VU meters look like they're in an earthquake

B.Verlik wrote on 9/10/2004, 8:29 PM
I'm sure I'll have trouble explaining this but I'll try. I've been trying to re-render some audio for some video and I keep having weird things happen. The weirdest is that sometimes the audio sounds like it's backwards, but mostly it sounds fairly normal but I'll hear little added pops and clicks and what I can only term as digital audio artifacts. When this occurs, it still sounds kind of normal but the VU meters look like they're in a minor earthquake. I've had extreme situations where the sound really sounds almost garbled. (like cheap radio/satellite broadcasts) I'm going crazy trying to figure out the cause of this and it's not real consistant. I'm using the dreaded Audigy2Platinum sound card (until I can afford better), but this hasn't been an issue until lately. I have been doing some crazy EQing, but it sounds normal until I re-render it. Can somebody shed some light please? You don't have to answer if all you're going to say is RTFM. I'm not even sure what to type in the search engine concerning this. Thanks in advance,
Steve

Comments

MJhig wrote on 9/10/2004, 9:00 PM
What do you have selected in Prefs, > Audio Device?

ASIO or Classic Wave Drivers are the more efficient choices. Using Classic you can increase the playback buffer in that dialog window, for ASIO you usually set the buffer size in the soundcard's mixer panel but I'm not familiar with the Audigy's.

Also if you set the project properties to the actual sample rate of the audio itself (audio for video is usually 48 kHz) Vegas won't have to resample on the fly to say 44,1.

MJ
B.Verlik wrote on 9/10/2004, 10:01 PM
I've been all over this forum reading everything I can find related to something like this. 1st, to answer your question. I originally had the drivers set to "Microsoft Sound Mapper". This is something I did when I first got VV 4.0, because of something I saw in the manual. It doesn't make sense now. That was done in the early days and I never noticed anything wrong since. Then again, I don't usually re-render audio. But before I asked this question, I had switched it to SB Audigy ASIO (1040) and tried again. No luck. ( I don't know what the 1040 stands for, I'll have to get out the manual.) but the bit rate was 48K. Then I started reading here and I discovered that apparently, some EQing will cause some major sound jumps, not noticable until after rendering. On top of that, I was re-rendering from a re-rendered wav already, magnifying the problem. (The 1st render was done with the 'Microsoft Sound Mapper'). So, I have some experimenting to do, before anyone else needs to offer anymore suggestions. I still don't understand why I can listen to it live, and it sounds great and as soon as I re-render it, it sounds like digital crap. ( I really don't understand the backwards sounding stuff. Which happened more, when I was converting to AC3. ??????) I just wish Vegas included an audio and video card with the software that made everything work altogether. I waste so much time trying to figure out why somethings not right. You have to understand.....I'm still basically a newbie to the computer and I have trouble remembering terms and initials and things I did in the early days, when I first got everything. I thank you for your input, but I can tell there's no clear answer for this. I'll just have to experiment until I get lucky.
Steve
MJhig wrote on 9/10/2004, 10:08 PM
Why are you "re-rendering"? Start over from the source file. If you are rendering an already compressed format such as MP3 you will be degrading the audio.

Just as .AVI is the preferred video format for editing, .WAV is the preferred audio format for editing.

MJ
B.Verlik wrote on 9/11/2004, 12:49 PM
I recorded some live bands and I have two camera angles. I didn't have a chance to set up separate audio recording capabilities, so I have to try to make the cheesy camera mics sound as good as I can. While editing one of the bands, the sound and video started losing sync with each other. This by itself made no sense to me, but somewhere here I read that that might happen with two camera tracks and making cuts. My work around to get it together again was to make one long audio track, with all the patches already stitched together. (Sometimes I had to use the sound of one cam or the other.) This worked. Then I had to make two different DVDs. One of the complete show and one that was for a compilation DVD. So that meant that I had to cut down the full show to a 20 minute section. So that's when I had to re-render for the second time and that's where my biggest problems occured. To make matters worse, I'm the guy, here, who was looking for a cheap 'Mastering' program, because I'm set up in a bedroom, trying to do everything through a cheap boom box. This is not a serious project, in the sense that I'm working for a production company or something, but these were fairly big bands in their day, and I don't want it to come out crappy. I won't be set up for more serious stuff for quite some time, (few months). As you know, camera mics don't do justice to live music and all the EQing in the world won't make it perfect. But I can get it to sound pretty good before the render. Also I only have about 45 to 50 gigs of space to work with and about 11 hours of video. So I didn't want to have to re-mix two camera angles for each band, twice. When I re-render, I'm going from .avi to .avi or .wav to .wav. The video looks fine, it's the sound that's not so great. I'm just trying to get the best from what I have to work with and I don't care to pursue this in a few months. It's not that important to me. (although, I'll probably save the original tapes and maybe try again when I have more experience. With all the hours I've put into it already, I doubt I'll ever get back to it, unless I really end up hating the results of this one. Which I might.) PS: I've tried going back to the original source files, and without me stitching the audio together, it would play fine in the timeline, and lose sync during the render. Doesn't make sense to me either.