12-bit Sound in AVI files

[Alan]

Not sure how widespread this issue is, but it may be of
interest to others who have had a similar experience to
mine and been stumped by it. Saved AVI files captured as
DV-AVI in 12-bit sound in MM2 and played back in Win Media
Player prior to rendering into a movie, appear to run
slowly and exhibit all the symptoms of dropped frames. In
particular, sound is veeerrry baaaadly aaafected playing
at about half normal speed. Somewhat amazingly, when
rendered, eg saved back to the camcorder or saved as
a "movie" file, this problem completely disappears.
Problem does not occur with captures at video bit rates
lower than DV-AVI or captures where the original video is
recorded with 16-bit sound. Weird(?) but true in my
case. Curious to know if others have struck this before
and/or why it happens.

 

[John Kelly]

Hi there,

Yes there are some oddities when using 12 bit sound apart from the fact that
the quality is obviously less that 16bit. Exactly how it manifests itself will
to some degree depend on the codecs used in the decode process. If switching to
16bit solves your problem I would stay with that...or Don't fix things unless
you really have too

 

[Jake]

Other experiences of using 12-bit source include "tinny" sounding output
when rendering the project back to DV. That happened to all 5 hours of my
honeymoon tapes, which were recorded in 12-bit by mistake - aaaarrrrgghhh!

Jake

 

[John Kelly]

Hi Jake,

Its probably rather late in the day now....did you realise that you can convert
the audio with one or two packages (Free or Cheap) and then add it back so that
it sounds the way you intended?

 

[Jake]

Yes, I know that now (sounds like a Jasper Carrot sketch, the one with the
pet cat!) but as it happens I also have some other NLE software that
resamples audio very well, so that's what I used. I also have my camera set
to 16-bit permanently! You live and learn...

Jake