Help Mixing Sound from My Lumix G6 and Zoom Q3 HD

[Malinois]

Hi,
help I have killed my sound it is flat.

I am helping a friend record some African drumming videos. I am using my lumix G6.

The sound setup is as follows.

He has a lavalier mic going direct to the camera.

I have a Zoom Q3HD in audio only mode to record the drums as they are so loud the gain has to be set at about 2 which obviously does not pick up his voice.

My lavalier is only recorodingon the left chanel so I duplicated it on the right to get it in both ears. No problem.

Then I merge both sound sources and video in Adobe Premier.

On their own both sound sources sound good but as soon as I merge the drums go flat and uninteresting. Totally lacking punch.

You help is really appreciated on this. Be gentle I am also a novice.


Thanks

Ian

[TimAndrews]

Perhaps the 2nd track is phase cancelling.
I am unsure whether that can be adjusted in 'Premier', but the option appears in many sound editing apps (e.g. Audacity has Menu: Effects / Invert).

[bouldersoundguy]

Most likely you have a time alignment problem, and possibly a polarity mismatch. I don't know if you can do it in Premiere, but it's a fairly simple matter of moving the far mic track to the left in the time line to compensate for the different arrival times of the sound in the two mics. It takes approximately a millisecond for sound to travel one foot, so you can estimate how much to move the far mic track. Once you get it close it may become apparent that one track needs to have its polarity inverted. Then you fine tune it by ear. Even after all that there can be "complications" that may make perfect sound impossible.

This is something easy for me to do so if you like I could give it a go. You would need to post the files someplace where I could download them. Audio only would be preferable.

[zamiotana]

It definitely appears that the problem is caused by the sound of the drums having been caught on both microphones at different distances, resulting in the phase cancelling that Tim suggested.

you can move one of the audio tracks a bit in premiere and you will see a difference - you will need to read up on audio units since this will enable finer grained adjustments (finer than a single video frame)