Internet Video Audio - Part 3

People don't generally like the way they look or the way they sound on video. If you are trying to establish yourself as the Maven or expert in your industry then you have to get past this fear. If you don't, then recording someone else may in the long run be better because the whole process can eventually be outsourced.

If you decide that you should record yourself, don't start with full motion video, start by just recording your voice and do a voice over slides presentation. Read your script using voice recording software and a USB headset. This way you will get use to the way your voice sounds on a the recording. Most of us feel that we have a face made for radio.

Practice not coughing, ummming, etc. Most of these sections however can easily be cut oit in post production anyway, but if your objective is to do full motion video, then this is a perfect environment to practice smooth confident reading.

The best advise is to pretend that you are talking to a friend 1 to 1. Someone that you know and trust. Don't be afraid of taking a few cuts. Don't race through the material but talk fairly quickly. The brain is capable of listening twice as fast as most people talk. If the content doesn't arrive quickly enough then we get distracted, we open browser windows, read email, clean our desk. Faster speaking means people have to concentrate harder and the take more in.

The two popular ways to record your voice is using a recording device such as a digital dictaphone or dedicated recording kit [Roland Edirol R09]. or using a PC. The Edirol R09 is a studio quality recorder with built in high quality microphones. It also uses a solid state recording medium (CF Card) and as there are no moving parts there is no motor noise.

Since this tutorial focuses on the low cost option, you can either use Audacity and a USB microphone to record one person or skype and the pamella plugin to record two people.

Audacity can be downloaded from either the audacity.org site or the portable apps site. If you wish to record a telephone interview, an advanced technique is to record either end of the skype call.

Both ends of the call use the pamela plugin for skype to record the conversation, and then the two recordings are combined. Pamela records each person in a seperate channel ie 1 person in the left audio channel and the other person in the right channel.

The sterio channels from both recordings can be split and the local channel of each recording is joined together in Audacity. The local recordings have better quality and don't suffer from the occasional voice drop outs and distortion. This type of recording is called double ended recording.

When you record yourself reading your script and you make a mistake, don't stop. Simply take a small pause and repeat the phrase again. The mistakes, coughs, background crashes can all be taken out in the post production editing phase.

Audacity is an extremely powerfull recording tool. It has the option to save files as .wav files or mp3 files. Unfortunately the library for saving files as mp3s, called LAME, must be downloaded from http://lame.sourceforge.net seperately. In the days where hard disk space was expensive, recording audios as mp3 was important. mp3 encoded files are lossy. They do not have the same quality as a wav file. When you edit and save mp3 files repeatedly, the quality will diminish. I recommend that you record and edit wav files only. Even though they are larger, they are still small in comparison to video files.

When you record directly to a PC, please don't use an analog microphone. The electrical noise level in a PC or notebook is very high, and getting voice volumes can be tricky. Use a USB microphone for single person and Skype multi person interviews. The only thing that enters the PC from the microphone is digital signals. All of the analog circuitry is isolated in the USB adapter.

Please note that you can't simply plug two USB microphones into a laptop, fire up Audacity and record 2 channels at the same time. Don't waste your time trying and here's why. A USB mirophone is designed to look like a complete sound card from the point of view of the PC.

Unfortunatley you can't run multiple copies of Audacity on the same machine at the same time. The simple solution is to record on two laptops. There are multi channel recording systems available, but my experience has been that they are flaky and prone to crash. If anyone has a reliable solution, then please let me know.

Another solution is to buy a physical mixer with two microphones that has a USB connection. Amazon sells the behringer PODCAST kit . This consists of a microphone, headphones and USB mixer.

If we focus on the the simple voice over slides process, record your audio using Audacity first. Edit and correct any audio mistakes and make sure you are happy with the Audio first. Compile your screen grabs, photos, slides and pictures, then I will show you how to combine the audio and slides in moviemaker in a later tutorial.

To use Audacity, Plugin the USB microphone and then select edit -> preferences and ensure that the USB mic has been enabled, adjust the volume control, click the record button and read the script.

The video below shows the basic audacity controls.

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