Basic Sound Question
 

I'm a Mac/FCP user. Hearing how much you guys love Vegas, I advised a PC friend to buy/download Vegas Platinum for his racing videos. He's muddling through pretty good except for sound. I paid him a visit the other day and looked at Vegas. Obviously, the interface and workings were rather foreign to me.

The problem:
He's not getting audio when the clips are played back in the time line. I do see the audio meter moving, but it looks low. What I really don't see is sound waves down in the audio tracks.

So I start thinking FCP, and look at his preferences. I change external playback monitor to none, but that doesn't do it. I look at how he captured, and his settings were for audio and video. I looked at the Vegas capture window and played back some of his captured clips in that window and heard the audio.

It is as if there is a video file and an audio file but the reference movie in the time line isn't pointing to the the audio file and I'm not finding the audio file.

The other things I know, is he's using a laptop and he's capturing from USB instead of firewire.

So the basic question is: How does he capture video and audio so that it plays back in the timeline during editing. I did see him put an mp3 file in the music track and it played during editing, so I don't think its a sound card issue. And I thought it was strange that Vegas played mp3 because FCP seems limited to wave and Aif.

Thanks,
Scott

Hard to tell from the info you've provided, but, one guess is that he recorded his audio at extremely low levels. On thing to try is to add the "Normalize" function to the timeline. If there's any data there, it should raise the volume to be heard.

I believe when you end your capture session the clips are automatically added to the project media bin. If you right click on a clip and 'open in trimmer' and play it from the trimmer do you hear the sound or see the wave form in the audio track? Yes? Then add the clip to the time line. Do you see the wave form or hear the audio? When the clip is added you should get an audio and a video track. If you can see the audio track but no wave form then right click the audio track and 'switches-normalize'. If this brings up a wave form then the audio was rcorded at too low a volume. If it does not then no audio was recorded.(Thats probably not the case since you say you can hear it in the capture window) It is also possible that the output volume in the mixer 'view-mixer' has been decreased too far, or the mute switch in the header has been activated (usually changes the color of the track). There is also a volume slider in the header that could be misadjusted or a volume envelope has been added. The nice thing about Vegas is that there are a number of ways to do something but in the same vane ther area number of ways something can be off also.
Good luck

Does he have more than one sound device?

I wonder if he has sound via the motherboard as well as sound from a different device, eg a pcmcia card (as I have on my laptop). Might be worth checking that the sound is being routed to the correct output (ie the one with speakers attached!).

If memory serves you can check this by looking at the mixer view and clicking on one of the icons just above the levels meters (sorry - don't have Vegas to hand so can't check).

Might also want to check Options/Preferences/Audio Device (I think) and see if all is well there in terms of which device is being used.

Good luck.

Ian . . .