Vegas 4.0 and Sony 4-channel Microphone

Crittleman wrote on 12/6/2004, 3:50 PM

I recently purchased the Sony DCR-HC1000 and am interested in the 4 channel ECM-CQP1 surround microphone. From what I have been able to read, it seems that Sony's "Click to DVD" SW can extract the 4 channels from the miniDV tape and generate a simulated 5.1 surround DVD.

I have a Sony Viao desktop computer, but it is rather old -- I purchased it before the "Click to DVD" SW was bundled in and I cannot seem to find a copy of the SW.

Since I am a user of Vegas Video 4.0 that can handle 5.1 surround, does anybody know if there is a way to pull in the 4-channel stereo audio using Vegas 4.0 before I drop the money for the microphone?

Thanks.

Comments

farss wrote on 12/7/2004, 4:46 AM

Vegas itself can only capture channels 1 and 2 of the audio however Scenalyser will do the job for you and it's incredibly cheap.
However please bear in mind that with an on cmaera mic you'll never get anything like the 5.1 that's in a Hollywood DVD, in fact you're pushing it uphill to even get decent stereo from an on camera mic, even with a mic that cost more than this camera. Simple reason is the mics in the wrong place!

Capturing surround sound is a bit of a dark art, there's a few mics around that probably do a half decent job, and they cost big time. Biggest problem I see is you need a set of mics at about the acoustic middle of say a hall to pickup the ambient sound but that's the wrong place to be getting clean sound for the front channels.

That might sound odd, you'd think that if you just recorded the sound at the spot where you were and played it back through four speakers you'd have 'surround' but that's not how our hearing works. That was sort of the idea behind Quadrophic systems and they were an abysmal failure. What's even more startling is that you can create a perfect surround recording using only two channels, quite an old technique using a pair of small mics embedded in a 'dummy head'. Only problem with that idea is it only works if you listen to the sound through headphones and the 'ears' of the dummy head have to be pretty close to your own in shape.

Bob.