How about PCA / 48.000 HZ?

PCA is good and saves about half the space losslessly as compared to WAV. I use FLAC because it is the same lossless saving but it is a standard rather than Sony only format.

Thank you all for your precious answers.

Whoever whenever needs some thunder sound can drop me an e-mail:) In the end we are all the members of big big big family:)

Tonight I feel that I'm in the mood of learning something about audio formats.
(As being someone who has heavy hearing loss and uses hearing aid, all these infos about audio, sounds to me like science fiction)

So I checked the videos that I took with Sony HDD camera :
Dolby AC-3, 48.000 Hz, 5.1 Surround (stereo downmix)

Which one is better? Should I use next time Sony camera for such situations?
For recording thunder etc.

I remember that, when I used to open videos coming from Sony HDD camera in Vegas timeline, I used to see four lines of audio but not anymore!

Thanks in advance.

Dolby AC-3 is a lossy compression format, which means that some of the quality is lost every time audio is saved in that format. It's not much loss, but it is there. The trade off is that typical AC-3 files are only about 1/11 the size of uncompressed WAV, which is why it's used for the limited space of DVDs and other disc formats.

"I remember that, when I used to open videos coming from Sony HDD camera in Vegas timeline, I used to see four lines of audio but not anymore!"

If the camera records 5.1 surround sound you will see it on the Vegas Pro timeline if you set the Project Audio Properties to 5.1 before putting you media on the timeline. I have not found it to work by changing the Audio properties after the fact.

I recommended PCA / 48.000 Hz because that's the format of the source audio.

FLAC would retain all the original PCA data untouched, and be more likely to be decodable in 10+ years time than PCA.

Or better still WAV (48K/24bit) as file-size is barely a consideration any more..

geoff

Geoff > Or better still WAV (48K/24bit) as file-size is barely a consideration any more..

and WAV is also universally accepted (as evidenced by my ignorance of PCA earlier) and therefore most likely to be future-proof.

Actually you should save both formats. Set project properties to 5.1 surround then load the video+audio clips. You should then have 4 tracks of audio.

2 stereo tracks which 1 will be front left & right,
and the 2cd will be rear left & right.

And 2 mono tracks, one will be the center track, the other the sub.

Save each of the 4 tracks individually as 24bit 48khz PCM, ie., wav format.
And again save all the audio together as a Dolby ac3 file with the same bit rate, etc as the camera recorded and delivered.

The wav format is lossless and the best quality while being future proof.
The Dolby ac3 is the original format. Always want to save that too.

Will

There's no advantage in rendering the audio on the timeline into AC-3 for "safe keeping". That will be recompressing lossy format into lossy format, creating more loss. Saving this for later use just means another lossy recompression added into the chain. If you've saved the uncompressed WAV you can always create any compressed version from this later when you need it, without adding in the third recompression.

Now, if you use a tool that de-muxes and pulls the audio track directly out of the file and saves it, this is fine. Vegas is not one of those tools.

PCA is a SCS loss-less format. Which is fine for SCS software, if the PCA file(s) need to go to a third-party who uses non-SCS Apps, the files would need to opened and saved .. in a cross platform/application file type.. normally WAVE or AIFF.