A long shot, but.... (Extracting audio from files)

Hey all,

Wanted to check before I scrapped a bunch of clips.
I had a RODE VideoMic Pro plugged into my Sony a7s. I discovered later that the VideoMic chord that plugs into the audiojack had become severed internally in my travels, and will no longer record audio.

When I imported these clips into FCPX, I cannot hear anything. BUT it does give me a faint outline of a waveform which if different for each clip. (Seen in attachment)

Why and How? I'm hoping that the camera itself has still recorded the audio, and then disables it with a microphone attached. Is there any chance of this? Or are these pipe dreams? Why does it still produce a faint waveform?

In general if you cannot hear the audio during playback of the file, it's not there. Unfortunately this is a common issue with external mics. If the battery runs down or if the mic isn't switched on, there is no audio recorded. This is why it's a good practice to always monitor your audio with earphones.

Having an additional audio source -- even an inexpensive field recorder like a Zoom H1 -- can save you in cases like this.

The faint waveforms in FCP X are "reference waveforms", intended to show a magnified version of a low-level signal to help you find events and endpoints. If the recorded signal is mostly noise, the reference waveform is just magnified noise.

However there is a slight (microscopic) chance cross talk or leakage could have been recorded that could be boosted and processed to recover something.

If you load in FCP X, click on the clip then open Inspector with CMD+4 and click on the audio tab, it will probably show yellow "potential problems detected". You can then press the blue right arrow and try the loudness and background noise removal options, turning them up high.

That will probably not help but if you can hear anything maybe an expert could recover something.

Sorry about this; we have all been there and done that.