[Tom Yeiser]

Mike,

I pretty much work only with audio and video recorded on separate systems and sync them in Vegas. I might have been able to offer some insight into the workflow I am familiar with. What you’re dealing with is outside of my experience, so good luck and I’ll follow the thread to see what happens next.

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

Do you have enough space available on the drive you are writing to? I’ve seen this happen when I had a lot of projects going and had not realized that my hard drive was about out of space.

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

Are you recording on two different devices like a video camera and an audio recorder and then manually syncing them up in Vegas?

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

Don’t you have to remove the memory cards to get the uncompressed HDMI output?

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

I took my three m2ts files and aligned them so the video would play back smoothly and rendered them to a mpg file. Then in a new SVP11 file I imported (import media) the mpg video and my wav file from the Sound Devices 702. Despite the audio glitches in the video file ‘Plural Eyes’ was able to sync the files, much to my amazement. It looks like this will be a solution. I guess life is too short to figure everything out, but I am glad ‘Plural Eyes’ was brilliant enough to cover my mistakes.

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

Thanks for the post Phil. These clips are big, the camera is splitting them at the 4gb limit.

Here is a screen shot of SVP11 with my two m2ts clips that ‘HD Writer’ created during ‘copy to PC’. I don’t remember how many times I’ve done this in the past year, but it has been a pretty regular way of working. Usually I can expand the m2ts files and just bring them together on the timeline and the audio and video plays back seamlessly. In this case the video blinks and the audio is way off. As they are aligned in the screen shot the video will play back seamlessly, but the audio drops out.

I will be able to make this work since I have a separate audio file from a Sound Devices 702, but it may be messy. Ultimately I merge the m2ts video with the 702 audio. If I have a single video file Plural Eyes will sync the files and take care of audio drift, but with three files that don’t line up, well as miraculous as Plural Eyes is, it can’t pull all three together.

What keeps me messing around with this is the fact that ‘HD writer AE’ can play these files seamlessly. The information in the cont, pmpd, sfk, tmb files must hold a secret that I can’t figure out how to use. I might have HD Writer make a DVD for me and see if I can rip the converted file off the DVD.

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

Hey Mark,

I read through these and was able to get HD Writer AE 2.1 to copy the various files from one place to another on my computer, but they are still in the same format that Vegas Pro and Vegas Platinum won’t open as a single file (several m2ts files and a cont file). It is entirely possible I am missing something obvious, but what I want to do is find something that can read the container file and reformat the video into a video file that Vegas can treat as a single item on the timeline.

Thanks,
I appreciate your help

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

I forgot to mention that ‘Statistics’ also reports ‘Average Value’ in dB.

As I was thinking about VU I did a quick search and read wikipedia. I think VU meters report dB but the mechanics of the device cause it to be inaccurate in a helpful way, which may be what the TV folks are after.

Some of my preamps (Focusrite ISA428)have vu meters but they are way to slow to be of much help to me, but I enjoy watching them.

Here is a link that I found that is a free VU meter application. https://www.vuplayer.com/other.php I didn’t notice if they have an Apple version.

Sweet Owen Sound Recording Studio
Musician

[Tom Yeiser]

In Vegas (and CD Architect) you can right click on an audio file in the timeline, select ‘properties’, and check ‘Normalize’. The properties window will tell you how many decibiles of gain were added (or removed) to the file so that the peak is at zero. When you uncheck ‘normalize’ it will remove the gain. If it added gain, subtract what was added from zero.

If you are in Sound Forge (Studio 10) under ‘Tools’ and ‘Statistics’ you will find a report that tells you ‘Maximum sample value (dB)’, and where that is ‘Maximum sample value (time)’.

I hope this is what you are looking for.

[Tom Yeiser]

Thanks for the reply. Since I am not independently middle class I appreciate a pragmatic solution that does not require another investment.

All AD/DA conversions in my recording studio runs off of a master clock. All outboard gear that have converters sync to word clock, a relatively inexpensive solution in audio. I guess in this case I am only surprised at over such a short period of time that drift becomes significant and how expensive it is to sync video to audio.

Thanks again,
Tom