Jean-christophe Boulay
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Ty,
I’m surprised you don’t know about VLC. Here I was thinking you knew everything! It’s an open source media player that has a solid reputation as being able to read everything. It lacks export and transcoding functions, but is a great player. As the saying goes, “if VLC can’t read it, you’re f’d”.
I tought Ty something! yay!
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Chalk up one new miracle for VLC. With the info WaveAgent gives you, I think you’re very lucky that VLC can somehow read the file. It seems the recorder didn’t close the file properly. I don’t think you’re going to be able to repair the file while maintaining both audio and metadata.
I’d try rerecording the audio to another file, either through Audio Hijack or by physically routing an output from your computer to a recorder or another computer with some kind of recording software. You’ll lose timestamp info this way, but you still have the corrupt file and you can read its info in WaveAgent should you need to reference back to it. Depending on what software you’ll use the file in, there may be a way to reinsert the timecode info to the new file’s metadata. Not ideal by any means, but I think you’re in damage control territory already.
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Bjarki,
In the scenario you describe, Pro Tools compatibility will be the determining factor. Logic plays nice with most control surfaces and supports many protocols.
PT is notoriously fiddly about which control surfaces it integrates well with, mainly because Avid (formerly Digidesign) make their own surfaces and they’d like you to use those. Smaller control surfaces should have a HUI-emulation mode for the best integration to PT. The Mackie MCU has this, of course. I’m not sure about the SAC-2K but I remember seeing it working well with PT a few years back. I’m never fond of buying into a discontinued product line, though.
The JLCooper MCS-3800 manual contains references to compatibility with ProTools 5 only. The current version is ProTools 8. If you go for the JLCooper, this warrants further investigation before you plump down the cash. The JLCooper’s hardware looks really solid compared to the others. I haven’t used one of these myself.
The most supported of the surfaces you listed is the Euphonix. I’ve used them with Logic and it was a brilliant experience. More importantly, Avid has acquired Euphonix and is integrating the EuCon communication standard into its products. Pro Tools support for these should be excellent in the near future. They are a tad pricy, though, as you noted. I’ve seen them for quite a bit less in small ads and even in a local pawn shop!
If you have clients in that room, the Euphonix clearly are the best-looking ones and, sometimes, that client saying “ooooooh” is worth the extra in the price. If not, I think the Mackie would be the best place to look as it’s very compatible, stable and has nice upgrade options should you ever need more faders or pots.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
You need a recorder that will play back at altered speeds without degradation?
Ever heard of tape?
Seriously, I don’t know of any portable digital recorder that does that and doubt any exist. It takes quite some horsepower to timestretch convincingly, especially in real time, and it’s probably way down the list of features when designing a portable recorder.
I’d probably have a DAW running on a laptop to transfer from the H4N and treat it in that environment. Or record directly to the laptop, once it’s there. Or record to an old Nagra you tripped over in the attic and record the output of that to digital.
How dramatically do you need to slow it down?
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
I don’t regularly use it, as most everything is done through the digital connections, but the analog audio quality is very good. There’s absolutely no need for a separate audio interface as far as audio quality is concerned.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
The Perian extensions for Quicktime enable exporting of FLV files in either On2VP6 of Sorenson Spark formats. https://perian.org/#download
It’s a lot less powerful than Squeeze, but it’s free and does a good job most of the time.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Hi Jessica,
To plug two mics into that camera, you’ll need an adapter cable which breaks out to two female XLR plugs, which will each be plugged into its own mic. Basically, something like this only with female XLR connectors. This may be a bit hard to track down, as it’s not a common audio connection at all.
As for mics, I’m from the cozy studio side of things so people on here with more location experience can surely guide you better on that. With this kind of setup you’ll need mics with receivers on which you can control the output level, as you won’t have a mixer before the recorder and need that control.
With this kind of setup, each mic will go to its own track of the stereo feed the camera records. One mic will be on the left track, the other on the right track. As that camera records directly to stereo AC3, from what I’ve seen, you’ll have to convert the audio before editing and mixing it back into a stereo mix. A simple mix will be needed, as I’m sure you want both voices to come out of both speakers on the end product.
John does have a point about hiring an audio person, though…
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
If the video and audio were recorded with a common timecode source referencing them, it’s as easy as looking at the timestamp on the audio in the Logic session and digging the corresponding clip up in your video bin. Even better, export and EDL from the DAW and refer to that.
Without timecode, you’re pretty much blind unless the video also comes with camera audio in which case you just have to listen to lots and lots of clips to find the action that made the sound you want. If you didn’t film with timecode, the long blind search you’re getting into will probably ensure you do next time.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Early 1.5TB models pushed the platter density to rather obscene levels, which is where this idea of them being more finicky comes from. Now, manufacturers are taking away platters from some models so they can say their drives draw less power. This combination should raise fail rates dramatically, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. All my 1.5 and 2TB drives are humming along nicely and all my friends and contacts running them haven’t had any issues either. My fail rate for these drives is lower than for my 1TB drives, right now.
I’d personally say there isn’t that much reason to have cold feet. If you’re running RAID5, you’re always protected from a single drive failure anyways. Don’t buy “Green” drives or drives that use the “very low power consumption” selling point, as these are more likely to have high areal densities and have mechanisms that stop and start the platters often.
As for software that monitors drives, mechanical checks are pretty much limited to SMART status tests. Most drive maintenance software (DiskWarrior, Techtool, Onyx) has this included and your RAID enclosure itself probably has the function. I don’t know of any affordable software that goes beyond that. SMART is still enough to alert you to issues before they become major. Sometimes.
IHTH
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com -
Don’t delete QTX (if Apple jumped from 7 to 10, it’s surely so we can use this übercool shorthand name, so let’s). I tried that on a friend’s system and had to retrace my steps, as some important files seem to only be present in the QTX package. Web video playback suffered big time.
Doing what Jerry suggests is the best idea, I think. It works great here, though the odd video will open in QTX which then repossesses all formats for itself.
Why they did that is beyond me.Another one for the “Apple’s Really Stupid Ideas” folder.
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com