Posted by mmaker@my-deja.com on 10/29/06 13:37

carlmart wrote:
> Cleaner in what way?

Um, cleaner. Far less noise, no hiss. I've never heard better audio
from a $10k camera than that recorded on the Z1.

> But you couldn't compare either with an audio recording done on
> sole-audio recorders, at least those that record linear PCM at 16bit /
> 48KHz or more.

Perhaps, but with pretty much every movie I've edited, even if that was
somehow producing better audio than recording on a Z1, they'd just have
a higher quality recording of the background noise in the location.
There's a limit beyond which you're just recording better quality
noise, and the Z1 is well beyond that limit.

> Do a simultaneous audio recording in a DV or HDV camera, also recording
> that same audio on professional audio recorder. Then play them on a
> studio and compare them.

Now try listening to audio from a Z1 and from an DAT recorder without
knowing which is which, and see how often you correctly identify them.
It's easy to make up reasons why you think that HDV audio is worse than
DAT or other uncompressed audio recordings, it's much harder to
actually identify which is which.

> Not Hi-MD, which is the one I specified as an option, which can record
> in linear PCM. It's not compressed.

Ok, I looked it up on Wikipedia and they only seemed to be talking
about compressed audio. I checked again and they do list uncompressed
recording in a table near the end.

> If you consider a better audio no real benefit...

Z1 audio is plenty good enough for almost all uses (and I only say
'almost all' because I'm sure there must be some weird case where the
compression screws up but I've never come across one). Worrying about
an extra 1% audio quality is far, far less important than shooting to
get better audio quality in the first place: if you're shooting next to
a construction site because you couldn't afford a better location after
you spent the money on recording dual-system sound, you've just taken a
huge step backwards.

> Just think of this: why is it that professional audio in video
> productions is still recorded double-system?

If that's the case, I'd imagine that a) they have a budget large enough
not to have to worry about the extra cost, b) it's easier to run cables
from the mike to the DAT (or whatever) and keep it in one place rather
than have to keep moving around with the camera and c) it's the way the
sound recordist learnt to record sound and they have no intention of
changing.

Mark

[Back to original message]