Video8 mono capture into stereo?

[AlphaZeta00002]

I have been recording some Video8 tapes that were captured on a mono camera. I didn't use a Y-splitter out of the camera, since I thought that functionality was captured in the original cable provided with the camera (that was definitely wrong I realize now!).

Is there a simple process to boost only the right side audio in a post-processing sense? Or would I be better of re-capturing with a splitter in-line? Thank you!

[timtape]

Yes so long as the mono audio has been cleanly captured on one of the channels it can be changed in post to fill both left and right. But I'm not sure every editor can do this. There was a convention in video recorders that if you plugged a mono cable into only the left audio RCA input socket the signal would automatically be recorded to both left and right channels equally. If this doesn't work with your audio inputs it will have to be fixed with a y splitter or in the editor assuming it can do this. You may need to check this by reading up the editor's owner's manual.

[traal]

I would remove the blank channel so the playback device doesn't think it's stereo. You can do this in Audacity when you normalize the audio.

[lordsmurf]

I always use Sound Forge for correcting single channel to dual channel mono. I can open the AVI direct in Sound Forge, copy the good channel over the bad, save as WAV. I can then open VirtualDub, stream copy the video, with this different audio file, to a new lossless AVI. In some cases, I don't even need to correct the lossless, the WAV is just used as source for the latter encode.

This is actually a very common problem. Camcorder "stereo" was farce that had many issues not noticed until the digital conversion era.

[keaton]

I've used the same method as Lordsmurf describes when I discovered that I had one bad channel from a 2 channel source.

I captured Video8 a few years ago. It only had one RCA audio output. I used my usual 2 RCA out from tape player to 1 mini plug in to capture card type plugs. I plugged one of the RCA plugs into the camera out. In Capture mode, go to Audio -> Raw capture format and select 48000 Hz Mono instead of 48000 Hz Stereo. If you enable the audio meter in Virtualdub, you'll see the meter has both left and right active, and so it will capture the same audio to both channels. If you changed the capture format back to stereo, you'll see that only one of the channels is active.