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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don’t know about or aren’t using Evernote, you are missing out big time. Simply put, Evernote allows you to take all types of notes (from text to audio to images) and store them in the cloud. They have fantastic programs on tons of platforms that allow you to access and create/edit notes from your desktop and your phone. Make a change anywhere, and it syncs to the cloud.
I’d recommend signing up for a premium (paid) account, but the basic account is free, and so are the clients.
With a technology like Evernote, use cases are far-ranging and diverse, but today we’re going to take a look at some uses specifically for DiY Filmmakers.
With Evernote, you can …
Editor’s note: Sorry for the lack of posts this week. We’ve been in the planning stages of some DiY overhauls PLUS working on taxing shoots this week. We’ll be back in full force next week.
I ran into a problem this week. I wanted to burn a quickie DVD of a Quicktime file. DVD Studio Pro = overkill for this, so I reached for iDVD. iDVD is quick and dirty, and it gets the job done.
However, I ran into a road block when I wanted to put in some chapter markers, because I needed some chapter markers. You can’t do that in iDVD, so the search for a solution began.
My first try was opening up iMovie to see if it could do anything to help me out. My thinking was “hey, iMovie and iDVD both have “i” in front of them, maybe the work together on this. After 15 seconds, I was out. Don’t try it. It’s scary.
After a few searches on the Googles, I came across Metadata Hootenanny, a free program for Mac OS X (sorry Windows and Linux peeps). Anyways, Metadata Hootenanny allows you to control the metadata for Quicktime files. It allows you to do all sorts of cool stuff, but the feature I was interested in was creating chapter markers.
Turns out it’s easy like easy cake.
Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a series of articles we’re doing on how to quickly train an unskilled person for any job on the set – in 2 minutes.
Operating a boom mic on a set is an interesting job. In Hollywood, there are people who just operate boom mics. It’s their job. They literally spend all day boomin’ it up, and they’re good. Real good.
On the independent/DiY level, you are very lucky if you come across someone who is proficient in boom pole operation. You should probably give them an edible arrangement and be best friends with them if you find one. Never let them go. Never.
For the most part, though, you will be going through a familiar scene: trying to train someone to use a boom pole quickly so they do a decent job. Could be for one scene or a whole day. Could be because you forgot, our the edible arrangements made your first boom pole guy sick. It doesn’t matter. You need audio, and your brother’s girlfriend isn’t doing anything for the next 30 minutes.
So, we’ve rounded up a few tips to make sure you communicate, and you’ll have some decent audio flying your way.
We’ve had a lot of readers come to the site looking for information on the Sony HVR-A1U. It’s a great, affordable camcorder with a lot of great professional-end features. You can check out our review of it here, and our tips on using it for a documentary here.
To make things easier, we’ve gone ahead and scoured the net for the best HVR-A1U reviews and tutorials. Check ‘em out!
Warning: We could not find any decent tutorials on the HVR-A1U online, only test shoots and hilariously bad related videos. We’ve embedded them for your enjoyment. We’re going to make an HVR-A1U tutorial video soon. You can see my descent into madness as the post continues.
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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.
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