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Sound Advice: Digital Audio Secrets Revealed!

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Digital Audio Secrets: Revealed!
When it comes to audio in our videos, most of us just plug in a microphone and hit the record button.

There is more to digital audio than squiggly lines on the timeline. A better understanding of the process will help you record and edit better sound with each project. It's time to dig in and crack the digital audio code. I promise to keep the math to a minimum.

By the Numbers
As audio is piped into your camera or computer, it is digitized, a process that converts the sounds we hear into a string of ones and zeros. On playback, the computer reassembles the digits and converts them into something we can hear. Magic, right? Actually, it's more math than magic. To understand the math, we first need to know a couple of key phrases: sampling rate and bit depth. In digital video, the incoming audio is sampled 48,000 times per second (48kHz for short) -- sort of like a snapshot of the sound at that instant in time. By sampling 48,000 times per second, we're assured of a very accurate depiction of our audio. By comparison, CD audio is sampled at 44.1kHz. There are some fancy mathematical calculations -- commonly referred to as the Nyquist Theorem -- that explain the sampling ra…

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Hal Robertson | October 2006

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