One of our shooters who does legal depositions got requirements for delivery with the audio in MP3 format. He shoots with a Sony PXW x70 which records in either LPCM or Dolby Digital formats. Short of rendering the audio to MP3 in Vegas or Audacity and syncing the new file to the video, is there a better/different way to deal with this?
We've never been asked for this before. Moreover, the client specifically demands that delivery not be made in Dolby Digital format.
The customer is always right, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t also be ill-informed, ignorant or just stupid.
Did your customer also give you any direction about their preferred video codec and/or wrapper they require?
Since it’s legal are you going to edit it at all or add timecode, etc?
Customer appears to be ill-informed and a law firm. Their list of do's and don'ts reads like a text book on video, with some of the pages missing. All our depositions are shot with camera date-time on and in the five years prior to this demand there has never been any editing or manipulation of the tapes. It goes from camera directly to DVD or memory chip and out to the client via Dropbox.
There is no mention of video codex and/or wrapper required. .
I agree; that's a stupid stipulation. AAC would be a far better audio codec if they don't like AC3.
You should be also be able to remux/convert your files in VLC; that's where a lot of the MP4/MP3 garbage I get comes from, or of course in ffmpeg with something like this:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -acodec mp3 -vcodec copy out.mp4
I think I remembered why an organization might specify no AC3; they have MACs and iPads. There was a period where Apple devices (including my iPad) did not support AC3 audio. At the time, I read a forum post that stated that Apple was not allowing app developers like VLC to include AC3 in their apps from the App Store.
It's possible that the law firm codified the fix for that in their vendor specification even though the dust-up between two large corporations has been resolved or, at least, there is a cease-fire.
It's true, Apple support for AC3 has ranged from nonexistent to poor, nothing better really.
In that case, they (jack's law client) should stipulate MOV / AAC or MP4 / AAC; with AVC video the wrappers are 90%+ interchangeable. Any video with mp3 audio would be best be pigeonholed as a hobbyist format along with divx, xvid, x264vfw, and the like.
I know why people do it, and why it is popular with VLC fans; good, open-source AAC encoders were hard to come by. ffmpeg's solution has matured, in fact it is now quite good. Finding precompiled copies of fdkaac takes some digging, and Nero is but a pile of skeletal remains. Mainconcept AAC is quite good, but licensed. So Lame mp3, still being developed and updated, is a tempting choice, despite conventional video production wisdom and practice. Its high-frequency reproduction and distortion is still worse than decent AAC.
Thanks to you both for the comments and information. We don't get much opportunity to talk to law firms directly -- typically we're hired through a middle-man company -- but we'll pass this information along and see what happens.