I Recorded Sound At A Wedding... To MP3... 64K...

H

Hunter Starnes

Active member
Hi DVXers!

As the title says, Using a Tascam DR-40 I accidentally recorded the speeches at a wedding at the 64k mp3 setting. It sounds pretty awful... :embarasse

Any tips on improving the sound quality as much as possible? I tried searching the forums and Google but I couldn't find any advice for working on a low quality mp3 file. I could use my on-camera mics but they don't sound very good either (big room).

Any help appreciated!
- Hunter
 
Sorry, there's usually not much that can be done to a low res MP3 file. If you can post a sample, we could evaluate it further.
 
Do you have any sound recordings in camera? Maybe you can mix two tracks together and make the most out of it.
Good luck
 
yohenk said:
Do you have any sound recordings in camera? Maybe you can mix two tracks together and make the most out of it.
Good luck
Click to expand...

Yes, from camera-mounted Rode VideoMics - thankfully! I had planned on doing just that but would like to improve the Tascam sound as much as possible.
 
You can't add bits that aren't there to begin with...well...mostly. I don't know if high end restoration would fix this, but that costs lots of money.

Here's a question. When you are recording on the DR-40 and listening with headphones (because you were monitoring your recording, right?), is it actually monitoring what's being recorded on the card? For example, if you are recording at a low resolution MP3 file, is that what you hear when monitoring?
 
davefisk said:
You can't add bits that aren't there to begin with...well...mostly. I don't know if high end restoration would fix this, but that costs lots of money.
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Yeah I know. I wasn't very hopeful that this could be fixed magically. I was looking more for EQ tips or other filters that would help make it sound better.

davefisk said:
Here's a question. When you are recording on the DR-40 and listening with headphones (because you were monitoring your recording, right?), is it actually monitoring what's being recorded on the card? For example, if you are recording at a low resolution MP3 file, is that what you hear when monitoring?
Click to expand...

Yep I do a quick check with headphones and then I have to leave to attend the B-camera. I really don't know the answer to your question. I would guess that it does not monitor the actual file but I could be wrong. But even then I do not listen for low bit rate quality usually. Just the usual things like a check of levels, listen for distortion, noise, etc.

- Hunter
 
Hunter Starnes said:
Yep I do a quick check with headphones and then I have to leave to attend the B-camera.
Click to expand...

That's not really monitoring. Not to be a "finger wagger", but I bet if someone was monitoring this devices someone would have noticed something was up.

I only bring this up because we see your situation all the time, and the answer is always the same. "Can't fix it, but was anybody really monitoring?", and it's the same every time. I guess the good thing to come of it is that it is a learning experience for those that this happens to. Always monitor your audio. If you have multiple audio sources (lavs on people and camera mics) figure out a way to do it. The best thing to do is to get an audio professional to handle it. If there isn't budget for an audio professional then don't have audio sources where you can't hear them. After all, nobody sets up a camera and doesn't look through it to make sure it's ok, do they?
 
davefisk said:
When you are recording on the DR-40 and listening with headphones (because you were monitoring your recording, right?), is it actually monitoring what's being recorded on the card? For example, if you are recording at a low resolution MP3 file, is that what you hear when monitoring?
Click to expand...

No. Monitoring is pre-compression, so you won't hear low-res MP3 artifacting until playback.
 
Alex H. said:
No. Monitoring is pre-compression, so you won't hear low-res MP3 artifacting until playback.
Click to expand...

Well, that's a bummer then, innit? I always prefer to monitor the recorder when I'm mixing. All that preaching I just did about monitoring your recording is all for naught in this specific situation.

Now this makes me really curious as to which recorders monitor that way, and which ones monitor what's being recorded.
 
davefisk said:
Now this makes me really curious as to which recorders monitor that way,
Click to expand...

I think it's safe to bet they all do.

The problem with monitoring is that what comes out of the MP3 compression isn't audio -- it's effectively random data which gets dumped to the SD card. The only way to monitor the encoded MP3 would be to have an MP3 decoder running in real time, being fed from the output of the encoder, and then converting back to analog so you can monitor it. If you actually did that, there would be significant latency -- i.e. the monitored audio would be noticeably lagging behind the action, which would be EXTREMELY hard to listen to unless you could TOTALLY shut out the external sound.

I don't believe any recorder has all this extra circuitry in it. And why would they? If you want quality audio, don't use MP3 -- it's an outdated, inefficient, low-quality format. Use WAV/BWF, or at least AAC if you have it. But with audio being so compact, why not just use WAV? Then you lose nothing. 24-bit 48kHz WAV is just a gigabyte for an hour -- pretty minimal if you're used to working with video.
 
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The DR series does not have read-after-write, so monitoring would not have revealed the mistake. That does NOT mean monitoring is unneeded.
Good question Dave. I'm not aware of which recorders (if any) have this. I recall my old Portadat did, but that was.. ages ago.
 
Well, you can always play back the audio after it's been recorded. I don't think there would be that much latency involved if it monitored what was being recorded. All that stuff happens pretty fast. No more than what we used to listen to on the Nagra if we monitored off the playback head during record. I never had a problem with that.
 
Thats sucks mate, I made the same mistake on a wedding using a Tascam recorder a while back,
i think i recorded mine around 128K, fortunately I also had shotgun mic audio and mixed it as best i could
 
davefisk said:
That's not really monitoring. Not to be a "finger wagger", but I bet if someone was monitoring this devices someone would have noticed something was up.
Click to expand...

