Pinnacle Studio & Adobe Premiere - audio clicking noise!

[Digger]

I have a Panasonic DV camera and have been putting home movies on to DVD using Pinnacle Studio 9. The very first time I tries, I got a clicking noise over the audio of the movie. I 'cured' this by switching the camera from 16-bit to 12-bit audio... no idea why this fixed it, but it did. Recently the problem has come back - when I play the video from the camera it is OK, the clicking is only introduced during the capture process. I have tried using Adobe Premiere (thinking it was a Pinnacle prob) and this is the same. I am using a PCI firewire card to capture on a P4/3Ghz, 512Mb RAM, Windows XP Pro PC. I have tried shutting down all other programs & TSR's to try & fix it.

Can anyone help??

[Digger]

BTW - I have read the threads suggesting using WinDV - tried this and get the same results. The clicking appears random, the gap between clicks varies, you may get a few seconds of good audio then a rapid series of clicks.

[Digger]

Anyone have any ideas at all??

[mpiper]

Do you have any audio editing programs? I would be interested in what frequency the clicks are happening. If they are at 50 - 60 hz, the source would be electrical of some sort. That would at least give you a starting point in tracking down the problem.

Just as a test, have you tried recording the video to a VHS and capturing from the VHS? Did the VHS have clicks? Did the capture from VHS have clicks.

Have you tried capturing from the camera via the RCA output vs. the firewire?

If the RCA does not have the clicks, it could be either the firewire cable, or the firewire hardware on one end or another.

Most firewire cards (NOT all) have more than 1 firewire socket. Can you change to another socket and see if that does it? In the infancy of firewire, many 2 or 3 port cards had a "favorite" port that was perfect, but the others would have problems, even up to not recognizing anything was plugged in.

You could also try moving the firewire card to another PCI slot. Maybe another item on the motherboard is using the same IRQ, and the intermittent nature could be from the IRQ actions.

Just some basic brainstorming. Hopefully something helps.

Mike

[troyvcd1]

I know you said that the sound is ok when you play from you camera but I think it may be a dv tape problem still. I got weird clicking and popping and high frequency beeping when I was using cheap sony dv tapes. I switched over to sony excellence tapes and all my audio problems disappeared.

[Digger]

Mike - I havent tried VHS or looking at the frequency of the audio - But I am pretty sure its not the firewire cable, card or socket as I have tried a different manufacturer firewire card and different cables. The clicks only last about 1/10th second each, so I am not sure how to check the frequency.

Troy - funnily enough I am using Sony Premium tapes (they were aggresively priced!!), so I will try some Panasonic ones and see if theres any improvement.

[Digger]

Out of desperation I emailed Panasonic - they came back with some ideas. They said disconnect from internet if on broadband and shut down all other applications. I have done this and there is a BIG improvement (too much to be coincidence) even though I thought their ideas were twaddle. But it still has some clicking which makes it unuseable. But I am begining to think it is a resource problem. Anyone know exactly what you can shut down from "Windows Task Manager\processes" without crashing a PC??

[turbo]

Only just read your thread bud, and I used to have problems when connected to internet. Use to get some sound abit like electrical interference every now and again but when I render with my modem turned off I don;t ever get the problem

[Digger]

I have just borrowed a friends JVC DV camera - played my tapes through it to PC - all fine so I guess its a camera problem - unless anyone has any more ideas?