Don't know why this worked?

I got footage from a corporate event that was recorded on a AJA Ki-Pro drive and dumped it into final cut pro 7. Put the footage on the timeline and noticed that the audio in the footage was very very low. Just barely hitting. I highlighted the video track and two audio tracks and then selected link and stereo pair in the top menu bar. After doing this the audio tracks were coming in on normal levels.

I just don't understand why that boosted the sound with out noise or distortion? Were my project settings just setup incorrectly?

I always understood it to be reversed wires on the mic or recording device. Similar to hooking up one of your speakers on your stereo backwards. Speakers make sound going in and out. So if one signal is backward it works fine on its own, but mix the two as mono and one signal is telling the speaker to go out, and the other in, then you get nothing.

First time it happened to me it was a music track with extreme stereo separation. The only thing panned center was the voice. So the voice vanished. But the guitar, drums' etc were all separated and so they didn't cancel each other out.

Phasing. An odd issue that happens with audio sometimes where two audio channels cancel each other out.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Tim Wingert] "
So, when you highlight 2 audio tracks and select "Stereo Pair", it essentially hard pans left/right respectively?"

Yes making a stereo pair will default to left/right panning.

[Tim Wingert] "would this be noticeable to the person monitoring the record at the KiPro? (Either on the levels meter, or in the headphones?)"

Its not always easy to spot this kind of error without proper monitoring equipment that shows audio phase, or the ability to simply sum or mono the tracks when monitoring. Headphones plugged into the camera would likely be in stereo so would probably mask this kind of error. Possibly could have picked it up if monitoring via a mixer that allows mono-ing of the monitoring.

If one side was totally phase reversed then you can more easily hear that in headphones or speakers but lesser degrees of error are harder to notice.

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv