DV for Teachers

At Studio Daily, Lonzell Watson provides his concise method to Remove Unwanted Noise from Clips in Apple Soundtrack Pro 2. No audio samples, but a clear step-by-step with screenshots aplenty. If you don’t know this trick, you should. Ever have to work with an audio track with a refrigerator or air conditioner in the background? What about crickets, or an outboard motor? I’ve seen – or rather heard – of all of these removed from audio tracks with Soundtrack, and with surprisingly good results.

Gain Adjust: Absolute vs Relative Audio In Final Cut Pro

A simple and beautiful tool for adjusting the volume of selected clips throughout an entire Final Cut project, without going through to do it by hand. Oh I could have used this many many times. Thanks to Digital Media Net for keeping the tips coming. Now if they’d just ease back on the incredible number of ads in Flash on their sites….

The inexhaustible Miguel Guhlin posted this about Audio Converters a few months ago, and I finally have gotten around to posting it.

Pop star Moby offers free licenses to student and independent filmmakers at mobygratis. Don’t know if internet use is acceptable, but the terms certainly seem to make the tunes available for offline personal and school use:

hi,
i’ll keep this brief.
this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.
to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password.
you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short.
the music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short.
if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society.
i hope that you find what you’re looking for,
moby

Go check it out.

I found another video excerpt from a Lynda.com training video, this one about equipment for podcasting. It’s useful information for any audio production, really. The clip describes what makes good headphones good and why you’d want to use them, does the same with microphones, and then a second clip on the second page of the post demonstrates how to position the mic for optimum pickup of your voice.

A small criticism of this is needed though: the host, Scott Bourne, does a good job of showing where to place the mic and of explaining why… but he doesn’t let us hear the difference these positions would make. His own voice is recorded for the video on a lavalier clipped to the front of his shirt. I’d like to see and hear a clip that demonstrates what not to do so listeners can hear the difference for themselves. I keep telling myself I need to do some podcasting….

Zoom In has a bunch of video tutorials, I’ve just discovered. This page links to a series on creating a soundtrack for video in Soundtrack and another two-part series on creating a podcast with Garageband. They have series on Motion, Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator, Flash, and much more. Well worth your time to check out.

GarageBand ‘08: A Review for Podcasters – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog

GarageBand ‘08 (or GarageBand 4, whichever name you want to call it) includes many time-saving and headache-saving improvements over the previous version. It also includes some new features that – if used properly – will improve the overall sound and quality of your podcast. For a heavy GarageBand user, I see these improvements as nearly worth the $80 pricetag for the iLife suite. Of course, iLife includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb in addition to GarageBand, so the purchase should be a no-brainer for the Mac-based podcaster.

Sounds good to me. It’s way past time for me to start podcasting – there are so many things around the ITC that need video tutorials, and there are bound to be people who need that information too. Keep an eye out, because they’re coming.

Thanks to Ellen, I found Mashable’s post listing 400+ Tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters & Musicians under the post title Online Media God. I linked to their 150 Online Video tool Sites a couple of weeks ago, and that 150 is part of the 400+. Go ahead, take all day.

Switch is a free audio format converter for Mac or Windows. Working on podcasts? Can’t get your Windows Media Audio files to work? Change to MP3 or other formats with this tool. Here’s a complete list of formats for importing or exporting. It even converts batches – so have your students submit their files to you and convert them all at once to the format you need for distribution.

Looking for a way to save the audio from an online .flv-format tutorial, Google found Gabriel Serafini’s site and his HOWTO: How to record a streaming .ram file to .mp3 using OS X.

He used the freeware applications SoundFlower to route the audio signal and Ben Shanfelder’s excellent Audio Recorder with specific settings in the Sound Preference Pane under System Preferences. It worked very well. now if I could capture the video portion without having to point a video camera at the screen….