Hey all,

I was wondering if buying the MA-300 and having 4 (XLR lavalier wireless) mics input to the camera is the 12 bit audio acceptable for broadcast?

Also if anone has any experience editing 12 bit audio in a NLE?

Thanks in advance

Well, 12-bit audio is in fact CD-quality sound. The most famous DV camcorder of all, the Sony VX1000, had 12-bit audio and it was used for broadcast all the time.

<<<-- Originally posted by Chris Hurd : Well, 12-bit audio is in fact CD-quality sound. The most famous DV camcorder of all, the Sony VX1000, had 12-bit audio and it was used for broadcast all the time. -->>>

Where do you buy your CDs from Chris? :)
CD audio is 16 bit 44.1KHz, the 4 channel audio in the DV Spec is 12 bit 32KHz.

I've tried some 3 channel (on camera mic plus external mic) interview recordings with the XL2, and the sound quality was fine. I have doubts about using it for music recording, but for speech and backgrounds I think there is no problem. Mic placement probably has a much bigger impact on the recording quality than changing from 2 to 4 channels.

Yeah, CD's are 16-bit 44.1khz. DV actually has that as part of the DV spec, but nobody uses it...

Chris is correct, the original VX1000 (the camera that started this whole "DV Revolution") only offered 12-bit 32Khz audio. I would agree with Richard, for dialogue it's fine, but wouldn't be the first choice for music or anything with an extended dynamic range.

Thanks for the feedback guys..but tell me. Can any NLE edit 12 bit audio? I use Liquid Edition, and so far only audio I see that it supports is 8bit & 16 bit. I have a old VX1000 and have shot and captured using Liquid Edition (just home movie stuff of the kids) but I think it says in the view finder 16bit 48KHz.

Can any NLE edit 12 bit audio?
Good question Scott. I have seen it reported many times that it is best to stick with 16 bit audio. Otherwise your NLE may have problems in capture, FX, and rendering.

The conventional wisdom, if you have more than two sources to record, is to either use a mixer prior to the camera, or use a separate recording device, like a mini-disk recorder.

OTOH, the BEST way to find out is just try it! Record some 4-channel audio on your XL2, load it into LE and see what happens. If you do, please let us know the results.

Shoot for the cut,
Pete

I've edited the XL2 12 bit audio in Vegas without any problems. When I get a chance, I will try it in Premiere and Edius too, and post the results.

I have a old VX1000 and have shot and captured using Liquid Edition (just home movie stuff of the kids) but I think it says in the view finder 16bit 48KHz.
When playing back from Liquid Edition out to the camera, right? The VX1000 is capable of playing back 48KHz audio, but not of recording it...

Any guess as to what editors support 12-bit would be a guess. Logically all of them should support it; 12-bit 4-channel is part of the DV specification, so if the editor supports capturing DV data, it should support 12-bit audio. But whether that's true in reality is the question, and there's probably no real way to know other than to just test each one.

12 bit audio has 24 dB less dynamic range than 16 bit in linear encoding and the 32K sampling limits the highest frequency which can be recorded to 15 kHz. In broadcasting the highest frequency permitted is 15 kHz and the audio is companded so practically speaking 16 bits at 32 kHz should be fine for broadcast. FCP does handle 12 the lower rate just fine. I can't speak to other NLEs.

No one addressed my obvious question (which I will look for in the XL2 Watchdog list next):

How does one go about capturing all 4 channels? I've looked in the obvious places in FCP HD but cannot find this option.

I'll presume I will have to take a second pass at it, with the audio capture set to CH3/4 the second time. But I don't know...

Ian, if you're using Final Cut, you might try asking in our Mac Editing forum. Plenty of FCP users and a few XL2 owners are in there. Good luck,

Not to keep this thread going here, but you do have to do a 2nd pass as far as I know. Apple has announced that their next QT upgrade will include 4 channel audio, but for now, it's only 2.

At least I think...

Kevin

A few years back I was using the Canopus DVstorm card and one of their capture modules allowed you to capture all 4 audio tracks simultaneously. Tracks 1-2 were embedded in the .avi asusal and 3-4 were encoded into a .wav file that had the same name.

FWIW. I haven't used the doftware for a few years.

I use Avid Xpress there is no problem with capturing all 4 audiotracks simultaneously. I think you can capture up to 8 audio tracks simultaneously. But I never tryed more than four.



Greetings


Thomas

My NLE is a Matrox RTX100 Extreme (Premiere Pro 1.5) which allows you to capture the second audio stream simultaneously.

It creates a wav file with the same file name as the avi containing the first audio muxed with the video.

I assumed Premiere Pro could do this alone, without the Matrox bits, but a colleague could not figure out how on his system, so he ended up downloading a program to do it.

I can't remember the name of it - I will post again when I find out.

As far as quality is concerned, PPro conforms all the audio to 32 bit floating and it sounds great.

Mark

Just for the record, I found out (by reading THROUGH the manual instead of trying to find the topic with the index or TOC) that one has to change one's CAPTURE SETTINGS in the A/V SETUP dialog prior to capture. From there it's a matter of recapturing the same clips using AUDIO ONLY.

In case anyone else is looking for it.

I just shot a documentary using a damaged XL1, it's first two inputs were not operational so we had to use 12-bit mode to use the second pair. The audio was fed line-level from my PDX10 which was used as preamp and dual system just in case. As it turns out, 12 bit sounds well enough for interviews, we had no need to use and sync the PDX10 tapes.