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premiere pro audio and surround sound problem
I have recently had 2 clients say my audio was muddy or some of the soundbites were lower level than other audio. With the first client I had her check the settings on the TV and the culprit was surround sound or studio sound or one of these new audio options with televisions. As soon as she turned it off the “problems” with my DVD were fixed.
I use Premiere Pro, I use a lav with my Canon XL1, send that one channel in, “breakout out to mono” and then “treat as stereo”, just like Adobe told me to do. A much worse problem years ago came up when I used stereo audio and a not sophisticated nonprofit didn’t have both speakers hooked up so I always send everything to both channels now.
The second complaint said, “well, what if we send this to funders and they don’t know how to turn off the surround sound and they can’t hear part of the audio because it’s muddy?” Point well taken.
I have no idea how to deal with this. My levels are all fine ( I am meticulous about levels) but if an interview is quieter than something else the surround sound seems to prey on that audio.
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2 Replies
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I should have googled before I posted. The line at the bottom is my exact problem:
The DVD plays, but the audio is muddy; what do I do?Most DVD players have several audio modes that change the sound for different purposes. For example “action movie”, “symphony hall”, etc. Using your DVD remote control, find the button that changes the audio mode. Make sure that you are in “normal”, “basic”, or “regular” mode. Playing an instructional disk with voice narration in another mode can result in very muddy audio.
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Yep, you got it.
Many (cheaper) surround systems, (the cheapest one come with a DVD player) will try to reproduce surround where there isn’t any, by a splitting of frequencies (that I haven’t really researched), but the result is either a fuzzy sound from the satellite speakers, or the muddy audio you are describing. I guess, one way to deal with it would be assign the same tracks to surround speakers or to tell the client to disable the surround feature, or even better, sell them a surround version 😉
Vince
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