John Gruber pointed to this comprehensive guide to podcasting equipment. Dan Benjamin, a veteran podcaster, offers recommendations at four levels:
1. Beginner
2. Entry level
3. Mid-Range
4. Prosumer
Go read, and get to podcasting. (I’ll join you as soon as I’m done editing this video…)
I think jose. I do. I met him – only briefly – when he recorded an interview Ellen and I did last weekend at the National Storytelling Festival. The organizers of the festival were collecting peoples’ stories from their own experience in Jonesborough and at the festival over the years. The first time I went, 11 years ago, I had a memorable time and was part of a great onstage story. I’ll tell that tale here another time, but I want here to point to Jose’s site, which documents his many interests, achievements, and areas of expertise.
If you’re i his area, check him out, and if you’re not, check his site – there’s lots he knows about and can help you with.
Think Jose!
Taping a science teaching demonstration in Dr. Brian Williams class, a preliminary to a series of podcasts were going to produce. Shooting film-canister rockets fueled by Alka Seltzer in the park! (Clip to follow; posted from my phone.)
Debra Kaufman reports on a Digital Cinema Society session on encoding video for the web: Online Video: Codecs, Encoding and Compression for the Studio Daily Blog It’s a quick report of what must have been a much more in-depth discussion, but go for the take-away formats that have, for now, the widest reach among potential viewers.
There are alternatives to some of the paid apps they link to in this nice list of quick tips. Regrettably I don’t have time at the moment to link to them.Those aside, this is a good list for the Mac newbie, from TechRadar UK: 69 really useful OS X timesavers | News | TechRadar UK.
This introduction is “gentle” only in technical terms; Mark Pilgrim’s language can get quite salty, so if your school’s filters block four-letter words, you’ll need to read this at home. Nonetheless, the four part A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding (part one, part two, part three, part four) is an excellent introduction to concepts, terminology, patent status, and limitations of the formats. It does not provide any instruction or tutorials, but those are widely available through the Google.
At O’Reilly’s Digital Media blog, Todd Ogasawara offers A Newbie Looks at Podcasting Tools: Garageband, Audacity, and Levelator. It’s a good overview of mostly Mac-based tools, and includeds a link to and description of the (apparently invaluable) Levelator. I haven’t tested it yet, but many many podcasters are singing – or blogging – its praises.
Todd publishes periodic posts on the O’Reilly blog about FFOSS – Freeware/Free and Open Source Software. Put that link in your RSS reader – worth it!
A quick link to a thorough piece on compressing for YouTube: How To Make YouTube Videos Look Great. The author covers several methods, platforms, and compressors, including Divx, Flash, and QuickTime, and provides links to samples. Very well done – if you want to learn about video compression for the web, whether for YouTube or some other site, you’ll do well to bookmark this.
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.