Can’t hear vocal tracks when uploaded to youtube on mobile

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Youtube link? I’d like to listen. My guess is it’s predominately an audio mixing problem, add some compression and makeup gain on the voice-over and lower the music.

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Angelo Lorenzo

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[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

This sounds like a classic case of phase cancelation.

The reason you can hear the dialog in every situation except the phone without headphones is because the phone only has a single mono speaker.

Somewhere in there your dialog got flipped on one channel.

Let me take a guess. You recorded this video with a consumer camera with a professional mic plugged in using a basic XLR to 1/8″ adapter cable to the jack on the camera right?

What this does is record the balanced signal from the mic as a stereo signal in camera. Since pin 3 in the XLR caries a flipped version of the signal and your adapter feeds this into the ring connector in the 1/8″ plug that flipped signal got recorded onto the right channel in the camera while the left channel got the non flipped version.

Apply the “Fill Left” effect to your dialog and see if that doen’t fix the problem.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I could have sworn the iPhone had stereo speakers, but there may be some phase cancellation in the air. The speakers are close enough for it to be an issue.

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Angelo Lorenzo

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[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

All iPhones from the 3G onward have had a pair of sound grills on the bottom, but that doen’t mean it’s stereo.

I shall have to play around with my iPhone 5.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Tested my iPhone 5.

It may apear to have two speakers, but it’s mono.

If anyone feels like trying this, here’s the file I made:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0g06q7gu61knyiu/Phase%20cancelation%20test.mp3

It’s some jazz which I’ve copied the left channel to the right channel, and then flipped the right channel at 5 second intervals. If you have a mono device, the sound will cut completely at the 5 second mark and return 5 sec later.

[Russell Anway]

Thank you for your responses, though I’m not sure we’ve hit on a solution yet.

Firstly, a link. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bIV2U6bFXvA&feature=plcp

Here’s an example, but there are dozens of these that behave identically. It’s worth noting that I’m currently on an ipad, and I can here all the proper tracks, but that the audio sounds a bit garbled.

Next, the video was shot on a dslr, audio was recorded with a sennheiser me66 into a zoom as stereo.

I’m not an audio pro, but I have some basic mixing skills and I can’t imagine this is a levels/compression problem, the music is so quiet.

Next, I’ll say that my suspicion is that I have something along the lines of this : https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1160353

But, it’s not panned to the left, at least not in the controls tab of the viewer window. But having run some tests on different timeline settings, I’ve come up with various screwed up variations of the problem including, voices not music, so I must confess I don’t fully understand some of these settings in premiere, as I am a fairly recent convert, longtime fcper. Also, cs6, btw.

Thanks, any suggestions would be great. I need this fixed tomorrow so I’m looking at an edl to fcp, but a long term solution would be better as this seems to be a bi-product of my workflow/setup.

Thanks.

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[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

As i said, this is a phasing issue. Your Stereo voice track is probably actually two copies of the same signal, one of which has been flipped. Did you try my suggestion of applying the “fill left” effect to all the clips in track one (the voice track)?

If that didn’t work then something else is up, but the problem is DEFINITELY phase cancellation. The Voices disappear when played on a mono device and sound weird when played through closely spaced stereo speakers. I can hear it when I play it on my laptop as well because I know what to listen for.

By the way, how did you hook your ME66 up to the Zoom?

JM

[Russell Anway]

Thank you so much, I meant to say that I would try your suggestion when I got back to my computer (was away yesterday i.e. iPad) but neglected to put it in my post.

That does seem to have fixed it. I say “seem” only because I’m still unclear on what was happening and why. Here is the corrected version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axdd39xfOLk&feature=youtu.be

I just don’t quite understand what you mean by my audio being “flipped.”

I was plugging my me66 into my zoom with an XLR. My understanding is that it is balanced (though I don’t totally know what that means), it is long, and it’s worth knowing I soldered one end on myself (though I have every reason to believe I did that correctly).

