My quest in a nutshell

[Bruce Pelley]

Hello,a couple of questions if I may,but first some background.

I quickly discovered that the GL-2's onboard sound system lacks(to put it politely),in a number of respects.For the most part,
the stock mic appears to have a very limited effective range especially when put into operation within a medium to large enclosed space because by circumstances I am forced to place the GL a significant distance(50-75 feet or so?)away from the lectern in back of the audience.So of course what happens is that you get all of the reflections,ambience,unintended crowd noise and the like with the resultant audio track sounding cavelike, drowned,too soft,cavernous and indistinct.What I'm trying to do is to apply normalization to the entire track in an attempt to salvage the situation.It should be stated that as of this date,I do not own a major video editor/mixer application.

What I've done so far is to capture the clip in it's entirety to the hard drive,saved it and tinkered around with it.

My goal is this:

1)To extract the GL-2 audio track,saving it as a seperate .wav file.
2)Apply signal processing(normalization,etc.)and save as a new .wav file.
3)Use the processed file to overdub and replace the original track permanently.

Whoops!What is the standard format for GL-2 audio?.wav?

The scenario here has only one combined AV track.

What I want to do is this:To summarize & restate.

Find a freeware or low cost executable that will:

a)Rip or extract the audio track from the source avi file whose audio is basically unusuable.It would be even better if it would permanantly strip the audio portion of the track away completely,preserving the video portion of the track.
b)I already have sound editors.Maybe I'm not using the right one for this particular type of operation,that's why I ask.
c)The key thing is to marry the processed track by overlaying & syncing it back to the source .avi file.

Help!!!!

Nothing is easy..

Thanks.

Bruce

[Robin Davies-Rollinson]

The actual onboard mic on the GL2/XM2 does a very good job in close situations. You really are expecting too much from any mic to be working at that distance from your subject.
If you were recording to minidisc or DAT, would you really expect good quality sound 50 feet away from the speaker?
The answer lies in getting another mic closer to the subject. You could use a radio mic, or a mic with a long lead (but it really shoul be a balanced lead otherwise all manner of hum and other nasties will develop.)
Another possibility is to place a minidisc recorder close to the speaker. If you record as well on the camera mic, you can easily sync the tracks up in editing.
As for trying to rescue what you've already recorded, I don't hold out much hope - otherwise we'd all be recording as you have and the radio mic manufacturers would soon go out of business ;-)

Robin.

[Rodd Seifarth]

Bruce,

I think that some fairly inexpensive software such as Pinnacle Studio may give you some flexibility in knocking out an audio track and dubbing in a new one. Also, I just checked windows movie maker (free with OS) and it seems to be able to insert a new audio track over the original video sound track. I am also in agreement with Robin, I have had very limited success in fixing bad audio. Sort of like do the best that you can and live with it. Good luck!

Rodd

[Rodd Seifarth]

One thing that I forgot....the GL2 does offer some onboard settings for audio adjustment. I think there is one for zoom..that may have helped.