HVR-A1E hd camcorder with white noise problem

[tpnorth]

Hi

I've recently bought at a Sony HVR-A1E hd camcorder however the white noise is horrific!!

The sound is coming from the cameras external/attached microphone, it is recording other ambient sounds up okay but the white noise is the more obvious sound which ruins the footage.

any suggestions? anyone with the same problem?

Tom

[Mick2011]

Hi Tom, welcome to the forum.

While the A1 gives you incredible image quality for the money, its built-in audio is maybe not quite so refined. I obviously can't quantify the noise levels you're referring to and I suppose it's possible you have a hardware problem, but the audio is known to be a little noisy on this model.

It may be that a decent external mic would help, although I believe much of the heightened noise floor you're experiencing is down to on-board audio processing. It's certainly quite common for 'serious' A1 users to carry outboard pre-amps, or use entirely separate audio recorders, for critical applications.

There are other methods that might help, like using manual gain adjustment, about which I'm frankly less clued-up. You could try asking at the Sony Videographers forum: http://www.sony.co.uk/discussions/community/en/pse and hopefully pick up some tips there.

Hope that's of some help.

Mick

[tpnorth]

Hi Mick,

Thanks for replying. I've since discovered my problem. I was playing back the recorded footage through the camera and listening through my headphones. This is where the sound problem occurs. Once the footage was in my editing software the sound was fine. The cameras hardware seems to be working.

Although there is still the issue of sound testing before filming but if i trust the camera will record it and record it to a good level I shouldn't have too much of a problem.

I will look in to the manual gain adjustment and see if I can get clued up on this.

Any reason why there is so much white noise when listening to sound through the camera?

Regards

Tom

[Mick2011]

Yes, live monitoring of audio through the cans might well be a little 'dirty' compared with your actual footage, because the circuitry that you plug into is often either different to the recording circuitry or not as well shielded.

I suppose there is an element of 'faith' there that things will be better once you upload them. Glad to hear you got a good result anyway, that's what counts!

Good luck with it.

Mick