16 bit AND 24 bit in AVID 3.1.3

[gato sapato]

Hello all,

I am recording sync sound for a documentary and sending 24bit/48khz files to picture editorial, they are running Avid 3.1.3. They are also importing the 16bit/48khz 2 tracks from the sony Z7 we´re shooting with into the same project.

My questions: does anyone know if AVID plays both types at the same time, or whether there is any conversion going on, and whether this could be a problem for sound editing later on? (In case the OMF export would later get the original 24 bit files this should not be a problem, I assume...)

[apple-q]

You can set the avid to either:

-Leave every imported sound at it´s original bit-depth and Fs.
or
-Convert every imported sound to a fixed Fs and bit-depth and format (AIFF or BWAV)

It´s somewhere in the import settings.

The AVID plays mixed Fs fine.

What´s best for you depends on your workflow. If all your original audio is 16bit only it doesn´t make sense to set the AVID to 24bit. It´s just a waste of space and all LSBs will be filled with zeros.

If the 24bit audio is your main audio set the avid to fixed 24bit or leave all files at their original bit-depth.

If it were you, I´d ask the editor to set the AVID to fixed BWAV, 48k, 24bit.

[gato sapato]

I understand you are talking about two different things:

1.importing files
2.project settings

I know he already has his project setup and started with plenty of audio material (both 16 bit and 24 bit),so I can really only hope his settings were the correct ones (do you know if default settings apply or AVID always asks you to adjust them beforehand?).

In case they were set to 16bit, even if he converts the new material to 24bit, a lot would already have been "downsampled" to 16bit...which is not what we need for sound post.

The same goes for changing the session/project settings halfway through the editing, am I right?

[apple-q]

going from 24 to 16 isn´t downsampling. The AVID will simply drop the 8 LSBs wich it´s very nice. Bit depth reduction need proper dithering and shouldn´t be done at the first stage of your shoot. It would be a shame if they truncated everything to 16bit before the project has actually started. There are no 16bit delivery formats in Film so it doesn´t really make sense at all.

The import setting are somewhere in the project settings.

You can ask the editor to set the AVID correctly and batch-import the audio again.

Chek the settings and batch-load the 24bit files that were loaded with 16bit settings. You can verify that in the bin by setting the bin views to show bit-depth and sample rate.

If the editor doesn´t know how to set his own machine, find an assistant editor who knows how to operate the editor´s workbench. ;-)