With controls resembling those on an actual mixing desk
found in a video editing suite, the Vegas Pro 8 mixing
console GUI allows for carefully detailed audio tracks.
There are numerous consumer-grade camcorders that
don’t even have a 1/8-inch miniplug for a mic built into
them. If that describes your current DV camera or you
don’t want to buy the adapter base, consider recording
narration after editing your video, or use a portable digital
recorder to record your voice. Prior to owning a
“pro-sumer” quality Sony HVRA1U HD camcorder, I
used a Zoom H4 ( www.samsontech.com) digital Handy
Recorder to record my voice while recording video with a
consumer-grade DV cam. I could plug a professional
Shure SM- 58 handheld mic ( www.shure.com) into one
of its two XLR inputs, or simply hold the recorder in my
hand and talk into it, since it wasn’t much larger than a
microphone itself.
If your audio is recorded separately, how do you
easily sync up the sound? For decades in Hollywood,
audio was recorded with a tape recorder, and then synced
to the picture in the editing room. To simplify the mating
of sound and picture, Hollywood relies on clapperboards
to simultaneously generate a loud audio CLACK! and then
the filmed image of its two boards come together as
a visual cue to sync up the sound and picture.
That basic method (or a more primitive version
such as a handclap on camera) has worked since the
earliest days of the first talkies in the late 1920s, and
is one option to consider if you’re recording audio
into a digital recorder. Another is to use the audio
from the camcorder’s built-in low-res mic itself as a
guide. Most editing programs generate a visual image
of the waveforms of the audio. By sliding the
waveform image of the separately recorded audio
track until it’s aligned with the waveform image
recorded by the camera’s mic, it’s possible to sync
the two remarkably tightly, particularly if your editing
program can be switched into audio time units, which
are much, much finer a resolution than the 30 frames
a second of video.
There are several options open to successfully
mic’ing on-air talent, including shotgun mics,
handheld mics, and clip-on lavaliere mics, so some experimentation may be necessary to find the approach that
works best in your situation. And again, the You Tube environment is somewhat forgiving, but in general, the closer
to the talent’s mouth, the better. Shure’s SM93
lavaliere, for example, is smaller than the size of a
paperclip, and can easily be clipped to a lapel or necktie.
A handheld mic such as Shure’s SM58 can do double-duty
as both an in-the-field mic, and a tabletop mic for
voice-overs.
For editing audio, owning a separate digital audio
workstation (DAW) program such as Cakewalk’s Sonar XL
( www.cakewalk.com) is a huge benefit to a video producer.
Multiple narration tracks can be easily recorded and
edited together, audio compressed and normalized so
that both the main and B-Roll elements play at the same
apparent volume, and background noise from a remote
shoot can easily be edited out by importing audio from
the video editing program into the DAW. For extreme
situations, an applet such as Bias, Inc.’s, SoundSoap Pro
( www.bias-inc.com) or Izotope’s RX ( www.izotope.com)
can do wonders to salvage an audio track otherwise
ruined by hum or wind. A DAW also facilitates audio-only
podcasts, as well. For much more on recording podcasts
with a digital audio workstation, see the article on the
topic in the March ‘07 issue of Nuts & Volts.
Rendering Unto You Tube
Sony’s Vegas Pro 8 Multicam interface allows for
editing of scenes originally shot with multiple
video cameras running simultaneously.
Assuming you’re happy with how the video looks,
sounds, and flows, it’s time to render it into a format
that’s acceptable to You Tube, or whichever site you’re
uploading to.
You may have compiled tens of gigabytes of material,
including multiple takes of your on-camera lines, narration
tracks, and separate B-Roll footage of the electronics
project that’s the subject of your video, but it all needs to
be boiled down to a clip that’s under 100 megabytes in
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September 2008
