Thanks...

yeah...poor is an upgrade from horrible!

I forgot the mention I did a Linkwitz mod twice on the 4mm ECM, under a microscope...2nd time to change my incorrectly estimated source resistor.

the 3rd one was an upgrade (where’s the laughing emoticon?) to a 6 mm one, hanging from wires after carving the original one out from the front...I figured my luck would run out if I kept taking the camera apart!

The audio was as good as I could expect from a probably 8 kHz sampling rate on a point&shoot camera codec chip but all the ECM’s were omnidirectional. Apparently the chipset had companding or at least compression and it would pick up everyone in the room talking or clapping. A fun exercise but another set of frustrations.

I never thought at the start I’d go as far as I did...added a blocking capacitor and XLR jack to protect the camera from phantom power...try to make it idiot-proof...

Next up was a hypercardioid snare mic that seemed like a dumb purchase earlier as it had wrong hardware for a mic stand...but easily adaptable, pretty deaf (great for overload insurance) and good pattern so the loudmouth sitting next to me inaudible.

No A/V synch problems but still had the mediocre codec...still better than unusual. Distortion and wind-noise significantly improved...

I still have simple tasks, hiwever, like splitting files into multiple files and saving-as, and audio enhancement then save as.

Lately I’ve been using the iPhone whuch is pretty good except in really loud situations.

So I still need to learn what can be done to audio or video without causing the transcoding...save-as may be guilty of this...I’m not certain...could be operator error or poor choices/methods.

thanks

Unusual should say ‘unusable’

I am still having massive file size increases, so it must be operator error.

New phone, creates .mp4 videos. Processing audio in the videos with Sound Forge 10, then saving as .mp4 seems to save only the audio portion of an mp4 video, but if I save the mp4 as .mov, it saves a video, but many times larger (like 86x larger: 440 MB became 38 GB!

'Custom' tab allows reducing size and quality to reduce size, but results are still at least twice the size of the original source video

Is there some parameter I am not setting correctly to simply process audio in video? Do I need to detach video, edit audio, then reattach video?

Thank you

That is because SF is re-rendering the video likely at a higher bitrate and other factors affecting file size. Re-rendering video should be avoided unless the picture is changed or needs to be in a different format The Magix versions of SF AS (12 &13), allow replacing the audio w/o re-rendering the video. This is typically known a 'muxing'. There are free third-party muxing utilities available though. I use MeGUI,TS Muxer and AvideMux, However, I am not sure if any of the above support MOV files. But you can probably just change the file's extension to .mp4 if it's a MOV.

Thank you.

I had used a couple things years ago...not sure I remember, maybe MP4BOX & something similar, when I was trying to dub externally recorded audio. I was having huge file duration (time, not data) increase, worse than clock drift. SF was the first program I ever encountered that showed me the frame rate changed during audio edits. That s/w guy I mentioned earlier told me it's not the fault of the s/w but my 'breaking' the video container in some way the original camera's management of audio & video interleaving (management of all the framing, sync, etc) didn't anticipate...they just needed to make their camera do what THEY wanted.

SF allowed me to overwrite the misinterpreted video frame rate (imported at 29.9997 fps but was something drastically different when saving-as...yes, the re-rendering you mention (or re-encoding, transcoding, whatever) became the villian.

While external recorder device (I have a Tascam PCM one somewhere) is really a better way, I found editing the video file's audio without separating and re-muxing (attaching) the audio & video was my brute-force way of preventing the time duration changes)...but I always get blind-sided by the unexpected re-render/encode.

I started looking at/test-driving other Magix products today to see if something else newer would help. I am also checking out Video audio cleaner lab (forgot the name) product because I don't know if SF is really what I need...it was an accidental discovery but quite helpful. v. 12 or 13 might be the simplest change without relearning everything (but using it once or twice a year means...re-learn anyway). I think all I really have a need for is the audio edits minus re-render/encode...not in need of video titling, non-linear editing, etc.

The Pixel phone I just used records at 44100 bps for audio, so that's a huge improvement from the old cameras. I also learned I surely do not need 1080 HD or 4k UHD for web publishing! Impractically huge files! So, I'm working on a 'dumbing them down' workflow. I might go back to trying external microphones or a mixer to feed the phone audio input, but in many cases the smart phone audio has been pretty impressive (despite non-ideal microphone placement-sheer luck basically).

To be honest (and wordy), other than your pointing out SF 12, 13 are able to edit audio without re-rendering the whole video, that's a hard thing to discover about a s/w product from the sales literature!

Thanks for your patient reading and ongoing responses...one thing I learned asking 'experts' is that they buy what they need/what works instead of pursuing alchemy with random open source s/w etc. Avoiding the rabbit hole, as it were.

I do waste a lot of time figuring out many wrong ways to do this kind of work(hobby, no doubt), but I prefer that to bowling, or whatever...

Thank you.

Murray

Only reason I switch between .mov and .mp4 is if whatever s/w I'm negotiating with seems to force me when I want to complete an uncooperative function.

Not sure I am correctly repeating this, but I was told (sometime ago) .mp4 and .mov extensions refer to 'video containers' rather than the codec 'function' (like h.264 and so on). An .mov and .mp4 file could hypothetically have the same encoding but are put together differently. That was why two different cameras that both created .mov files or .mp4 files were still too different in certain circumstances (like trying to put one camera's .mov file onto an SD card with the other camera's .mov files). I think we're not supposed to be 'looking behind the curtain'...just using what people created for us! (No user-serviceable data inside warning).

I was not meant to be a software guy but apparently am a 'Butterfly Effect trespasser'...I get inside, wreak havoc on myself, and...spend tens of hours instead of tens of $...I just don't seem to learn from my mistakes!