Why the high pitched beep on DV material?

Zwampen wrote on 1/27/2006, 6:43 AM
Hi,

Lots of material that I use gets a high pitched beep added to it when i open it in Vegas. I can EQ it with a bandpass filter set to very narrow and placed at around 11730 Hz to get rid of most of it.

The material is either from DV tape or a QT ref mov eported from AVID. Most of it is filmed with Sony DSR-300 cameras or DSR-150 and captured with Sony DSR-20p DV Tape recorders. I am running Vegas 6.0c at the moment.

The beep is definately not in the AVID and not hearable from the tape recorders. The sound is hearable on multiple computers running when Vegas. On the same computers when the material is played in AVID there is no beep. The beep varies in strength over time and can suddenly disappear and then come back again and run for a minute. It's mostly there when there are voices, perhaps because it's easier to hear the beep then?

What is causing this. I have been EQ:ing away this beep for years and would like to find out what it is. Should I install another DV codec? Is it a plugin that causes this?

Thanks for our help.

Comments

Former user wrote on 1/27/2006, 7:36 AM
Is it a beep like a PULSE or a beep like a constant tone?

I know some audio PLUGINS will insert a beep in the audio if they are demo or unregistered versions.

Dave T2
JJKizak wrote on 1/27/2006, 7:43 AM
Try the simple things first. Turn off audio monitoring when capturing in Vegas. Ground loops on sound card? Built-in sound card on motherboard not behaving? Weather radar neerby?

JJK
Zwampen wrote on 1/27/2006, 7:53 AM
It's not a volume constant beep. But the frequency seems to be constant. And not like a PC speaker beep. It varies with time. Remember that i'ts at over 11kHz which is quite high up in the frequency band. So i'ts not a put there delibrately by some plugin etc. It reminds of the high pitch of a 50/60 Hz television.

The capture is always digital through firewire so analogue influence should not be the situation here, except maybe from recordning the material (with analogue microphones). It feels to me that our Vegas programs handles the DV audio material differently compared to say AVID or Sorensson or Canopus...
Former user wrote on 1/27/2006, 7:54 AM
I am not an engineer, obviously, but any chance this is interference from a cordless phone, security system or cellphone?

Dave T2
johnmeyer wrote on 1/27/2006, 8:06 AM
I will hazard a guess that this is something coming in from your monitor. I am not totally certain because usually you get this at the flyback transformer frequency, which operates at just above 15 kHz. However, I'd try capturing with the monitor turned off.
Zwampen wrote on 1/27/2006, 8:18 AM
i don't think it's the monitor and not any cordless phones etc.

Just did a test with some video captured with the capture tool in Vegas. First i played the AVI (DV) file in Windows Media player and it sounded great. Then i put the file into Vegas with everything at default and there is the high pitched sound in the background!

This is driving med crazy. It must be a DV codec or something in Vegas that does this. I tried with both the Microsoft DV codec and the Sony Vegas default DV codec, same result. And this happens on different computers in different locations in the office too!
Former user wrote on 1/27/2006, 8:20 AM
One other guess for me, sorry I am not helping.

Vegas defaults to some PLUGINS enabled on the audio tracks. Have you tried to disable or delete this plugins to see if they are affecting the audio stream.

Dave T2
Zwampen wrote on 1/27/2006, 8:24 AM
Yepp, I have tried disabling the audio plugins but the annoying beep is there. What is Vegas doing to the sound that other programs don't? This is so strange.
Sol M. wrote on 1/27/2006, 12:00 PM
What version of Vegas are you using? I know Dave already mentioned this, but there's a confirmed bug on 6.0c that causes intermittent beeping to occur on audio tracks with certain plugins added to the chain because they show up as being in DEMO mode. This bug doesn't appear to happen on all installations (it didn't happen to me until I had to reformat and re-install vegas), so you may have trouble finding others who have found solutions to this issue. So far, my solution has been to downgrade to 6b. Sony have told me that a fix should be in the next update (whenever that is).

Have you checked any of the audio busses or even the master to see if you have any audio plugins enabled?

Also, is the sound present in renders? Maybe you could render out a short audio file for us to hear so that we can get a better idea of the sound you're referring to.
Zwampen wrote on 1/27/2006, 2:01 PM
I have had this problem for years, with version 5 and 6 a, b, c. Once I open it Vegas for processing and then export it to say wmv or AVI (DV or uncompressed), the high pitched beep is in the new file too.

I will encode a small file so you can have a listen to it on Monday when I am back at work.
vitalforce2 wrote on 1/27/2006, 2:05 PM
Not an expert at all but after reading a few years of these forum posts I hear a voice saying, "sounds like a hardware driver issue."
johnmeyer wrote on 1/27/2006, 8:37 PM
Since it isn't your monitor, I would agree that your sound card is the next most likely suspect.

You mentioned 11,730 Hz in your original post. How close is this to the exact frequency? I did a search for "spurious response" and "spurious signal," which is what you are experiencing is called. I found a few things, but nothing close enough to what you describe to be useful.
Zwampen wrote on 1/28/2006, 12:17 AM
Well, the signal seems to be around 11730 Hz +- 50 Hz.

