[MacDV] Audacity

[Alex]

Hi Eric

You will indeed have a problem processing audio this way.

Firstly when you normalize a piece of audio it will not do what you are 
after by its self.
When you normalize audio the program will look for the highest aptitude 
peaks in the audio and pull them to the
normalizing percentage that you have chosen and enhance the levels of 
the rest of the audio in relation to that.
This means that if you already have really loud sections of audio their 
gain will only be raised slightly if at all and
the rest of your audio will not get much of a level boost either.
To do this so that you have an even sound throughout your audio you 
must first carefully compress the audio,
this will give a much evener level to your audio, then normalize to get 
a better level

As far as the lost frames is concerned that is par for the course I am 
afraid.
Digital audio files are subdivided into samples either 44,100 or 48,000 
of them a second
Digital film is subdivided into frames at 25, 29, 29drop or 30 per 
second
Within iMove or FCP the problem of syncing frames and samples is taken 
care of because it has to be.
Unfortunately when you process audio in an audio only app is takes no 
account of the necessity of keeping
the two in sync. Thus you will end up with miscellaneous sub-frame 
errors when you try to put the two back together.

In order to keep them fully in sync you have to use a program that will 
reference the footage's frames as well as
the audio's samples.

Alex


On 21 Feb 2005, at 15:13, Kim wrote:

> I am trying to normalize the audio in all my clips. These are home 
> movies so in some takes people were talking loud and other times they 
> weren't so I am trying to get them all to approximately the same level 
> so you don't need the TV remote to keep changing the volume. I have 
> done this manually in iMovie but that gets tedious. What I did this 
> time was to extract all the audio. Import al the audio clips into one 
> Audacity project. Selected all then did Effects>Normalize. I then 
> selected each clip and exported it as AIFF. In iMovie I then imported 
> the audio. Now my problem is not all but a significant amount of my 
> audio clips are short by one frame. I am using iMovie4 and 
> Audacity1.2.1 on OS 10.2.8. Is there a better way to do this, am I 
> doing something wrong? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Eric
>
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