Audio Popping -- Searched the archives, no answer. NOT mp3 problem!

My client has a sony handycam DCR-SR47, and I'm working from home so she uploads the files to her server (the camera has a hard drive, no tape deck) and I take it from there. Since the files are in MPEG-2, I convert them to .dv using Visual Hub, but even though the raw .dv clips have no popping, the problems begin when I load them into a sequence in FCP.

The popping happens in the timeline, and also after I compress the timeline to a .mov file, too. The raw footage (MPEG-2 & converted .dv) are OK. In addition, there are no .mp3 files in the project. All my music files are .aif, and they're not the ones that are making the noise... It's the audio from the footage. When I import the .dv file to my FCP project, the audio makes a popping noise (similar to the one that mp3s make).

I'm thinking maybe it has something to do with the clip & sequence settings? The clips' audio have 48.0 KHz rates and the format is "32-bit Floating point." The sequence is set at 48 KHz, 16-bit depth, config: default, stereo output. Is it the 32-bit and 16-bit that don't match up, or do those two have nothing to do with each other? The settings on the sequence only allow 8-bit, 16-bit, and 24-bit. Also, another thing I noticed was that for some reason, when I bring the clips into the timeline, the pan is set to -1 as a default, and FCP won't let me edit the two audio tracks independently... It lumps them together as "Stereo (a1a2)," rather than the two separate tracks when you import DV footage from a camera. Hope this information is somewhat illustrative.

Any advice on how to get rid of this popping would be much appreciated! As I said before, I will send anyone interested a link to the video if you'd like to hear for yourself.

Thanks so much!
Stephen

Your audio settings should match, that can lead to problems. Try converting it to 16 bit as that's the correct bitrate for DV.

I've has issues with .dv files and FCP. They don't behave exactly like the DV .mov files that are native to the DV preset (like when you capture from a camera). I think the audio never quite comes in right. I don't use VisualHub but see if you can export to a Quicktime movie and set the Compressor to DV NTSC instead of exporting as .dv.

HTH, JK

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