines. It didn't happen all the time, but often enough to be noticeable. Once i got a flat line the only way to recover was to remove all references to that media file from the project, clean the media pool, and then re-add them. Now i just remember to let it finish drawing before i normalize.

Quryous wrote on 6/27/2005, 8:28 AM

This is a recurrent problem. I, as well as others, have been reporting it for years. I believe I first noticed it in Vegas Video 3.0. I thought it had been fixed, but apparently not. I tried the "wait" solution proposed by Chien, but it doesn't seem to always work.

B.Verlik wrote on 6/27/2005, 10:46 PM

My cheesey fix for this is to clip off one frame at one end and then Un-normalize and Re-normalize it. Sometimes I need to take off one frame from each end of a clip. For some reason it works again.