"Audio quality" and "Canon 5D" in the same subject line; John, you crack me up. Oh my. Let me catch my breath from laughing so hard.
So, building on Dom's and Steve's comments. The clocks on 5Ds, ime, are fairly stable but inaccurate. Some cameras hardly drift at all, some drift a fair amount (seemingly independent of user error). I'd suggest using the backup audio that the mixer recorded as primary audio. Even if they were recording from the mixer to a cheap prosumer flash-memory recorder. If the mixer is recording to professional gear (Sound Devices, Zaxcom, whatever), then no contest.
Sync should be pretty easy with Plural Eyes, if you want to go that route. The deal is, the greater the similarity between the two audio waveforms you want to match, the better job Plural Eyes does. So if you have good audio recorded by a competent mixer and poorly-recorded audio captured by a crappy on-camera (or crappy built-in) mic on a 5D and you're in a noisy environment, Plural Eyes may struggle. During an interview in a controlled environment, things will be OK. But since production is sending the mixer's audio to the camera, the camera and audio recorder should have super-closely matched waveforms and Plural Eyes will zip through everything. Useful if you have dozens of clips to sync up. And slip everything a few frames.
But if it's just a few long takes and you have neither Plural Eyes nor an assistant, just sync by hand.
Worst case: use the 5D audio tracks the mixer sent to camera. If it was recorded optimally, it'll be semi-sucky and off by 3ish frames (as Steve says), but useableish if the your standards are low enough.
Jim Feeley
PS- I do a fair amount of location audio work.
On Aug 31, 2012, at 6:23 PM, John Moore wrote:
> I searched but didn't find the thread I'm thinking of. I believe Oliver mentioned various legacy format issues with audio sync and some DSLRs. I believe the Panny HVR-200 was known to have some audio sync issues with it's files and perhaps DSLRs like Cannon 5D. We are shooting standups with the 5D and they use to do double system and sometimes it was off. Now they are sending the audio to the camera from the mixer. Is the internal audio on the Canon 5D problematic as far as quality and sync? We also have the audio files to use for backup. Trying to remember what gotchas I've read about on the L-2. You now it's not until I get bit in the arse that I remember something somewhere somehow might be of use.
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> John Moore
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> Barking Trout Productions
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