SOUND ON SOUND

[fja_sos]

Hi Folks,
I record a podcast in Audacity and once I clean up the noise, it sounds decent enough to my rank amateur ears. I export the track in wav at 32bit. Once I import it into my video editor, edit the video and audio, and export the finished work, it never sounds quite as good. I do my best to make sure the tracks are not clipping or distorted in any other way before I export them. Is 32bit wav the best format or can anyone suggest something better?

[James Perrett]

I would guess that the video editor is compressing the audio with a lossy codec. This is fairly normal but you need to check which codec is being used and which data rate. If it is using AAC then I'd go for an audio bit rate of 128kb/s as a bare minimum while with mp3 I'd probably want to go for 192kb/s if possible. If you have the option of uncompressed audio then go with that for archive purposes although some player programs don't seem to like uncompressed audio.

You should also leave plenty of headroom to allow for inter-sample peaks and any changes in level due to the lossy coding. 32bits is probably excessive for most purposes but it allows you to leave all options open.

[CS70]

Also, audio in video is usually at 48KHz. If your WAV is 44.1KHz, the video editor will resample. Software resamplers can be very good, but not all are.

Check out https://src.infinitewave.ca/

[Mike Stranks]

I'm doing the same as you all the time at present and don't have the problems you're experiencing - even when the end-product is played out via YouTube.

What video editor are you using? And what format are you saving your video editor output?

I import to my video editor at 24-bit 44.1...

[Tim Gillett]

...Once I import it into my video editor, edit the video and audio, and export the finished work, it never sounds quite as good...

Like Mike I've not had any problems even with playing my Youtube uploads.

In what way specifically does it sound worse? Any chance of "before and after" audio examples ?

[Mike Stranks]

I'm doing the same as you all the time at present and don't have the problems you're experiencing - even when the end-product is played out via YouTube.

What video editor are you using? And what format are you saving your video editor output?

I import to my video editor at 24-bit 44.1...

I should have been more specific... What codec are you using when making your completed video? H.254, H.265 , X AVCS, WMV, MPEG-2, MOV etc etc?

[pk.roberts]

I would say the best way to export from Audacity is to match the project audio settings of your video editing software - I would guess this is very unlikely to be 32 bit for example and would ideally be at the same sample rate. At least you then know that there is not an additional and necessary conversion going on.
A few more details of your software and your pipe-line would give us a bit more to go on, also perhaps a description of what, to your ears, is making it sound less good.

[Luke W]

Most video software I've used behaves best when it gets 24 bit/48k WAV/AIFF files. But as others have mentioned, it's the codec that software uses when it exports the final video that's likely to be your culprit.

[fja_sos]

Please pardon my delayed response. Thank you all for your feedback. I never checked the settings in the video editing software. Now, I know what to do. Thanks again. Happy New Year :-D