gl1 audio glitches

[Brendan Donohue]

hey y'all,
just imported a tape last night from a wedding that I shot a little while back. I was monitoring the audio from the camera while capturing and everything sounded fine, but once I had the footage in fcp, i was watching the ceremony footage and listening the the dialogue and I kept hearing these little glitches in the audio: basically it sounds like digital artifacts of some sort, like you hear with highly compressed streaming audio on the internet or something, but the dialogue/music is perfectly clear, there are just these little digitally distorted sounding clicks and pops that are randomly scattered througout.

It's pretty subtle, but it annoys the hell out of me. I used a rode videomic to record the ceremony audio, plugged directly into the GL1. Like I said, everything sounds fine in camera, but the converted audio has the artifacts. I'm gonna try cleaning my heads today and checking my capture settings in FCP again.

I may try to post a clip later tonight so you can hear what I'm talking about

any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

thanx,
~brendan

[Jason Leonard]

can you post a clip?
i had a very similar problem with my GL1 a couple of years ago.
i am curious to see if we share the same issue.
thanks.

[Frank Simpson]

I recently edited some footage for a friend who shot with his GL1 and noticed a similar thing. Occasionally there is like a one frame or less spike of a static-like sound or drop-out. It's extremely annoying and difficult/impossible to edit around!

I also noticed that this same friend has a local TV commercial airing (that I had nothing to do with) and the same thing is happening there.

In his case all audio was captured via the on-board mic. I did all my post in FCP.

I have 3 GL2s of my own and have never had anything like this happen with any of them.

[Brendan Donohue]

thanks frank, I've never encountered a problem like this with my GL1 either, just with this particular tape, during the ceremony footage, where I need the audio to be clear as possible, luckily, I had a second camera (Gl1) in the balcony that has useable audio, so I can use that also if I can't find a workaround for this, but I still want to know what is causing it. As I said, it's not that horrible, but annoying

thanks

[Randall Allen]

Only time I have had that kind of an issue is when capturing GL-1 footage using anything other than the GL-1. To make matters worse, it is an intermitent(sp?) problem making diagnosis nearly impossible.

Randy

[Frank Simpson]

I have experienced the problem capturing from the GL1 and capturing from another deck. Although I have not tried capturing the same tape from different sources. Since neither the GL1 nor the tapes are mine, I can't do this easily to check...

[Don Palomaki]

Sometimes you can encounter uncorrected tape read errors, which may appear in the captured audio as a glitch of some sort, sometimes as a gap in audio if you look at the expanded waveform. This is somewhat more likely to happen if the tape quality is marginal, or if you do capture in a different machine, and especially at LP speed. Also, my experience is that this sort of problem appears in the audio stream first bfore it effects video, possibly due to to less effective error correction.

If you cannot hear it in the analog audio stream from the playback machine (which has additional error correction) a work around may be to capture the analog audio with your sound card and sync it with the video.

[Brendan Donohue]

Originally Posted by Don Palomaki

If you cannot hear it in the analog audio stream from the playback machine (which has additional error correction) a work around may be to capture the analog audio with your sound card and sync it with the video.

Good call Don, I have a separate audio interface that I can run the audio through and record into protools...man, I was focusing too much on the problem and not the obvious workaround.

thanks
~brendan