So is this something that is happening because of the way I’m setting up? Is the “fill left” effect just copying the right side audio over to the left, and therefore eliminating the stereo effect?

Thank you again for your help, but I’d still love to know what’s going on.

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[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

To explain exactly whats going on, we need to delve into the world of audio and explain what “balanced”, “Stereo” and “Mono” really mean.

Balanced audio is a trick for limiting interference that would otherwise occur with long cable runs given the RF soup we live in. The idea is simple; Send an audio signal and it’s mirror image down the same cable on two separate wires. Any interference that occurs will alter the two signals in the same way, ie, not in a mirror image. At the other end of the cable, the two signals are combined together is such away that the interference cancels itself out and the original signal remains. XLR connectors always cary balanced audio. Pin #2 caries the normal audio signal and pin #3 caries a mirror image signal, the exact oposite of what is on pin #2. (pin #1 is the ground.)

Stereo, on the other hand, is two distinct, separate, signals.

The problem you’re having comes from when balanced and stereo audio are improperly mixed.

The mic creates a Balanced, mono signal. If, however, we feed this balanced signal into a recorder that is wired for Stereo, instead of the two mirror image versions of the signal being processed into one Mono signal, they are simply recorded as they are, one onto the Left channel, and one onto the Right channel.

This is fine, as long as the two channels are never mixed, but when they are, strange things happen.

You see, your iPhone only has one speaker, so the two signals, on a mirror image of the other, are fed into the same speaker, and while one signal is telling the speaker to do one thing, the other signal tells the speaker to do the exact opposite, and as a result, the speaker doesn’t move. This is called phase cancelation. The same thing happens with two speakers when the audio waves mix in the air. this is why it sounded weird on your iPad, because the two speakers on the iPad are close together, and so the two versions of the signal were mixing in the air and partially canceling each other out before arriving at your ears.

Fill left fixes the problem because it replaces the mirror image version of the signal that was recorded on the right channel with a direct non mirror image one from the Left channel. You don’t lose anything by doing this because the audio was never stereo to begun with, it was recorded with one Mic. To be real stereo you would have had to record with two mics. You could also fix the problem by inverting the contents of the Right channel, but Premiere doen’t have an effect that does that.

The source of your problem is indeed the cable you made, which, although it is wired correctly, isn’t the cable you should be using because you’re feeding a balanced signal into a stereo recorder without converting from one signal type to the other.

You mentioned that it was an XLR cable but that you wired one end yourself. I’m guessing that was cause you needed something other then an XLR to go into the Zoom; Ether a 1/4 or a 1/8th inch TRS plug. To wire such an adapter correctly, you need to connect pin #2 of the XLR to the tip AND ring of the TRS and connect pins #1 and #3 to the base of the TRS plug. This will ground off the mirror signal on Pin #3 and feed the correct signal from pin #2 into both channels of the recorder.

(if you’re not using an adapter like this, but a straight XLR to XLR cable directly into the zoom, then something’s gone wrong in the Zoom)

(Another option is to get/make a XLR to TS adapter, which would be the same except without the ring connection. This would ether cause audio to be recorded on the Left channel only, or, if the recorder is smart enough, it will notice that the ring connection is missing and record the same signal to both channels)

Anyway, to keep this from happening in the future, you have three options:

1) Apply the Fill Left effect to all the audio. This could get annoying if you have a lot of clips.

2) When you import the audio into Premiere, select all of it and right click and select Modify > Audio Channels. Then select “mono” or “mono as stereo” (I would do that former) and then uncheck the box next to Channel 2, thereby disabling it. (You don’t need it… it is, after all, just a mirror image of what’s on Channel 1.)

3) fix/buy/make a new adapter as discussed above.

I hope I’ve explained this clearly, if you have any questions feel free to ask.

JM

[Greg Clover]

This is a perfect explanation. Thanks for being so thorough. I’ve had this issue with Mac laptops as well.

GC