In message , Simon Patten
writes
Snipped....

Any suggestions?

I assume that you have already gone through Control Panel/Sounds and
Audio Devices/Voice/Voice Recording Volume and wound up the Line-In
control to max?

You might try using the Mic In instead of Line-in (and wind the mic
volume up to max as described above).

I know you've said money is tight, but most video editors allow you to
adjust the sound levels (either clip-by-clip, or by track, or both.
--
Tony Morgan
http://www.camcord.info

On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 00:49:15 +0100, Simon Patten
wrote:

Trouble is, the ATI AIW card captures sound and video and just sends
its audio output to the sound card's line-in. The recordings
themselves are quiet so that won't help.

Have you tried connecting it to other sound sources with higher output?
If they also produce very quiet capture then there's something wrong
with your ATI card.

It's either an input problem or the ATI isn't boosting the sound
sufficiently but I can't do anything about either so the only way is
going to be to boost the recorded audio with software and hope I don't
lose sync with the video.

It's worse than that, if it's being captured at low level you'll have
lost a lot of audio resolution (one bit per 6dB, if you're 24dB down
then your 16 bit audio will only be 12 bit), so if you try to 'amplify'
it later you will get a lot of digital quantisation 'noise'.

The solution is to amplify it before it gets to the video card, Maplin
do small cheap pre-amp kits but you'd be better off with a stereo mixer
so that you can adjust the level to your material.

I know you've said money is tight, but most video editors allow you to
adjust the sound levels (either clip-by-clip, or by track, or both.

I *love* my VideoReDo MPEG editor, it's easy to use and doesn't
recompress the edited output but alas it doesn't offer that facility
and the author didn't offer any hope of it being added. However, if
you can suggest an MPEG editor which streams its output through
without recompressing and includes that facility, I'd certainly be
interested in trying it.

It has a couple of other features lacking as well (playback skipping
cuts before muxing, unless that's an option I haven't found yet) but
it's the best I've found. It also takes TiVo MPEG-2 files (which have
long GOPs among other things) which makes it almost unique...

Chris C

"Simon Patten" wrote in message
...
Tony Morgan wrote:

I assume that you have already gone through Control Panel/Sounds and
Audio Devices/Voice/Voice Recording Volume and wound up the Line-In
control to max?

Yup, but worth pointing out I also checked that the audio output of
my cable TV box is set to max.

You might try using the Mic In instead of Line-in (and wind the mic
volume up to max as described above).

Trouble is, the ATI AIW card captures sound and video and just sends
its audio output to the sound card's line-in. The recordings
themselves are quiet so that won't help.

It's either an input problem or the ATI isn't boosting the sound
sufficiently but I can't do anything about either so the only way is
going to be to boost the recorded audio with software and hope I don't
lose sync with the video.

I know you've said money is tight, but most video editors allow you to
adjust the sound levels (either clip-by-clip, or by track, or both.

I *love* my VideoReDo MPEG editor, it's easy to use and doesn't
recompress the edited output but alas it doesn't offer that facility
and the author didn't offer any hope of it being added. However, if
you can suggest an MPEG editor which streams its output through
without recompressing and includes that facility, I'd certainly be
interested in trying it.

Thanks for replying.

Cheers,
Simon.

Try plugging the audio output straight in to the line in, bypassing the
capture card.