[Accountclosed]

Excellent advice from everyone here. And very constructive. Given the consensus, I think I will pass on this lady

[Accountclosed]

Thanks for your feedback, Steve.
I’m home recuperating (was released from the hospital Wednesday night) from a traffic accident where someone rear-ended me at a traffic light. I have some lower back injuries and have limited mobility for a while, so I’ll be around the computer more than usual this week.

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Accountclosed]

Thanks Joe. However, there are quite a few people in the video community who are award-winning pros who feel that I don’t know anything about audio and even LESS about video, so I don’t know that it would sell. 🙂
But some folks have been telling me for years that I should write a book and distill some of my knowledge into some published format. With book sales slumping and e-books being cheap or pirated easily, I’m not so sure that it would be worth my while–writing a book is a major undertaking.
But I’ve not ruled it out.

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Accountclosed]

Compression isn’t the issue at stake here. What I’m trying to find out is whether or not Sony put a big high pass filter in the audio system, that’s non-defeatable, like the V1U.

When audio is important, we use separate recording system, but for run & gun situations, it’s rather cumbersome. And it’s a major headache to deal with it in post. However, if XDCam EX is as good as Sony claims, it should be quite adequate for informal shoots where pristine audio is not the main focus. Situations like parades, where you have to move about on the street precludes having a MotU 896, 12 volt lead acid battery, inverter, laptop computer in a wagon.

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Accountclosed]

Certainly, Steve.
Although I am not sure it will be easy to condense it all to one paragraph. But here goes:

We human beings have the most amazing set of senses, with hearing that enables us to easily perceive sounds ranging from 20 cycles per second to 20,000 cycles per second. But human hearing is not equal at all frequencies. Fletcher and Munsen did scientific studies on the sensitivity of hearing over the 20-20,000cps range more than half a century ago. Their findings characterizing the

[Accountclosed]

I want to make sure we’re not buying a pig in a poke, like we did with the HVR-V1U last spring. Quoted specs were 20-20KHz in the B&H web site, but the camera actually tested to be 1,200-20,000Hz actual.

Sony is claiming the same response for the EX1, but qualifying it with +/-3dB. I asked Simon Wyndham about it, but he has yet to get around to testing it. I figure by now, with several of these in the hands of owners in Europe, someone could run the RightMark test (a free download) and verify Sony’s claims.

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Accountclosed]

Unless that is a program default for new projects, then I would say no. The footage is definately online, but pending.

It looks like I’m going to have to solve this pronto, because I did a capture of 6 reels of camera tape of a classical concert shoot we did on Saturday, rebooting the computer before each reel was captured, just to be certain Windows was “clean”, but all of the reels have synch loss between audio and video tracks. It took a full day to get that footage captured, and it’s no good because of the synch loss. I would see the violines start sawing away, and then a second later the music would start. Camera one was out of synch from the beginning of the capture, while Cam 2 and 3 lost synch somewhere during the concert. I haven’t even bothered with the second half because we don’t have an editable program here. The footage will have to be re-captured, but not in Premiere. Since Premiere doesn’t recognize the footage captured from HDVSplit, we-ll have to try capturing in Vegas on the old workstation and then try copying the captures over to the new workstation across the LAN, which will take a small eternity. And then, if Premiere doesn’t stop Media Pending on that footage, we will have wasted another full day.

I don’t touch the Media Cache anymore. I learned my lesson in September when I deleted it, thinking it was good housekeeping, and I ended up having to re-do an entire wedding edit from scratch–capture to edit–because the existing captures were no longer recognized (media pending forever) after the deletion of the cache. I also had to name the new captured files differently from the originals, or they would not import (media pending forever) –seems that the original filenames were tainted and Premiere marked them as ‘don’t bother to render’.

Now I’m capturing fresh new files in HDVsplit and Premiere acts as if I deleted the Media Cache files with these.

I have not deleted the preferences file. In fact, I’m reluctant to delete ANY files, as it may make the whole of my existing projects unreadable, as what happened in September! I don’t understand what Premiere is doing with these cache files, and it’s a black box and as such, these past experiences of having to redo a week of editing because we mucked around with deleting the cache files has taught us not to delete anything ever again until we’re certain we’ll never edit a particular project again.