I hear you. But in this particular situation that was all I could do. When the DJ will allow us to use our own wireless mic then we can monitor and record in-camera.
 
TubEfingers said:
Thats sucks mate, I made the same mistake on a wedding using a Tascam recorder a while back,
i think i recorded mine around 128K, fortunately I also had shotgun mic audio and mixed it as best i could
Click to expand...

Yeah I always record at the same quality and never change it so not sure how it got on mp3. Weddings tend to bring out the worst, incompetent me! :)
 
My Marantz can monitor off the card and the NAGRA VI can. But while safety monitoring on reel to reel was not bad, very small delay, the lag with DAT was enough to be a real problem and the lag off hard-drive and flash recorders has been essentially useless. DAT was like 1/2 a second or so and was enough of a problem ,for FX anyway, that folks rarely used it. The lag on the Marantz is like four seconds and the Nagra was something like that. WAY to long a lag to be of a lot of use for most people. If you try walking around with that much lag you find yourself tripping over things and you certainly can't look at the action or your boom op, very disorienting. And of course there is the problem that you don't hear anything if you are not recording. Plus I don't even know if it will work with MP3 (on the Marantz), the lag and processing overhead would be a lot more.

I also wonder how useful it actually is these days. With tape there was a good many things you could catch like slipping tape and weird alignment slips or just some flaky tape. With a flash recorder all you can really check is that A) you are actually recording, which you should be able to tell with the blinky lights. If you are monitoring off the recorder as opposed to the mixer the only thing between what you are hearing and what is being recorded is the A/D converter and depending how they are dealing with things you may in fact be listening post A/D so I guess card errors, but again that should show up as an error anyway.

Generally speaking I have found most monitoring sections to sound worse than what is actually recorded. The DAP1 was a bit notorious for having a headphone amp that was noisy AND clipped before the tape did. You eventually got used to the fact that many recordings that you though might have been clipped were not and that hiss you couldn't get rid of was in the headphones and not on tape.

I mean to each their own but I have the option and I don't use it on current field machines. The opposite is true in the studio. ProTools has a very short delay essentially zero on HD and we will always monitor what is being recorded rather than input. If my field recorders had something close to a zero lag I would probably use it, but with multiple seconds....
 
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Noiz2 said:
My Marantz can monitor off the card and the NAGRA VI can.
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That IS interesting.... but according to the specs, Nagra VI can't even record MP3, let alone monitor it post-compression (which is what the question was). Unsurprising really, since MP3 is pretty trashy, and that's not what Nagra is about. (You didn't say which Marantz.)

http://www.nagraaudio.com/nagra-vi/

Noiz2 said:
... the lag with DAT was enough to be a real problem and the lag off hard-drive and flash recorders has been essentially useless.
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Yup, the way data is buffered on and off an SD card will necessarily impose a significant delay. Trying to do this for MP3 would just make it worse. And, again, why? No-one who cares that much about what they're recording should be using MP3. And if you're using WAV, then post-monitoring to ensure that you have set the correct compression factor isn't an issue, since it's uncompressed.

BTW the studio software which lets you monitor wat is being recorded certainly isn't reading it back off the hard drive -- that would again impose a huge delay. They're basically letting you hear what is being SENT to the hard drive. Even if the software is written to read it back, the OS would just short-cut that out.
 
AtticusLake said:
That IS interesting.... but according to the specs, Nagra VI can't even record MP3, let alone monitor it post-compression (which is what the question was). Unsurprising really, since MP3 is pretty trashy, and that's not what Nagra is about. (You didn't say which Marantz.)

http://www.nagraaudio.com/nagra-vi/


Yup, the way data is buffered on and off an SD card will necessarily impose a significant delay. Trying to do this for MP3 would just make it worse. And, again, why? No-one who cares that much about what they're recording should be using MP3. And if you're using WAV, then post-monitoring to ensure that you have set the correct compression factor isn't an issue, since it's uncompressed.

BTW the studio software which lets you monitor wat is being recorded certainly isn't reading it back off the hard drive -- that would again impose a huge delay. They're basically letting you hear what is being SENT to the hard drive. Even if the software is written to read it back, the OS would just short-cut that out.
Click to expand...

Since I have never recorded MP3 and the OP did so accidentally I wasn't talking about MP3. The Marantz is the PMD671.

I actually question your assessment of what ProTools is doing. One of the fights they have constantly had with Apple is that they tend to work around the OS. Properly written there shouldn't need to be a huge delay. But you know I'm not a real software developer so? There is a way to either monitor inputs or monitor later, we had assumed it was off the disk since this would make sense since it is reading the other tracks but I guess it's possible it's reading at some point just before going to the disk. It would seem to me that keeping the tracks in sync would be a nightmare if you are monitoring one track off the hardware and the other 20-90 tracks off the disk but? If that is what they are doing they are doing a magnificent job of it.

Flash memory writes slow so it makes sense that you can't get decent off card monitoring, not really comparable with a high speed Hard drive.
 
I guess the good thing about monitoring off the card even with latency is that you'd hear the junky MP3 and be able to fix it, right? Even if you miss a few seconds, that's better than losing the entire recording. .
 
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