Aug 2
Note: This article is not legal advice, and should not be treated as such. Always consult a professional legal source if you have questions about legal matters.
In the United States, copyrighting is automatic. That means if you create something, it is automatically copyrighted. Automatically. Pretty cool eh?
I just copyrighting a drawing of a flying dragon on a napkin.
Well, it doesn’t quite work that way, but you get the picture.
Recently, I posted an article about the basics of removing audio problems, and the limitations that you face right out of the box when you go to fix some nasty audio. This time around, we are going to talk about removing a very specific type of audio problem: hiss.
What is Hiss?
Not to be confused with hum, hiss is a persistant noise on a recording that sounds like … well … hiss. Turn the sound up loud enough and you will almost always here some on your recording. A low levels, it isn’t much of a problem.
The problem is when you have hiss on a recording that is distracting – say from a bad microphone or from turning up low dialogue. You could also be trying to restore an old recording that has hiss on it. Wherever it comes from, however, it’s annoying and needs to be destroyed.
Many of you have likely heard of YouTube, Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald’s experimental, user-generated documentary, Life In A Day. In fact, many of you may have contributed to the project. This film, which according to YouTube is going to be the “largest crowd-sourced film ever made”, has a simple concept, capture July 24, 2010 on a camera.
According to the guidelines, the idea is to “create a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on 24 July 2010”. All the content of the film will be submitted through YouTube, and if the footage you submit is chosen for the film (by director Kevin Macdonald), “you will be credited as a ‘co-director’ in the credits that appear at the end of the film. You will also be eligible for consideration to attend the film’s premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival”.
Lately YouTube has really been impressing me, and one of the features that I’ve really started to like is the captioning support.
Basically, it allows you to add captions to your videos, and add them as a different language captions. This works out great for videos that have an international interest, because you can easily make a video multi-lingual, if you have the ability or people to translate it.
How are Captions Generated?
Captions in YouTube (and in most video environments) never touch the video at all. They are simply text files of information that the player reads and displays. The file contains the in and out timecode where a caption should be, and the caption text. Very simple, and very lightweight – you never need to touch your video, and the files and tiny since they are basically text files.
The problem is, it can be a real pain to get caption files timed right if you are trying to manually work with timecode and put that into the text file. I’ve tried, and it can be a real mess.
Enter Overstream
Overstream is a really great tool that I came across that makes it very easy to create caption files for YouTube. It’s free, and it’s very easy to use.
To start, go to overstream.net and create an account. Once you’ve logged in, we’re ready to go.
There are so many free things out there for use in projects. So many, that we are doing a 2 part podcast just on those things. Here, for your entertainment is part 1 of 2.
On this podcast we also announce a very special gift for people who “Like” our DiY Filmmaking Facebook page – a DiY soundtrack download we are preparing with some great stuff including some of Lance Johnson’s very own sound effects. It will be FREE and it’s for people who are fans of our Facebook page.
Panel is:
Adam (@adamfairholm)
Doug (@thedougmovement)
Lance (@omegabane)
Picks are:
Lance: Audacity
Doug: Celtx
Adam: Young Man Reading a Newspaper While Yawning Tracking Shots with Smooth Jazz
Other stuff we mentioned:
Craigslist, Blender, VLC, MPEG Streamclip, YouTube editor, MovieMasher, Jaycut, CineFX, Avidemux, VirtualDub, Wax
File Link: http://diy-filmmaking.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast/ep12_the_free_stuff_pt1.m4a
The web never stops, it’s always moving and moving. We’re going to try and catch up with it with a little web roundup. So let’s do it.
Now.
Direct Actors for Improv
Home Film School Student has a conversation with an actress about being directed in a scene where she ab-libbed quite a bit (and they wanted her too). The content of this video is valuable if you encourage actors to improv during a scene (this may be more helpful for them, actually), but my favorite parts of this video are meta. Such as the dude asking “are we ready to go” at the beginning, and this “bored camera guy” shot.
I’m trippin! Check out the videos here.
We’ve all been there before. You have a great shoot, and you get back to your editing system and discover that there was a problem with audio that you didn’t notice when you were filming. It sucks, because what are you going to do? Reshoot the whole thing? Of course not, and that means working with what you have.
It’s a common and difficult problem, so we are going to do a series of articles on how to deal with different types of audio problems and with what programs. But before we get fancy, we have do get down to some basics.
Animation. It’s everywhere, and it’s hard to do. This week, Doug leads us in a discussion of animation, and he gives us his best Snagglepuss impression.
Also, we’ve introduced a new contest. Call in during the next week with your best Hana Barbara cartoon impression, and win a copy of Adam’s comic strip book from college, CroissantWorld.
Panel is:
Adam (@adamfairholm)
Doug (@thedougmovement)
Lance (@omegabane)
Picks are:
Lance: Aniboom
Doug: SickAnimation.com
Adam: iStopMotion 2
The intro audio is Grum from Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job. Outro song is from Sick Animation’s Cool Court.
File: http://www.diy-filmmaking.com/podcast_files/ep11_the_creepy_coin_collector.mp3
Many DiY-Filmmakers have likely heard of Comedy Central’s online comedy video site Atom.com. With video content provided by big name comedians like Kenan Thompson and Andy Dick, Atom.com is far from being an internet secret.
However, Atom.com prides itself in blending mainstream and indie media. One aspect that highlights this point may also be particularly useful to the DiY-Filmmaker, and that aspect is Atom’s World Famous Cash-Money Internet Comedy Tournament. The rules are simple, and best described by the site itself:
WHAT IS THE TOURNAMENT? The Tournament is a weekly competition beginning April 19, 2010 celebrating the funniest and most popular original comedy videos recently uploaded to Atom.com (“Atom”).
Jun 29
For the people who grew up in the non-linear era with Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, we’re a little spoiled. Actually, a lot spoiled. We can edit something from beginning to end on our computers and not really give that much thought to the process going on underneath the hood.
That wasn’t the case before, and still isn’t the case in many production environments. You see, more often than not, we modern editors are doing something without even noticing: we’re combining offline and online editing. Essentially, it used to be that you captured much smaller, lower quality versions of files, and edited those. That was offline. Then, you’d send your edit to another department (or do it yourself) and they would do the online editing, meaning they would put in the full quality files from the source tapes, color correct, etc.
Now, you probably capture at full HD and edit at full HD because our computers can handle it. It’s simpler, and for a smaller operation, it makes sense.
But even though we’re editing in different ways, the fundamentals under the hood are still the same.
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The internet is chock full of how to guides for doing pretty much anything you can think of to make films on a budget. DiY Filmmaking is a blog that brings you the best and the worst of all that, plus great tips, tutorials, and guides of our own.