What we do have in our office is 3 mobile phone transmitters/receivers mounted in the ceiling at different places. But that those transmitters should afffect digital data, and only Vegas data is beyond my understanding...
JJKizak wrote on 1/28/2006, 5:34 AM
Whenever you have a boatload of electronic items in one room this sort of thing gets out of hand. The old telephone exchanges and IBM computer rooms were all shielded and that includes ceiling, floors, walls, furnace vents, doors with burillium ? strips, and huge filtrons on the ac lines. They also did not use flourescent lights as they are notorious noise generators. That still does not eliminate a hardware problem or a hardware conflict. Those transcievers have oscillators, thats bad news. Harmonics all over the place. First thing I would do is get rid of them or move them into a shielded room where they should be. Maybe try to correlate the beep with something.

JJK
Former user wrote on 1/28/2006, 7:19 AM
You say it doesn't show up in other software, are you running all your NLE software on the same computer?

Dave T2
johnmeyer wrote on 1/28/2006, 8:04 AM
Do you have the telephone line plugged into the computer? If so, try unplugging it. My Panasonic PBX phone system generates an unbelievable amount of RFI.

Zwampen wrote on 1/28/2006, 3:31 PM
Often the editing is done through Avid Pro DV and then wmv, rm, qt or flv files are rendered through Vegas in some way. But the "beep thing" is experienced also on some computers that "only" have Vegas installed too... Something is happenning in Vegas and only Vegas. Is there any audio setting I can change in the prefererences that migh help me?

There are no telephone lines installed on the encoding and editing computers. In fact there is no computer in the office connected to a phone line.

I really appreciate you trying to help me with this. It's hard to believe that nobody else has this problem while I have it on multiple computers.
farss wrote on 1/28/2006, 3:44 PM
First off, RFI, phone lines and Ghosts In The Machine cannot be causing this. I say that ASSUMING everything is staying in the digital domain and you're not somehow doing something completely oddball.
Vegas is used as a very serious audio application, think 100 track mixes for major motion pictures, if there was any oddball 'beep' getting into that stuff due to some glitch in the code all hell would break loose.

So lets go thru this step by step, cause I suspect it's a simple finger problem. You put an AVI file from some other NLE on the Vegas T/L and render it out to say WMV and you get a 'beep' in the audio?
You do nothing else, just plain AVI or QT file on the T/L and it's a plain file copy from one machine to another?

Try this simple test, Create a few minutes of generated media, plain black will do, with no audio. Render to an AVI file and play it back, any beep?
Render to the other formats you use, any beeps?

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/28/2006, 4:28 PM
I agree with Bob. For a whole host of reasons, some of which he mentions, it is extremely unlikely that Vegas is the cause -- or at least not a "bug" in Vegas.

In addition to the steps he recommends, can you post 10-15 seconds of sample audio somewhere?
Zwampen wrote on 1/28/2006, 4:57 PM
I will post a clip on Monday when I'm back in the office. I'm almost 100% sure that if I generate media there will be no beep. But if I capture a tape with material that was recorded with our equipment as stated in the first post there will this high frequency beep in the background (only in Vegas...).

Could it be the DSR-20P that is reencoding the DV data and Vegas with it's DV codecs get's it wrong in some way? I can test with a DSR-11P and see if it works ok later.
farss wrote on 1/28/2006, 5:05 PM
Does the beep onlyshow up in the captured clip in Vegas, I mean the same captured clip, like if you open the same clip in another NLE (don't capture in another app and don't render it out).

Also when you have the captured clip on the T/L check the audio's properties, does it report 16/48K and not 16/32K? To do this RClick the audio track.

The other possibility is it is possible to get VidCap to capture audio from your sound card and vision from the 1394 port, that could get odd beeps from RFI into the captured video.

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/28/2006, 6:25 PM
I looked back at your previous post, and you stated that you are capturing via Firewire. I think it is impossible for Vegas to have any effect on the audio for the simple reason that a "capture" via Firewire is actually not a capture at all, but a file transfer. The bits on your camera are simply copied to the hard disk on your computer. There is no more chance of introducing a suprious tone or other anomaly than there would be if you were to copy the file from one hard disk to another.

Having said that, once Vegas opens the file, it may need to manipulate it to match your project properties. What is the format of the original audio? What are the audio project settings in Vegas?
Zwampen wrote on 1/29/2006, 1:45 AM
Yepp, the capture/file transfer is via firewire. No analogue captures involved in the tape to computer process. Hmmm, as I said, even if I create a Quickitime reference file from AVID and import into Vegas, that beep is added. That should put the firewire transfer/tape recorder out of the picture I guess.

I use the PAL DV template (I'm in Sweden) in the project properties as default. The audio is almost always stored as16bit/48kHz on tape by our cameras/tape recorders.
farss wrote on 1/29/2006, 2:15 AM
John,
want some bad news, it's VERY possible for Vegas to have an effect on the audio during capture. It is not a straight file transfer. Vegas can and will resample audio during capture. Audio from a tape recorded at 16/48K can end up as 16/32K, this is a know issue that's been there since day one.
Bob.