Sound distortion on music footage?

[TraceyJ]

Has anyone had any problems with sound distortion on camcorder concert recordings? It's not my tape so I don't know what it was recorded on but the bass is terrible. I saw a reference on another site to splitting the video and audio and reducing the bass before putting them back together again but the site didn't explain what software to use. Can anyone help please? I use dvdlab pro to produce the dvd from the footage.

Thanks in advance
Tracey

[Greenbag]

Hi Tracey,

The first question I want to ask you is what kind of concert the footage was recorded at? I was at an open air one a few years ago and got a little to close to the speakers onstage and when I got home and played back the footage not only did the sound 'sound' bad but the picture was distorted aswell. Whether it was the level of sound coming out of the speakers or being to close to magnetic fields I don't know. Thankfully the camera didn't seem to suffer. I've never heard of the software you are using but you'll need to unlink the video from the audio as in Adobe Premier, click on the video and just delete it and save the audio track as a separate file. When that's done you can safely work on it using the various audio filters to tweak it. But remember... don't cut any parts out of it or it will be hell to sync up again when you bring the video back in again. Yes I know it will have the original audio with it, just put it on a separate layer again by unlinking them. Delete the original audio and line the video up with your newly tweaked audio and then you can start cutting bits out of it.

Hope this helps

[TraceyJ]

Thanks so much for your help Greenbag, I'll check out Adobe Premier. Yes, it was an outdoor concert and I suspect the person with the camera was very near the speakers! It's only the very loud bass that is a problem though, the rest isn't too bad.

Thanks again
Tracey

[Greenbag]

Hi

If it's only the bass part of the audio you might be able to do something with it using either video or better still audio editing software. Anything from using filters to reduce certain frequencies or increase them or normalize the overall level.