Audio is slightly compressed and distorted when played in FCP

[dan crouch]

Please can anyone help with this?

I am cutting a sequence for a DVD using very old Pathe archive footage.
When I play the Qt’s on from my desktop they have a lovely warm distortion to them, but when they are imported and played on the timeline, the warm distortion is quite grating. It is a very subtle difference but it goes from being nostalgic and ‘old’ sounding to being quite uncomfortable on the ears.

Please can anyone help with this? I’m not too good with import setting etc but could it be a frequency conversion issue or something similar?

Thankyou in advance,
Dan.

[Jerry Hofmann]

What video format is the source footage? FWIW, you really can’t accurately judge picture without sending the signal out to a video monitor…

Jerry

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[dan crouch]

Thanks for the post’s guys. I could take it into soundtrack pro and improve it, I just don’t know why it is playing back with a different tone. Does FCP automatically compress the signal or something?

Dan.

[Michael Gissing]

What are the codec settings for picture & sound for these QT files?

[dan crouch]

Thanks for the posts’s.
It took a while to reply as I had to order a new copy of Snow Leopard to get QT 7, In order to get the pro version, to get full audio info.

The original Pathe archive clips, has audio that is running at 48 KHZ,
This is the same as my FCP project.

DV, 720 x 576 (768 x 576), Millions
16-bit Integer (Little Endian), Stereo, 48.000 kHz
Data rate is 30.34 mbits/s.

I did a test on Avid, importing the same clip and there was no difference in sound quality whatsoever. Therefore FCP is changing the sound somehow…

Any help would be very much appreciated. The director owns a record company, he’s got super man hearing, so audio is very important.

Thanks very much.
Dan.