Canon XLH1 HDV 4 channel sound issues with Premiere CS5

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Christophe,

Wow, it has been years since I’ve seen a posting about the Canon HDV 4-channel audio. I don’t know the solution via Firewire, but what if you take the analog audio out from camera, and route to the LINE IN on computer, and just let the tape play and record the audio “live”? Then drop the recorded audio into NLE timeline and manually sync with channels 1 and 2 of the HDV clip?

I just did a web search for “how to capture 4 channel audio from canon xlh1” and found many posts 8-10 years old, no clear solutions though. One suggested that you may need to use the headphone out jack to get analog output of channels 3-4.

Good luck to you

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Chris Borjis]

I’m trying to remember this as well, it wasn’t an easy thing if I recall.

was HDV 4 channel audio limited to 32khz? (like DV)

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Chris,

miniDV used PCM (uncompressed) audio, while HDV went to compressed MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio. Specs I found for the XLH1 suggest a total bitrate of 384kbps, so four channel would be 96 per track, or 192kbps per stereo pair.

You are correct that DV had 32k and 48k options available for recording.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Christophe De backer]

it’s an oldie alright. But footage is still beautiful to use for internet movies. So it’s a nice retairment from a “old” broadcast camera.

I’m wondering how they did it 10 years ago. I thought that this old technologie would work faster now than 10 years ago. But apparently it was something to wonder about.

Or did they use a SDI capture device? Will that work with thunderbolt and Premiere CS5?

If firewire isn’t the solution I’m open for suggestions.

Christophe from Belgium

[Perry Sarkisian]

I know another 5 years have passed since this discussion was active, but I’ve also just come across this problem, trying to record 4 channels of audio in HDV format, in my case on a Sony HVR-S270U, and trying to import into Avid Media Composer (which won’t import these files at all).

Has anyone in the intervening years come up with a conversion program that can take the HDV files (from the Sony I get “.m2t”) and break out all 4 audio channels into something useable?

Thanks! Perry