Help Wanted - Audio

pandaboy

Hi folks,

I need an ickle bit of help here. Basically did some filming at the weekend but took the cheaper option of using a camera to record the audio as we couldn't afford mics and that.

So, the recording went great but now I'm looking over the audio and it's terrible. The camera we used was a standard JVC HDD.

Now that I've converted the files from .MOD to .AVI I find that there's a crackling sound whenever someone speaks.

Basically what I'm thinking is that whoever is speaking was too close to the mic as they had to speak out loud! And because the mic is tiny on the camera it obviously interfered with this (the crackling sound is like when you try to sing loud on a cheap karaoke machine, there's no clear audio).

Does anyone know of a way to mute the crackling or even to lower it?

pandaboy

Oh wait it's OK. I was using Handbreak as a coverter and saw that it was converting the video and audio to .MP4. I changed it to .MKV and it's working fine now.

billius

Sounds like it's distortion on the audio. This basically means the audio was too loud and clipped the allowable level of volume when it was recording. You could try normalising the audio in Adobe Audition or Sound Forge, but it may not get rid of the crackling sound completely. A combination of normalising the audio and then noise removal might do the trick. Do you have any audio software you can use to edit the file?

pandaboy

Im using a Mac for this. When the file is compressed to MP4 then the audio is terrible. But converted it to MKV and it seems fine.

I'm going to split the audio and video using either iMovie or FCP 6. I have Garageband then to put the finishing touches to it then

Any other solutions? possible easier solutions for a Mac? Just found out that MKV is not compatible with iMvie, I don't have the quicktime plug in.

pandaboy

BTW, I'm using Handbrake for the conversion.