Octava mic test
 

An engineer told me this clip is not usable. Thought I'd get a second opinion here.

did he say why?

Peaking at -25db, yes that's too low, but when I brought it up the noise floor was OK.

Surely not the pinnacle of narration recording, but far from unusable... good enough for many purposes, I think. Good enough for you?

He said the levels were too low.

Thanks Seth.

The editor probably could not get them loud enough via the NLE's volume controls and knows not how to normalize.

Is that what it takes to "Make it right"? Normalizing? If so, can it be done in Vegas?

Yes, which is what I did. Right-click on the audio clip in the timeline. Pull down to Switches, and select Normalize.

If you have additional clips that need the same setting, you can repeat the above - or - right click on the clip which has been adjusted, select Copy. Select all the other clips (via shift-click and/or ctrl-click) to receive this setting, right click on one of them, and pull down to Paste Event Attributes.

Aside from low levels it appears to be recorded at 32kHz instead of video standard 48. Not a disaster but not a good idea. IMHO, original source recordings should always be done at as high a quality as possible. There's a bit of squeaky sibilance so a touch of de-esser will be needed.

If this was submitted for broadcast, I would have rejected it as well.
A QC or broadcast engineer's responsibility is not to fix out of spec material.

Squeaky sibilance? is that background hiss?

About 32k, the camera menu says 48k. Maybe when I exported it to quicktime? I don't think the JVC can record at anything but 48k.