Editing with two audio tracks

vitalforces wrote on 7/7/2004, 3:05 PM
I have a workaround for two tracks of audio in editing a long-form film project, but the options are limited by the fact that my camera mike's sound is not the project sound--a boom mike provides the pro sound (DAT converted to wav on CD) and that track has to be synched to each clip.

Thanks to Vegas' realtime playback and waveform graphics, I record the DV with the camera mike on, and after capturing I use the camera audio's waveform on the timeline to perfectly sync the boom sound on a track directly under it, then simply mute the DV audio. Thus--I never delete the DV audio track. At the end, I either output to DVD or to tape, with the camera audio muted--yet always available if something goes wrong.

My problem is that certain Vegas functions, such as the media bin and trimmer, cannot store the clips on the timeline (one avi video/audio and 1 DAT audio converted to a wav file) as a single unit, so all my work takes place along the timeline and nowhere else. (I open a second instance of Vegas with the reels and sound synched in order, then cut & paste them into the project running on the first Vegas, since I can't use the media bins or trimmer once the synching is done).

I'm just wondering if anyone might have developed a more efficient way to work, that doesn't involve rendering 27 reels of DV to new avi files (both for reasons of not wanting to eliminate the track of camera sound, and the obvious storage problem).

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 7/7/2004, 4:15 PM
Since you don't want to lose the original sound...I can't imagine another way. You've got 350 gigs of media in just vid there...not counting the extra audio, so you'd need a 400 gig drive or 2 200 gig drives etc.
We store all this off on our RAID at once, but usually end up replacing at least one of the original audio channels from the cam. Since it's usually dialog, no big thing to lose one of two channels.
vitalforces wrote on 7/7/2004, 9:41 PM
Thanks for the thoughts. I did add on some major storage, now have 600 gigs of firewire--the more I think about it, maybe it's time to wean away from the 'scratch' track and settle on the DAT sound. As I render one reel, I'd be deleting the old one.
Spot|DSE wrote on 7/7/2004, 10:06 PM
If the info on the DAT is mono, use that for one channel and original for the other.
You could also use the not-often-talked-about pca format to store and edit. nearly 50% in compression on average, depending on source, it is a lossless format, and is WONDERFUL for archiving.
vitalforces wrote on 7/10/2004, 7:43 AM
Excellent! Thanks for the tip. (Late but I don't hit the forum every day.)