Audio bit rate

[Alireza]

Hello,

Does ML allow the camera to record audio at a higher bitrate than the camera's original 16bit?

Planning to use a 5d mk2 to shoot an audio heavy short film. So far I've came across the Zoom H4n and Beachtek dxa-slr.
The H4n will record at 24bit, but the Beachtek is limited by the camera's 16bit.
The downside of the H4n is syncing in post, and the downside of the Beachtek is lower audio quality.
It would be ideal if ML altered the camera audio bitrate to record at 24bits.

Is the 24bit worth the extra step of syncing in post?

Would appreciate any feedback.

Cheers.

[Malcolm Debono]

You need to consider the input first. Have you decided what mic/s you'll be using to record audio?

[wallyllama]

A quick clarification.

sample rate is the number of samples/second, such as 48,000 (standard dvd bit rate), it affects frequency you can record, 48,000 khz sampling can record up to 22khz audio, most people can't hear above 20k (older people is much less, like 15khz)

bit depth (16 bit, or 24 bit) is how big each sample is and affects dynamic range (the difference between no sound and the loudest sound ) you can record. also can have an effect on the noise floor.

bit rate is part of compression, it affects how much loss there is from compression, higher bit rates will be decompressed with less difference between the playback and the original.

Unless you are really using high end gear, I doubt you will see much difference using 24bit sampling. If you do a lot of post production on the audio it may help some. Many audio DAWs will convert the samples to floating point numbers for editing which will reduce how much benefit you get from 24bit. <- this changes if you have great mics, and other gear plugged into a high end mixing board, then you will see the advantage of less hiss in the recording.

[vidalipoly]

Hi
this is my first post in the forum.
24bit audio would be  usefull when recording speech in a "noisy" enviroment or in a "live" music stage.
hard disk recorders such as :(hyperdeck shuttle 2, ki pro mini , pix 240i) record 24bit/48kHz audio through the hdmi .i know that these recorders use higher bit rates than the codec used by canon.i have the 5d mkiii and i will buy one of these recorders as soon as the "clean hdmi" is enabled,but i wish i could "calibrate" the audio meters to 24bits audio because there will be different meter readings between 16bits and 24 bits

Chris

[drapeama]

Onboard audio (like in this situation) should be used mostly for Sync in post. Dedicated recorder (Zoom/Tascam) should always be kept in mind.
What I do: mic >portable recorder >recorder's heaphone output >camera mic input. That way you get the best sound from the recorder, and output it to the camera via the headphones cable, so it's dual-recording (back-up recording as well) and you have a reference to sync in post.

That, and 24bit audio would require more space on the SD card. Not that it's a major issue but I don't think more than 16bit is necessary, it already records uncompressed audio (1536kbps) which is enough is the signal-to-noise ratio is good to start with.