Creativity to Spare

How many videos and short movies are ruined every day from bad audio? People will forgive mediocre video. If it is slightly out of focus, handheld, dim lit or whatever. But they will hit the stop button, change the channel, or grit through their teeth with bad audio. How important is it? What do you pay for on a airplane flight? They give the picture away for free, without the audio you don’t have the story, the emotion, the mood. Maybe I’m just an audio engineer, but I enter my work in a lot of film challenges and man is it a challenge to sit through most of these movies because the other movie makers neglect the sound.

So you bought a cheap camcorder with a built in microphone? Is there anything you can do to make this situation better. I will show you a few really fundamental tricks, while featuring the bad audio moving toward the good.

If your camera has an 1/8″ input for a microphone, purchase a small stereo mic that will sit on the hot shoe. Even the $30 to $50 units will improve your audio quite a bit. Get that mic closer to the talent, with an extension. It’s the same kind of cable that a pair of headphones uses. Get a microphone stand and mount the mic above the talent’s head pointing the microphone at their mouth. Turn off the A/C and any really noisy appliances. Listen to the sound coming from the camera with headphones, make sure it sounds good.

Links for XLR to 1/8″ mixer.
http://www.juicedlink.com/index_files/CX_camcorder_XLR_microphone_adapter_audio_mixers.htm
or
http://www.fullcompass.com/product/240770.html

Hey everybody, I went this last saturday to Podcamp AZ. It was great. I met a bunch of really cool people and learned a whole lot about social media. Changes and updates to my site soon. Check it out here.

If you have any suggestions on future show topics let me know. In the pipeline: an interview on how to start a record label, the New Logic Studio, simple tips for better sound. I’m thinking of adding voicemail comments to the page

I’ve always been a fan of old movies and commercials. Such as all the movies used on MST3K, or the footage in Queen’s “Under Pressure” video. When I would see other media producers putting this old media into their movies I wondered two things. Where do you get all this great old footage and is it free to edit and use in my own movies without copyright concerns? I’ll discuss both issues.

In the past, I have found services that warehouse old footage and will convert it to various media formats for you, but it would cost hundreds of dollars. But today we have an excellent source for public domain footage and it is free. It is the Internet Archive Movie Archive. It hosts over 100,000 moving images online, from old commercials, and short films, to feature length movies. One of my favorite collection is from the A/V Geeks by Skip Elsheimer. And did you know “Night of the Living Dead” is public domain, it didn’t include a copyright and after a few years it became PD.

As far as rights to use this material, it says in a side bar. “This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.” I would still check to make sure it says Public Domain in the Creative Common license field.

Once you find something interesting you can preview it in MP4 format and then download it if you like. I suggest downloading this stuff at the highest quality you can choose, usually mpeg2. It will be large depending on the length, but it will look and sound the best. Most editing software will not allow you to directly use mpeg2 footage so you will have to convert it. I have used QuickTime before with mixed results, but a great utility for Mac OSX is Visual Hub. It is only $24, and is a great solution for all your conversion needs, from ipod, psp, DV, DVD, or to Final Cut. Just drag and drop the mpeg2 footage into the window and choose the output format. In my case that would be a DV stream and I also check the box for prepare for Final Cut. A few minutes later its ready to go. Have fun.

Video Converters for Windows

http://www.madzsoftware.com/universal_video_converter.htm