Sample/Bit-Rate Question...

Promythia

Promythia

New member
Hi I have a few questions I'm sure you guys could help me with. I know CD audio is 16/44, so my CD songs I've been recording at 24/44. I'm also trying to get into film and video scoring and was curious what format those are in. I thought I heard DVD's are 24/96 so I'm assuming most video games are too because most of them are on a DVD now (PS2 and stuff.) Can anyone confirm this?

Right now I'm working on a piece that would be better suited for film and was about to start working on it in 24/44, then I thought wait, I should ask you guys before I record it at 24/44 then I'm screwed if I were to put it on DVD. Thanks!
 
I record everything at 24/48.

The CD Audio standard of 16/44 will be around for a while, but 48khz DVD audio is starting to become more prevalent. I'd rather downsample to CD than upsample to 48k in the future. Might as well get all those bits the first time around...
 
In terms of uncompressed formats(PCM), stereo audio for DVDs works at 16 bit/48kHz. Perhaps those higher rates you heard for DVD were for DVD-Audio. Now, you can choose to compress the audio for DVD using compression schemes such as AC-3 (dolby digital) and DTS.

The transfer rate for a DVD is 9.8 Mbps, and only a small portion of that is devoted to audio (the most going to video, but I forget the breakdown) For example a stereo 96k/24 bit transfer rate is 4.8 Mbps, which is way to much for a DVD-Video. DVD-Audio, which is only devoted to audio, can handle that (and that's why DVD-Audio can do uncompressed multi-channel files)
 
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One other little bit of information. It seems these days that the standard has become to encode audio for DVD-V in a compressed format, even for stereo files. If you look at the audio stream on a DVD you're watching, it is often Dolby Digital 2-channel. In terms of Dolby Digital encoding, I'm mainly familiar with APak which comes with Apple DVD Studio Pro, and while I haven't used it in a while, if I remember correctly you can import any type of file and it will convert it to ac-3.
 
If you are syncing directly to video, 48k.

Video games all use a compressed format of some sort. Just because it's on a DVD doesn't mean it's DVD audio any more than a CD is always an audio CD.
 
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