"Audio Levels too low" error and terrible viseme detection even with pro audio or camera-based mute

[BevinC]

I searched the forums for solutions to the "audio levels too low" thing, but none of the solutions work for me. My recordings in Audition are plenty loud, but I still get the error in CA. Also, viseme detection is really bad, even when I use professionally pre-recorded audio, or when I try the new "camera-based muting" option. Any ideas for what I could try?

[alank99101739]

Interesting. The two may be related - if it cannot hear you, then CH will do a bad job of collecting visemes.

Have you tried an audio clip with a simple voice at good volume level using Audition. Save that to a file, be confident it is good (by listening to it). Then import that audio file into CH and use compute lipsync from audio. Does that work better? Have you tried it with the sample puppets?

If you can show it working badly using a supplied sample puppet, can you post the audio file here you used? Others can then try to repeat it using the audio file on their copy of the sample puppets to see if it helps show any problems.

My hope is CH is just not getting the volume of the mic correct (or not using the mic you are expecting - e.g. using the laptop mic instead of your real mic, so you hear something but not very loud because its using a different mic that you expect).

[BevinC]

As mentioned in my original post, the viseme problem actually happens with professional clips recorded in a studio as well as when I'm recording live. I actually bought a condenser mic hoping I could lip sync over recorded audio thinking maybe the input from the web cam would help, but it made no difference. It's fascinating because the guy who does the tutorials on youtube doesn't even seem to be using professional equipment and his visemes look great. 

I did actually figure out that if I hold the condenser mic really close to my face (like, where it's almost touching my teeth) then I get much better visemes, even though putting a large mic that close to my face obscures my mouth from the camera... weird? Maybe it doesn't like something about the way the studio recordings are compressed... I'll see if I can get RAW wav files... or, for that matter, I guess I should try using the condenser mic to record something in Audition now that I have it on my machine (I literally downloaded it from Creative Cloud so I could see if my audio was too low in anything other than CH). 

[BevinC]

Recording in Audition is definitely better, so it's somethign about the other files. But that means the "low levels" problem inside CH is a totally different issue... I hope I can find a way to solve it because live-streaming is part of my eventual plan for this project. Also, I'm using an example puppet... so far I'm just trying to get CH set up correctly-- haven't even started work on my project yet.

I've tried all the usual things for the low audio problem (CH has permission to use my mic in Windows, etc.) I have a Realtek sound card and am having to boost my mic artificially to get good levels in general, but no other software is having an issue with this (and this has been a pretty standard thing to have to do on PC's since the beginning of time, sadly). I've never had to do much with audio (besides importing it) for any of my projects in the past (I'm trying CH for the first time-- have previously been a professional animator in Maya), so this is new territory for me. Is this forum really the only source of tech support for this program? There's not a support line I can call or anything?-- though, granted, I know Maya doesn't even have that anymore. I've been working at the studios for too long, LOL. I remember the age of the dinosaurs when you could actually call someone and get your problem solved right away so you could get back to work... funny, software was also cheaper back then. Go figure 🙂

[alank99101739]

Here is my limited experience in this area:

• I double check to make sure it is using the external mic and not the laptop mic. I gently tap in the microphone. If loud in app then its definitely the right mic.
• I try recording using a different application (non-Adobe). Is the microphone loud enough there? I had to get a pre-amplifier for my microphone for it to work well.
• I tried recording in Audition and using the normalize volume controls there, saving to a file, then using compute from lipsync. Any good? If so, that indicates CH *can* do it, but the volume is too low directly.
• For live streaming I use Virtual Cable software to pipe Audition output into CH and OBS. I use some of the volume normalization, noise reduction, graphic EQ etc to get the sound better.

Virtual Cable acts as a speaker and a mic. I set the output device in Audition to the virtual cable software, then set the input of OBS and CH as the mic from Virtual Cable. I also set a delay in OBS to get the audio and video streams to sync correctly (noise cleanup inserts a slightly delay)

You don't have to do all the above, but that is what I used to use for streaming.

[BevinC]

That process for livestreaming makes perfect sense to me (sounds like about how complicated it should be, haha). I haven't messed around with OBS yet, but my friend who uses it and inspired me to livestream to begin with makes it sound like it's kind of a pain in the butt, but as long as I can port Audition output into CH and OBS, I should theoretically be good. CH seems to be highly sensitive to my mic for some reason (just the sound of my computer fans makes the audio bar jump almost halfway to full) and yet it still says my mic is too quiet. I have no other mics plugged into this machine (it's a workstation, so no built-in mic) and I even disabled all other audio input ports, and that still makes no difference. But I will check out Virtual Cable. It seems like since CH likes the output from Audition, as long as I can just port that in rather than my mic input, I should be good.