Help! My Movie Music Is Screwed Up!!!!, disaster....fear and loathing... Options

[tokyoroland]

I finished editing my music into my brother's movie in imovie ( the latest one ) on OSX. I burned it to dvd-r and when I play it, the sound totally screws up halfway through the movie!!! This is odd because it works just fine imovie and the qucktime movie is fine, too.

I thought it was a faulty dvd-r, but I tried another one and it did the exact same thing! help! possible errors:

1) the sound was mastered wrong. ( the girl who transferred it to cd from minidisc mastered it at a low level, so I turned up the volume ( normalized it) in Spark.

2) Maybe I didn't format the dvd-r. Do I need to?

It isn't my computer because it messes up on my external dvd player as well as when I put it in my computer and play it.

PLEASE HELP! I don't know what to do, and I really want to finish this film. Should I go back to the music and NOT normalize it??

ANY suggestions will help...

- Jeffro

[Levon River]

ok... my cd is all one track. dont ask me, I didnt do it...

"It was like that when I got here!"

I think, tokyoroland, that just means that your cd was recorded in "Disk at Once" mode. That shouldn't be a problem.

I urge you to start thinking with your audio as a file, not as a cd. That it happens to have come to you on cd media isn't the important issue for what you are trying to do; there is still an audio file there, and that is what you need to be thinking in terms of in order to edit it into your movie. Yes, as has been pointed out in this thread, some programs automatically do resampling, others don't, others handle it better than others... I personally don't think you need that complication added to what you are already up to your eyeballs in right now.

So here are my simple, step-by-step recommendations for you to eliminate as many potential problems as possible, and it's absolutely the best I can do:

1. Get your audio file off of the CD and onto your hard drive using any of *many* freeware and shareware programs that will rip that audio file off of the CD. Make certain that you set the settings to save the audio file as a 16 bit, 44.1 AIFF file. Let's say you name it "Piano.aif"

2. Use Spark, Peak, Cacaphony, or any app of your choosing to open "Piano.aif" and increase the levels to your liking, or just normalize the entire file (and maybe even add a little reverb or eq or compression if you're feeling adventurous--or not!). Then, when you're happy with it, save "Piano.aif" back to your hard drive, making sure you're saving it as a 16 bit, 44.1 AIFF file. (Save it under a different name, like "Piano-FIXED.aif," or save it with the "Piano.aif" name, overwriting the file on your hard drive, since you have the orginal still on CD.)

3. Import your fixed 16 bit, 44.1 AIFF file into your movie editing program, and edit it against the video to your heart's content.

Theoretically (famous last words ), that should eliminate any problems that might be *inherent* in the audio file itself. If your final edited, output movie *still* exhibits audio weirdnesses *after* you have taken the above steps, then it's something in the movie editing program that you would need to address with the manufacturer (or with the docs).

Please, please go through though simple steps above, though, so you know with certainty that you have done everything possible to import a clean, unquestionable audio file into your movie editing program.

And good luck with it. You'll get there.