View Full Version : Dolby Digital - editing issues?


Dale Baglo
December 20th, 2011, 01:12 PM
There was a thread on here somewhere and someone mentioned that PCM audio was preferable to Dolby Digital because there were fewer issues when editing.

Can someone enlighten me as to what those issues are? Is the audio not scrubbable? Is it out of sync when frame frozen? Does the sync drift? What are the editing problems with Dolby Digital? Anyone?

Don Palomaki
December 23rd, 2011, 03:15 PM
Hard to tell without the context of the thread, but PCM may translate to "not compressed" while Dolby Digital may translate to "compressed." For serious editing, uncompressed files are better. Whether or not this is an issue for you depends on your requirements for the project at hand.

Compressed audio (and video for that matter) needs to be uncompressed for editing. This uses processing horsepower and often introduces decoding/encoding artifacts, especially if recompressed for the final distribution product.