Q3 camcorder audio level in recording is lousy

[abrand88]

I have been recording video's with the Zoom Q3 camcorder. I set the audio to auto level recording but when I play back the audio, it starts off high and I can see it by using Movie Edit Pro 15 and after 25 minutes, the audio level gets lower by 4 db (approximately) and after playing the video for a 1 hour it gets louder and then gets lower. Tech support states that this can happen but what is automatic level control if the audio level is not linear. Since I wasn't too happy with tech support, I sent a email to Japan but will not get a answer at least for a week if that. Tech support stated that I need tio do post editing.

I believe I can ungroup the audio from the video and export a wav file of the audio track. Is there a way to make the sound of the audio the same level throughout the audio track with a minimum of fuss ?

Is there another program that will ungroup audio from video ? The Handyshare program is very fussy when extracting the audio from the mov file and for some reaqson the quality of the Handyshare program of Zoom audio extraction is worse that my trying Movie Edit Pro 15.

Are there any audio programs that will normalize the audio track on the fly ?

Once the audio track is consistent in audio level how can I put back the audio track into the video so they are synced properly ?

Movie Edit Pro is a 32-bit program and I am running it with 4 gb of ram. I am running Windows 7 Professional and converting to wmv is slow. Are there any 64-bit video freeware programs to do video editing because then I can add 4 gb and use 8 GB of ram ? I am using the Q6600 Quad core cpu.

I look forward to your suggestions.

[Krispy Kritter]

Goldwave, as well as likely most other audio editors, can do this fairly quickly. Goldwave has a "normalize" option which works fairly well.

Most camcorder mics are not very good. Try recording with the "auto leveling" off, and you will likely see that it gets much worse.