Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 7/13/2002, 2:06 PM
I have a Canon ZR45 which is one of the latest models. It is true that the built-in mike picks up a considerable amount of internal camera noise which is evident when playing back raw tape where there is silence. Since this is my first camera with audio, I don't know if this is common or not or if the Canon is any better or worse than other makes/models.

Now is it objectionable? Depends. If you shoot footage with very faint or no audio and play it back directly from the camera hooked up to your TV the "hum" is very pronounced, If you have the volume on your TV fairly high we're talking at least 45DB and for sure playing tapes like that will get annoying fast.

However, not really a problem. Just to satisify myself and to better answer your question I just performed the following experiement:

I taped a minute of video in a very quite room, where the camera could pick up my breathing, so obviously I moved it far enough away to elimiate that. I then played it back on my TV and like I said above the camera noise is obvious and annoying. I next captured and brought it into Vegas then rendered the audio portion as a wav file. I opened same in MAGIX's Audio Cleaning Lab and applied a Noise print of the "silence" which reduced same by 99% or better. Then recorded back to tape and played again on the TV in the quite room. For all practical purposes all the camera noise was removed. If I really strained I almost could make out a soft hum, probably more the TV, then the tape.

Conclusion:

Since it would be rare to keep video that has long periods of silence without adding background music or cleaning up the audio as I did (SoFo has a similar product) I don't see 'camera noise' during silence being a major reason not to buy the camera.

I would be interested to know what others experience in the way of 'camera noise' like how loud, and what if anything they do about it. :-)
JimClark wrote on 7/13/2002, 9:59 PM
Thanks for the info BillyBoy. I am new to this and I have a fair number of analog 8mm and vhs family movies I want to edit and save them in a digital format. I really like the Canon's mainly due to the 18 to 22X optical zoom and the price is right.

I do have a question for you about the MAGIX's Audio Cleaning Lab software. All I have is the current version of Video factory right now. I don't have any sound editing software. What all would you reccomend to add to my software collection besides MAGIX's Audio Cleaning Lab.
Also can you open the sound file in the audio cleaning software, fix it, then bring it back into video factory and get everything into the proper sync?

Thanks
Jim Clark
Thanks for the test I think it seals the deal I am going to buy a Canon ZR45 or 50
Thanks again
Jim Clark
BillyBoy wrote on 7/13/2002, 10:28 PM
Your welcome. If you go with a Canon I think you'll like it. I do, and like you said the price is right, plus it has analog pass through so you can either hook up to your VHS recorder and have it record to DV tape or 'pass through' into Vegas for editing without wasting DV tapes. The ZR-40-45-50 have a lot of features. My 45 works fine with Vegas Video, so it should work fine with its little brother Video Factory, they share many features and are based on the same engine.

As far as Audio Cleaning Lab, its kind of a Swiss Army Knife kind of application. I mainly use it for noise reduction, but it has a lot of other features too, so combined with Vegas Video that's plenty to get started.

I started with Video Factory over a year ago when it first came out and since moved up to Vegas Video so I'm not sure how many features VF has compared to VV which is a loaded with audio features. Like with anything else it depends on what you want to do. If video editing gets to be a serious hobby or beyond then also look at SoFo's Sound Forge or upgrade to Vegas Video which has unlimited tracks which makes editing easier for more complex projects.