Loading Dat Audio

So, the production I'm on recorded audio to Dat and piped that audio into the camera, in some notable spots the audio is no good on camera.

The audio is being recorded from the dat into protools as a digital transfer, the aduio drifts by my measurement 3 frames over 2 minutes. Should the audio be pulled down to 47952? How can I do this to a wav file? As a giggle I tried playing a test file at a speed of .99. That made the drift worse.

Sure Dat's are outdated technology for this purpose but what are the specs?

If the audio is drifting +3 frames over about a minute, then you have a classic 30fps / 29.97fps pulldown problem.

You could re-digitize the DAT audio by giving the DAT machine a 29.97 video sync reference, and then playing it back at that speed. But you need a pro DAT deck (like a Sony 7030 or 7040) to do this. That should yield a frequency of 47.952kHz, for a .01% pull-down.

If it's still drifting, then you may simply have a bad reference problem, either with the machine you're using or the machine used at the shoot. As a workaround, you can try just manually cutting a frame or two out of the audio every minute, forcing it to stay in sync. If it's not hours and hours of material, this can work, but you'll need to keep an eye on lip-sync.

You didn't mention whether the video material originated from film or from tape. If it's from tape, and the DAT timecode matches the videotape timecode, there may be a discrepency (like a drop frame/non-drop issue), and if it was from film, perhaps the DAT wasn't running at 30.00fps (which it almost always should for film).

That's what I thought, it's really annoying that the transfer guy isn't doing it for me. I'm just getting a dat digitally transffered into pro-tools. He is giving me a DVD with wave files. Is there a way I can pull those files down.

<<<Is there a way I can pull those files down.>>>

SoundTrack Pro has a Process, Resample tool. See if you can get it to tell you what that does.

Koz

[www.geniusdv.com]

Here's a way to make Sound TrackPro change the duration of a clip. The tool control (as usual in my estimation) is the most painful possible. You will need to find out the current duration of your clip, then, with your calculator tool, calulate the new duration based on the Drop Frame/ Non Drop Frame compensation number, and then put that new duration in the tool.

Apply and export.

It's slightly less painful than poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick. I believe you have to do that with custom numbers for each clip.

There may be a way to make the tool apply the same correction ratio to each clip, but I haven't found it.

Koz

I bet you thought I didn't know what the number was, didn't you?

[docs.info.apple.com]

Koz

I work long form, and I've been trying to see how I can use Soundtrack Pro, and the more I do the more I think I'm going to have to get autoduck.

It should be called Soundtrack Pos.

Thanks, everyone for the help, I'm just not sure how those Soundtrack Pos fixes will translate in my OMF, for turnover to sound. Probably just as unedited audio.

I'm going to manually pull up some stuff, use the FCP speed adjustment for some things, and there is one critical take that is fricking 2 full pages of dialogue. I sh**t you not. A lot of the other stuff plays as online web material, but of course this one is all up close on a monitor.

A friend w/ a T.C. dat is going to transfer it correctly for me. Now I just need to pray that what the recordist did has some correct correlation.

<<<Soundtrack Pro>>>

I always thought calling it "Pro" was pushing it.

Koz