[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Errol Lazare] “Is this normal behaviour?”

Nope! The transfer over to AME can take a little while sometimes and the reading XMP always takes way longer then it seems it should, but the times you’re reporting are quite excessive, and once you’re switched over to AME nothing you do in Premiere should be affecting AME.

So yes, something’s very wrong. The question is what.

Have you tired restarting, trashing prefs, reinstalling, all those good things? Also try loading the Premiere sequence from AME. Save your project in Premiere and then go over to AME and select File > Add Premiere Pro Sequence… and see if that renders properly. You might also want to try that with Premiere closed then after AME’s going open up premiere and see if you can edit.

You didn’t say which version of Premiere you’re using. Also what kind of footage are you editing?

JM

[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

[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

[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.

[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]

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.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Marcus Moore] “are you saying that option-dragging a clip from a bin to the sequence replaces the clip content but maintains all it’s effects and attributes?”

Yep. That’s exactly how it works. To me, it seems silly to have it any other way.

Also, I should mention that while Option will use the in-point of the incoming clip, holding option-shift and dragging the new clip in will use the in-point of the existing clip. Very useful trick, for example, replacing a scratch effect with a better version you just got sent. Option-Shift will swap the files and keep the in-out points from the old file. (you could also replace the old file in the Project Browser but I dislike doing that cause I’ve had weird stuff happen.)

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Premiere Basics:

Premiere reads all files natively at the location it finds them. Premiere doesn’t move, convert or in anyway change the video files when you “import” them (except write a small identifier to the XMP but that’s getting technical.)

So, you need to copy the video files to your computer and organise them on your hardrive before you start importing anything.

How you organise them becomes a matter of personal taste.

A basic example of simple organization

A Project folder which contains:
    The project file,
    other related project files
    A Folder called Media which contains:
        Folders named “Card 1” “Card 2” etc. These contain the contents of each CF card copied exactly as
        the camera left them
    Other folders for Music, Encodes etc.

This is a really basic example which will not work with any sizable project, but it’s an example.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

It’s probably something to do with fact that you’re working with merged media. Premiere doen’t quite know how to work with it yet.

Also, if you’ll notice, even though the video is playing in the source window, the icon is still the media missing question mark, so something is clearly missing. When you relinked everything did it ask about audio as well as video?

I’ve never relinked merged clips, (i try to avoid them as they are a little half baked as yet) but I will experiment.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Judging by the fact that turning on the Red Rocket makes no image play at all,, I’d say that it isn’t working.

Try reinstalling the drivers, moving it to a different PCIe slot, etc.

Does the red footage play smoothly in Redcine-X?