Back to this concert, we’re in a real pickle, because looking for the points in the video where the a/v synch slipped is harder than looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s not readily apparent, unless there is a way to detect the corrupt frame with a search tool.

We could delete the files and recapture again, but seeing as 100% of the video reels captured have at least ONE loss of synch event, I don’t expect we’ll come out any better off on multiple tries, and it takes a full business day to re capture and rewind all these tapes.

We wasted an hour trying to figure out where the synch is lost and how to fix it, but it seems our guesses were wrong and things a minute later don’t look right, so I don’t know which way it slipped. Seems the video is a second ahead of audio, but even then, when we get to the 43-minute point in the first intermission, a photographer’s flash goes off and cam 1 is a full second behind cam 2 and cam 3, which are about 7 frames off from eachother, though both of them seem to have their audio delayed a full second from their video.

It’s opening a can of worms to try to fix this in post. Knowing exactly where and how many frames and how often the glitch occured would take days to figure out and we’d never be 100% certain. Better to capture reliably with another tool, but how to get those files into Premiere without stalling at Media Pending is the real kicker…

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Accountclosed]

I’m pretty sure we haven’t changed drive letters, and the system is practically new–the 1TB RAID arrays are not even 10% full yet.
The location of the temp files, media cache, etc, are all on separate drives, with several hundreds of gigs of available space so I can’t imagine we’re running out of disc space.
But the files HDVsplit makes just import without much disc activity, so it’s as if Premiere isn’t even attempting to conform the audio or make a media cache file.
The files that Premiere captured directly are ready to use as soon as capture finishes.
I wondered if there was some configuration issue with HDVsplit that affected the file format in some way that makes it compatible or not with Premiere. Perhaps not.
It is so easy to get the Media Pending situation–simply changing your mind about the file name after capture can cause it–so I always am careful to choose the filename before capture and then just confirm it at end of capture. One time, I changed it, and the file never came out of Media Pending. I thought maybe because the HDVsplit files don’t originate in Premiere that for some reason the two are not ‘handshaking’.

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Accountclosed]

What works well for me is to record at high bit depth with ultra-quiet preamps and normalize before conversion to distribution bit depth.

I’m in the middle of recording a concert by a major east coast symphony–we just finished setup this evening, which consisted of hoisting a custom-designed array of microphones for surround pickup, over the 4th row center, using aircraft cables. The recording is being made at 24/96 resolution, with orchestral peaks at -12dB. This covers any unexpected loud sounds without danger of clipping.

Since this program is going on to DVD, it will be downsampled to 16/48, and for CD, 16/44. In the final stage of conversion we’ll normalize it to -2dB, typically.

When normalizing, it’s highly desirable to do the process in 32-bit float, or 64-bit float, if available, as it reduces rounding errors and results in the least destructive effect on the sound quality.

Usually it is best to normalize first, then do any other things you need to do to the file, having the most bits allocated across the dynamic range. Watch the levels if you do any kind of EQ or compression with makeup gain and you should be fine.

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com

[Accountclosed]

I too, use an HV20 as a capture deck (to cut down on the hours on my HVR-V1Us) and used HDVSplit, a program recommended as an alternative to Premiere Pro, to capture the footage. However, it is THAT footage which Premiere refuses to “make ready”. Even small clips which should import instantly, are not ready, even after 1/2 hour.

I ended up re-capturing from the same camera in Premiere and that worked. But why can’t Premiere read footage captured by HDVsplit? I’m very concerned about synch because I’ll be covering a 1:45 Beethoven concert Saturday night with one intermission and that amounts to two 45-min performances in which the synch of three cameras must be maintained to the frame. Since I’ve had loss of synch with Premiere captures, I thought I’d try HDVsplit, but it seems that Premiere never creates it’s ‘cache’ files when this footage from HDVsplit is imported. I know some people are using it, but they much have a trick to making it work.
I also have some Vegas-captured footage, but Premiere was able to load that fine. It’s just HDVSplit footage that ends up “media pending” indefinately. Any idea why?

Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss

https://www.basspig.com The Bass Pig’s Lair – 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!
https://www.mwcomms.com
https://www.adventuresinanimemusic.com