I have been trying to take movies with my Fuji FinePix F470 camera. It takes movies in a type of AVI (audio video interleave) file that handles images and sound as a single file. The movies have a dot AVI file extension.
I record the movies on a removable flash card and use a card reader to input the files into my pc XP computer. I have the latest editions of Windows Music Player and Quik Time Player. Both of these players play the video part of the file without a problem, but on both players the audio is distorted. I don’t hear this distortion on the camera’s onboard speaker, but the speaker is small and may not be delivering the lower frequency distortion.
I’m curious whether anyone here knows anything about or has any experience with this particular camera or with playing dot AVI files. I read that other still/movie cameras that record in MJPEG-4 format can record basic videos suitable for YouTube presentation.
I’m not sure how to describe it technically. I can hear the flute track OK, but also there is lower frequency noise that is with each note, not as a background hum but synchronized with the treble notes. The overall effect is the the flute track sounds distorted. This may be due to a bad microphone in the camera, or else the music players don’t do well with this format, although the instruction manual says that the dot AVI files are supposed to play on Quik Time.
If I were to guess, that sounds like Aliasing.
Aliasing happens when you digitally sample
a sound using a sampling frequency lower
than twice the highest frequency you want
to capture. It causes frequencies higher than
a certain point to be “folded” to a lower freq.
(It’s the same phenomena that makes wheels
on cars seem to spin backwards in movies/TV.)
Look in your manual and see if there’s a way
to increase the audio sampling rate. It probably
defaults to the standard setting for voice, which
is about 8KHz. That’s way too low for instruments.
That’s why it’s pretty useless to play an instrument
over the phone, because phones cut off all freqs.
above 4KHz to prevent Aliasing.
Thank you for the helpful replies. Unfortunately, my camera has no audio adjustments in movie mode, and without that, it isn’t adequate for recording music.
I get the same problem as Doug with my Canon 710IS camera. The harmonica sound is just distorted, sort of broken up in a fluttery way. I’m using a top quality SDHC card too. There’s no way I could use the results for YouTube or anything else. Yet I know other people who’ve done recordings on their stills camera and got good results.