Homebrewed Music

Most of my video work consists of “look at me” videos I post on YouTube, shots of my slack key guitar playing. The audio is at least as important as the video, and a couple of my camcorders, the Sanyo Xacti HD2000 and the Kodak Zi8, were chosen because they had some sort of audio input and some degree of control over that input. In both cases, though, I’ve never been really happy with the audio I was able to record with these cams, even when I used an external source. Both these cameras, and others I’ve tried, have some kind of processing on the audio that attempts to maintain a constant level. And, of course, the audio circuitry gets a pretty small share of the development and manufacturing budget. The combination of these factors results in noisy distorted audio unless every detail is exactly right, a rare thing indeed. (more…)

I’ve been moving my audio processing to REAPER over the last year or so. It’s a powerful and reliable program in a fast moving package, with a very active and helpful user community. All these factors make it a real pleasure to use.

Now for the icing on the cake – the development team has linked in the FFmpeg video libraries and given REAPER the ability to do simple video editing. I’m totally happy with my video editing system since I moved to Edius Neo 2.5, but when I played around with video in REAPER I realized that this is a tool many musicians want and need. (more…)

I’ve been touting the Zi8 as a low priced tool for “look at me” YouTube videos because it allows the use of an external mic. It’s usually the case that our preferred framing for a shot moves the camera some distance from the subject. This means that the sound recorded by the camera mic is heavily affected by the sound of the room, and that is rarely a good thing for sound quality.

By separating the mic from the camera, I should be able to position the mic for optimum sound while placing the camera for the visual effect I want. Of course, I can do this wihout an audio input on the camera by a technique called parallel recording, that is, recording on a separate audio system of some kind. The familiar clack of the slate at the start of a movie sequence is used to make it easy to synchronize the picture and sound, and this technique works very well for my homebrewed videos as well. Still it’s very tempting to think that recording directly to the camera is an easier way out, with camera audio every take and every edit lining up without any extra effort. (more…)

I was already in Hawai`i on my vacation – can you take a vacation from being retired? – when I learned of the new Kodak Zi8. Now I already have a collection of video cameras that gets me teased by my wife, but this new shooter was too good to pass up. I’ve had it here in beautiful Kailua, O`ahu for a couple of weeks now and posted two videos.

I’m pretty pleased with this new camcorder. Let’s look at the pros and cons: (more…)

In my last blog entry I described the process for merging audio and video recorded on two different devices, for instance, replacing the audio in a Flip Mino HD video with audio recorded on a Zoom H2. This is a very handy technique, and can give great audio quality in the final video, but sometimes we only have camera sound available. So this post will describe the steps involved in separating the audio from the video, processing the audio, and merging the improved audio stream back to the video. (more…)

I have a lot of fun with Flip Mino HD camcorder. I’ve already done a few music videos with it and in my opinion the audio is far behind the quality of the video. Of course, even with expensive video equipment, having the mic on the camera keeps it some distance from the subject. Having a separate mic, much closer to the subject, gives a much better result. (more…)