I am a very casual user of Audacity, but can do what I need to do (not that much) with that tool. Great tool, BTW. This would be things like noise reduction, normalization, maybe some EQ and reverb, and not much more.
I also own a video editing tool called Wondershare. I have used it a half dozen times for mostly editing out unwanted sections of stuff and/or maybe splicing a couple of things together.
If I want to do a little "Audacity Stuff’ to the audio portion of a video file (captured by a webcam), is the basic approach here going to be to load the audio into Audacity which seems trivial to do. Do whatever processing is needed. Then, assuming that I didn’t change the timeline of the audio file save it back to whatever format it came from, strip out the audio from the video file using Wondershare, and replace the audio with the file I just processed with Audacity.
Then using Wondershare I can do whatever cutting, adding trailers and stuff, etc that I choose. Or would it be better to capture with Audacity and my webcam software simultaneously and then do the merge? Or something else?
Or would it be better to capture with Audacity and my webcam software simultaneously and then do the merge? Or something else?
Maybe…
Does one sound better than the other? Can you hear a difference?
The webcam is most-likely saving the audio in a compressed format (maybe MP4 audio?). When you open a compressed file in Audacity it gets decompressed. Then when you recombine it with the video and re-render, it goes through another generation of lossy compression. (You may not hear any quality loss.)
If you record with Audacity you may be able to record losslessly, if the webcam doesn’t have built-in compression and as if it works with Audacity. Or do you have a different-better microphone to use with Audacity?
Then of course you will have to synchronize the audio & video. You can clap your hands to simulate a [u]clapperboard[/u]. If you can see both audio tracks at the same time (before deleting the one you don’t want) it’s fairly easy to align the “claps”.
And, the webcam & soundcard have separate clocks, so over-time they will drift out-of-sync. If you are working with short clips that shouldn’t be problem but if you have “movie length” recordings it could become an issue.
The video editor may also be re-encoding (re-compressing) the video when you render. Some video editors offer a feature the only re-encodes the video (and audio) where necessary but most will re-encode.
If you record with Audacity you may be able to record losslessly, if the webcam doesn’t have built-in compression and as if it works with Audacity. Or do you have a different-better microphone to use with Audacity?
I will be using a Blue Yeti USB mic. I can capture with my (Dell XPS/Windows 10) laptop webcam and with Audacity simultaneously. I am assuming that in this case it is just like (from an Audacity perspective) the webcam is not there, so the issue becomes one of just replacing the audio track in the video file using my video editor. Surely that is doable, although I have never looked into it.