Can you mix 44.1/16-bit with 48/24-bit

F

FlyingDorkProductions

Member
Hello,

I just did a day of shooting on my Canon 7D and I went to transfer over all of the audio files from my Zoom H4 to my computer. I noticed that the Stamina switch in the battery compartment was switched on the Zoom. When my sound person put in a new set of batteries, I guess they flicked it on. So now I have half of my audio in 48khz/24-bit and the other in 44.1khz/16-bit. I was wondering if the two can get mixed together ok, if there is something I can do or if I'm completely screwed. I appreciate any and all help and advice. Thank you!

Jeremy
 
Depends on how your edit system treats audio, but in general 48khz is the accepted format @ 16bit.
So I'd upconvert/up-sample the 44.1/16 to 48khz/24bit - just to keep it uniform.

Can't be that bad.

The other way you're down-sampling to 44.1/16 via a dither or even without, so I would *not* recommend it, so upsample your 44.1 material via a DAW or even something silly like Quicktime or MPEG Streamclip in a batch, then sync it to picture.

If you leave it alone you may have some problems in the edit system - FCP for example might make you run an audio render before it plays a 44.1 source in a 48khz sequence, which takes longer than converting it once, some edit systems won't care, in the end they will export it as 48khz anyway via OMF or XML so might as well make all of it uniform and up-sample from 44.1 to 48 now. "bit-ness" is not a huge factor, but you might want to keep that uniform as well @ 24.

Once you lock picture and doing dialogue editing or other , you might go back to some of your 44.1 sources if you need to for pure non-up-sampled content to maintain zero generational loss during individual track manipulation, but that's at a later time....
 
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Thanks the info DJDecay! Very helpful. I was just freaking out that they wouldn't work together or the quality would be drastically different between the two. I'm not very knowledgeable in the realm of audio/ Plus standing out in the 90 degree weather and shooting for 8 hours has somewhat deteriorated my already limited brain functions.
 
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