Suggestions on .ac3 editing

xjerx wrote on 8/23/2004, 4:30 PM

I'm currently working on a project with 5.1 ac3 for audio. This project has several different parts to it and each part will be edited separately. What I would like to do is to bring all these edited parts with their 5.1 files together and piece them all together to make one long video.

Now, I know that vegas 5 can't read its own ac3 files, so how should i go about piecing all these various parts together with their 5.1 files?

Hope all that makes sense!

Thanks
Jeremiah

Comments

riredale wrote on 8/24/2004, 12:23 AM

I am not aware of any utility that can stitch together ac-3 files. You may be stuck with the brute-force way of demuxing and decoding the ac-3 into 6 wav files using a program such as the old "SoftEncode" program from Sonic Foundry.

erratic wrote on 8/24/2004, 4:33 AM

Well, BeSplit can join .ac3 files. It's explained in the AC3 FAQ in Doom9's Forum.
Apparently you can also simply use the MS-DOS copy command.
I haven't tried any of this myself, so I have no idea how well it works.

farss wrote on 8/24/2004, 4:51 AM

Simply render the audio out as separate tracks one for each channel. In the 'master' project ring those in and pan each one to the appropriate 5.1 channel and then encode to ac3.

Depending on what you're mixing for though you may live to regret doing this. It makes a lot of sense to do this for the vision, that way you've got a locked down vision track. You should always have this before you touch the audio. But locking down your audio in segments may cause you some grief. After you assemble the whole you may find it harder to adjust anything if you need to. If they're totally separate segements not meant to be viewed in sequence and with no connection between them I'd say OK. But trying to match dialogue levels could be very tricky until you monitor things as a whole.
Just my two bobs worth mind you.

xjerx wrote on 8/24/2004, 8:44 AM

I tried the MS-DOS (or command prompt) method and it worked beautifully! I did a little test with a smile file and it seemed to do what i want...I guess i'll find out when i attempt the full video.

Thanks