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…)
Thanks to Macintouch for pointing this morning to the update of Audacity, the terrific free audio editor and recorder. Podcasters, video producers, journalists, and independent musicians all over the world use it every day. It’s a great tool that keeps getting better. Put on your school’s computers for your students to play with. It’s free, useful, and fun.
I’ve been on the Creative Cow email list for years now, and while The Creative Cow—Creative Communities of the World—deserves its popularity for providing support for the myriad video and multimedia development apps out there, it hasn’t always provided articles or tutorials that served my immediate needs. Today, though, I discovered their Final Cut Pro podcast and I’m bowled over at how the tutorials they’ve posted cover so many topics I’ve wanted help with: title animation in Motion, Photoshop-to-video, and more more more. I haven’t watched them all, so I can’t comment on their overall quality, but if they’re in the same league as their written tutorials then this is a valuable resource. Go for the Cow.
On his O’Reilly Digital Media Blog, David Battino offers a story about a video for his kids that’s a whirlwind tour of several editing tips and tricks in QuickTime Pro.
My housebound sons and a 12-year-old friend borrowed my digicam, set it to video mode, and improvised a spy movie. Not realizing they’d shot upwards of 25 clips, I offered to stitch the scenes together in QuickTime Pro (QTP), which I thought would be simpler and faster than iMovie.
Note that these are video clips from a digital still camera – not DV clips from a camcorder. iMovie won’t edit anything but DV or HD, and Windows Movie Maker won’t play with many flavors of video from digicams either. QuickTime, especially with options like Flip4Mac and Perian, let you edit almost any type of (non-Flash) video. What David demonstrates here with his soundtrack tricks shows how QT Pro may be the most underappreciated video and audio editor out there. Unfortunately, that’s due to its underdocumentation – and I appreciate David’s efforts here to document what he discovered while working on this.
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.