mp3 in AIC 1080 50i timeline

[Marco van Belle]

Hey guys,

I've searched and searched the posts on here and although I've found several possible solutions none of them are working.

I've shot a music promo HDV on the Z1. I've taken it in as AIC and am therefore cutting in an AIC 1080 50i timeline. (I digitized as AIC to experiment - last promo was cut as HDV, this time trying the alternatives)

The band have emailed me the track as an mp3. I've tried various workflows - simply rendering the mp3 (obviously wrong, but had to tick the box to say I tried), converting it to an AIFF using quicktime conversion, converting to a wav using the same, and burning to a DVD to take advantage of the automatic AIFF convert and re-import it. I've also adjusted all timeline audio settings to correspond to the properties of said AIFF (44.1khz 16bit).

After 2 hours of experimenting I'm still getting horrible distortion on playback with every one of the above options.

I'm guessing it has something to do with the AIC timeline, because I've never experienced this problem with an mp3 conversion before.

Any suggestions very, very much appreciated.

[Victor Kellar]

So, you know FCP doesn't play well with MP3. It has to be AIFF. Whatever version you shot in ... I don't work in HDV, but in the SP DV world it would be 12 Bit or 16 ... whatever matches your timeline and/or what you shot it.

44K is CD audio ... you want 48 K (16 bit) or 32 K (12 bit). Again, I don't work in HDV so I don't know it it has another flavour of audio ... I'd assume that once you captured to AIC it would convert the camera audio .. your music clip must match that

[Craig Parkes]

Can't really help except to say perhaps you should have captured as HDV...

I am cutting a HDV music video as we speak with a mp3 on the timeline and it seems to work fine. (Had to render the MP3 in the timeline when we brought it in, but since doing that it all playsback fine.)

[James Miller]

Marco,

Did you convert the mp3 to aiff using the standalone quicktime app or within FCP.

Does the video time line show as grey or green (You should have no problems playing AIC with mac within FCP, have you made sure your time line is in AIC)

Does the aiff clip play fine with the video track removed.

Have you checked your FCP playback settings (Dynamic) ect.

Have you checked under 'User Preferences' - Audio Playback Quality.

James

[Marco van Belle]

Thanks guys,

I appreciate your responses.

Maybe if I break things down you'll see where I'm going wrong.

PICTURES: Shot Z1 HDV - digitized as AIC and timeline presets to AIC 1080 50i.

AUDIO: The track was emailed to me as an mp3. Once imported into FCP I've looked at the properties and found that this mp3 (untouched apart from the import) is 44.1khz / 32-bit floating point. I've tried altering the timeline settings to match this, then dropping the mp3 in and rendering. Awful.

If I burn an audio cd of this mp3 from iTunes - and then reimport this audio track from the cd to FCP, I get a 44.1khz / 16-bit AIFF track. Also awful no matter how I try to alter the timeline settings to match.

If I try altering timeline settings to 48khz etc and forcing any of my audio conversion to render to this, the results are still terrible. Likewise, if I use the options to export an AIFF / wav using quictime conversion, 48khz is not an option offered to me.

If I could still edit with the distortion I have I'd go ahead - we'll be using protools to mix the audio and reimporting a bounce anyway - but the distortion is such that the track slows and speeds up at random intervals on playback, making it impossible to cut accurately to.

(NB - James, I converted via FCP, not standalone quicktime)

[Klaas van Urk]

My voice-over talent sents always mp3's by mail. I open those in QuickTime 7 (Pro-version) and export them to aiff 16 bit - 48 Khz. I drop the resulting .aif on the timeline, no rendering required.

[James Miller]

Yes as Klaas says, use quicktime standalone app for conversion.

If you use FCP to convert the MP3 to AIFF then you will run into trouble sometimes.

[Marco van Belle]

Hey guys,

I've just done a stand alone quicktime conversion from mp3 to 48hrz 16 bit.

Distorted as hell and unusable. I've triple checked all the timeline settings as well.

This has never been a problem before...

[James Miller]

Hi, Marco

Send me the file in my public folder on my idisk 'jamesfilm@mac.com'

I will have a look for you :-)

James

[Marco van Belle]

Thanks for the offer James....but I've currently moved from home to the office where I am using radio edit software to convert the mp3 to a 48khz, 16 bit pcm wav file.

I've never had a problem with these in FCP - might be a way around a dodgy mp3.

I'll certainly let you know if this route fails too...in fact, if you're in Sussex you might here my screams from Sheffield.

[Marco van Belle]

...although its a weird one.

After much (much!) experimenting, I've worked out that for whatever reason my AIC timelines do not like audio that is not directly associated with pictures.

In the end, I've had to convert my MP3 into an AIFF and drop it into a DV timeline. Works perfectly. Then I've made a quicktime movie of this - exporting as AIC1080 50i - with audio and video (just black).

Then I've imported this quicktime movie into the AIC timeline and the audio plays back perfectly.

However, once dropped into the AIC timeline, if you delete the video track (which is of course just black) the audio distorts on playback again. In fact, if you even remove one second of the black video from any point of the timeline the audio associated with that one second will distort.

So basically I'm now cutting in my AIC timeline with an extra video track of black on the bottom rung to keep the audio happy. Very weird.

Since my end goal is to bring the AIC edit into a DV timeline to render anyway all will be ok - the current audio has suffered a bit from all the tinkering but before I encode to mpeg2 from said DV timeline I can just reimport a less adulterated version of the audio.