[Richard Crowley]

The general consensus that I have seen (and from personal experience) is that anything that costs less than $450-500 is an unreilable, cheap, fiddly, plastic toy and a waste of money. That is not to say that you might get lucky, but it might be a better use of your budget to travel to Las Vegas and play the slots. Maybe you can win enough to buy something decent.

The lowest-cost, generally-accepted minimum standard is the Sennheiser G3 series.

[Richard Crowley]

If you can measure full-open as “-3dB”, then how about giving us a number for the other case. “silent” isn’t a very objective measurement. How far can you turn it to get to -12? -24?

Note also that input trim (gain) controls are not intended to be as “linear” as the mixing controls. Their primary purpose is to allow a very wide range of input amplitudes to be accomodated.

I wouldn’t say categorically that your symptoms describe an actual problem. But there MAY be a problem, but not enough info.

[Richard Crowley]

Since you didn’t say how long it was between “beginning” and “end”, nor whether “completely out of sync” means 5 frames or 5 seconds, its hard to attribute the cause to anything specific.

You did’t mention what NLE you were using, either, but many of them will automatically convert the audio sample rate to conform to the project standard.

Without knowing the scale of the problem it isn’t really posible to say with any certainty that the problem was the sample rate, using two non-sync pieces of gear, or even using a lossy compressed format like MP3.

I have never found any significant problem with “pulling-up” sync when I have sound that was recorded on a separate (non-sync) device. Most modern equipment (even pro-sumer and even consumer gear) stays reasonably close over a 10 minute span that it won’t drift more than a few frames. More drift over longer time spans, of course, but one rarely uses even a 10-minute uninterrupted clip when editing video. And any point where the video is edited (to go to another shot, etc.) is an opportunity to “pull-up” the video to match the audio.

I would have to agree, however, that using any lossy compressed format (like MP3) is never a good choice for production work. For several reasons. If I had a choice, I would record audio at the same sample-rate that the camera is using (if that is 44.1K, then so be it.)

[Richard Crowley]

Not sure what you are asking? Are you saying that you couldn’t find the download on the MS website? When I went to https://www.microsoft.com and used their search for producer the first hit took me directly to the download page.

[Richard Crowley]

Check out (free) Microsoft Producer. It allows you to produce content (either on a web server or on a disk) that shows the PPT slide and the live-action video concurrently. It has one frame that fills most of the screen, and a smaller (inset) frame. You can control which content (PPT or live video) appears in which frame. You can also provide clickable indexes so that the viewer can have direct access to sections. Recommended. Did I mention that it is FREE?

[Richard Crowley]

If you have established that the original file on the laptop behaves the same way, then the thumb-drive copy is not the problem.

You can calculate how many samples are good, and figure out exactly how far into the WAV file the problem happens. Then you can use a binary file editor to examine the bytes in the file to see if you can see any anomoly in the bit-stream inside the WAV file. If there is just a brief interruption in the data, you can try removing the bad part and pick up the bit-stream after the problem. But if you see that everything after the spot is zeroes or something, then you are out of luck. Or maybe you can find someone who can do this for you as a favor (or for $$$ if it is worth the expense.)

[Richard Crowley]

They are BOTH overpriced. Cable is NOT magic. Don’t throw your money away on something that makes absolutely no difference.

[Richard Crowley]

Google revealed several thousand hits for: Bluetooth headphone transmitter. They are typically used by people for their MP3 players (etc.) but no reason they couldn’t be used for monitoring your camcorder audio.

There was even a vendor at NAB a couple weeks ago showing a dongle that plugs into a standard Clear-Com (4-pin XLR) intercom headset jack to allow use of a common Bluetooth headset (like used for cell-phones.)

[Richard Crowley]

At their NAB demonstration (similar to the one that is available online), Newtek made it clear that the Tricaster has MULTIPLE of the equivalent of down-stream keyers (DSK). I can’t imagine why you couldn’t have the score ribbon and the player stats overlays intependently showing in the frame. I suggested two different computers to source them so that you wouldn’t have to do the awkward switch between score and stat.

[Richard Crowley]

I’m looking at getting a Tricaster (or probably VT[5]) myself. I can’t help thinking that there are Tricaster-specific forums (on Newtek’s website?) where people are participating who have actually done this.

After watching the whizzy demonstration at the NAB convention a couple weeks ago, I would be surprised if there wasn’t some way of putting up multiple overlays/keys. I would be tempted to use separated “feeder” computers for the continuous score ribbon, and another for the player stats.