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Audio clip with solid clipping
I’ve got a real delimma here. I got an audio track, part of a short test video we did that’s horrible. Sounds like constant clipping. I didn’t realize it until we were done.
I was shooting both to tape and to DV-Rack in my laptop. I had the mixer set, or so I thought. Shue M367. I had the limiter switches on. I used the tone generator to zero the meter on the mixer and -12db on the camera. Headphones were plugged into the mixer. The speaker was wearing a wired Shure SM93 lav. I noticed the red (clip)light come on every so often on the mixer but I thought the limiter was taking care of that as everything sounded normal and good in my headset.
Since I also recorded to DVCAM tape, I haven’t had a chance to capture or play the tape cause my DSR-11 DVCAM deck was in for service and just came back this evening. I’m going to play the tape to see how the audio is. Only thing I can figure was recording volume was too high in DV-Rack.
I put up a 1 miunute wav clip for you to listen. I’ve currently got the track in Sound Forge 9 trying to figure out how to clean this up, or just wnat I did.
I’d appreciae any help or suggestions. I just found an old tutorial for Sony Noise reduction which I haven’t used in a long time. Help please? Or should I just trash it. It’s not critical. It was a test shoot, but at least I’ll know what to watch for next time. It’s just that I got so much connected I don’t know where to start. I thought by having my mixer right, the audio coming out would be good.
https://www.azagel.com/clipping.wav
Thanks
Allen -
3 Replies
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Hello Allen,
Sorry for your pain. Maybe a simple line out to mic in problem?
Were you listening to the audio at the two destination decks?
I kept getting challenged by that this week on shoot here. The shooter would leave to shoot B-roll. When he came back, he wouldn’t tell me he’d changed the audio setup. (To all shooters; play nice. Communicate with your sound folks.)
Each time he came back I had to go through a few seconds of WTF!? before I realized he’d been playing with the audio. First time it happened, the return to my mixer was way low on one track. As I dialed through the monitor options on the 442, I listened to that one channel in both ears. I realized it was the camera mic. He was telling me it was something wrong with my headphone cable. (Must be YOUR gear problem. It’s not MINE.) Had I let it go, the recording on that channel would have been crap.
When I realized what he had done. I simply said, “No you have your camera mic turned on. Wanna turn it off now?” The I rechecked the levels. I will give him credit. He did have his gain knobs taped down.
Regards,
Ty Ford
Ty Ford’s “Audio Bootcamp Field Guide” was written for video people who want better audio. More at: https://home.comcast.net/~tyreeford/AudioBootcamp.html
or https://www.tyford.com -
Hello Ty
Not the on-board mic because it wasn’t plugged it. I ran Channel 1 cable from the mixer to the front mic in on the camera and had both switches set to front/line in. Goofed up on the DVD recorder and I’m wondering if tht may have cause the entire audio problem. Here’s the set-up I did.
Lavs to Mixer. Out from miser XLR to camera front connection. Firewire out from camera to laptop and DV-Rack. RCA out of camera to what was supposed to be DVD recorder in but after it was all over I noticed the analog was plugged into the output of the dvd recorder. ugh! S*%t. I noticed the audio levels in DV-Rack were too hi but stupid me didn’t do anything about it. Anyway I could’t find my 1/4″ audio to mini 1/8 adapter so I couldn’t plug the headset into the camera or the laptop. My fault again.
I’m going to get the tape out of the camera today and see what was actually recorded to the DVcam tape. I should have been monitoring the out from the Laptop and/or the the DVD recorder which is a panasonic ES25.
Is there any way to fix that audio track or should I not even try. I played around with the NR and other FX in SoundForge but not knowing the program that well, I ws aloe to reduce some of the noise but couldn’t bring the voice to any semblence of normal.
Allen
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Hello Ty
Well it was a stupid move by me. In all the excitement of setting everything up and using it the first time. I got my answer from a friend.
After I did my audio text and zeroed the meter, I should have backed the master pot on the mixer down a notch.
Also by plugging the audio cable into the front camer connection, since that’s has +48v always on that may have contributed as I also had the phantom power on in the mixer.
I’ve since gotten an XLR splitter, so now coming out of the mixer with only 1 cable to the wye and into the camera rear Channel 1 and 2.
Allen
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