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Old 01-02-2017, 01:00 PM
Fran Guidry Fran Guidry is offline
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Location: Walnut Creek, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KevWind View Post
Thanks for the thread. It has brought home one point for me.

My thoughts. The first thing I noticed was the mis matched audio level on the first comparison, made it fairly difficult to accurately evaluate the sound difference of the onboard mics.

That said, while I think it is very clear the onboard sound on the Canon/camcorder is substantially lacking compared the Sony,
the video was substantially better on the Canon .

For me, given that I already have an older Cannon Vixia I now will simply use it and since I don't need mobility I will just use my recording sound system, then import the video to my system computer
Ordinarily level matching is my first priority, but with the auto-level processing and the near freezing temperatures upstairs in my studio I couldn't bring myself to do the work needed to get levels matched. In this case it seemed to me that the qualitative difference was great enough that level differences weren't a critical factor. Interesting that you were confounded by the loudness difference, just shows I should have taken more care.

I was actually surprised at how much worse the Sony video was compared to the Canon. I think the lighting was a worst case for the Sony, it appears to be scene averaging for exposure while the Canon is using its face recognition to expose for the skin tones. I could actually see the adjustment in progress when I walked into the scene and put my face in front of the black background. There are lots of options in both cameras, specifically a "spotlight" setting that might have helped the Sony in this case, but I ran out of desire to try every tweak exhaustively.

I should have started my video by pointing out that parallel audio is the winning approach for quality regardless of the camera, and that I (nearly) always record audio separately and that after a bit of a learning curve the post processing needed to align audio and video is a snap, at least for the small scale projects I do. But I have read numerous requests for suggestions of cameras with decent audio capability, and many suggestions that the camera audio of the Vixia was satisfactory. And after this bit of fiddling I would agree, for some version of satisfactory. Not something you and I are likely to use, of course.

Fran
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