[MacDV] Audacity

[Kim]

Alex,
Thank you very much for that information. Being a total audio novice I 
had no idea what I was doing. I played around a bit with the compressor 
in Audacity and that is exactly what I wanted. One more quick question. 
How will the Compressor and Normalizer work with multiple clips in one 
project. Will the filters work on each clip separately or will it try 
to do something taking all the clips into account at once? Am I going 
to get into trouble taking the shot gun approach to all the clips, 
having the same settings for all the clips? I am trying to get home 
movies to sound a little better this doesn't need to be production 
quality. Thanks for your help.

Eric
On Monday, February 21, 2005, at 11:12  AM, Alex wrote:

> 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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