Doctor Frederickson

I was asked to film a short video on Friday for Doctor Frederickson of the Department of Public Adminstration.

I do not personally have a camcorder. And, it was a rush job.

What I did was turned to my sub-$200 digital camera (Fuji S700). It does a functional job of video recording. 640x480 resolution.

There are reasons a proper camcorder is preferable. The digicam saves "compressed" video (slightly more artifacts) instead of the raw video on DV tapes. The digicam is not
as good at compensating for shaking (but this was a steady shot on a tripod). And, the digicam doesn't have quite the capacity (a blank 1 GB chip stores about 15 minutes on the 640x480 setting on my camera).

But, it worked.

The other thing is that the built-in microphone is basically unacceptable. Honestly, the "from the camera" lousy sound is biggest indication of camcorder amateurism.

What I did, instead, was record the Doctor from a microphone on the desk. I recorded this on a DAT machine I had, but minidisc or solid-state recorders would work. The sound quality was excellent, and I was able to properly "normalize" (set to standard loudness) the audio.

I blended the camera's video and the better audio using iMovie.

Unfortunately, the digital camera and the DAT recorder did not precisely agree on
time. CD quality audio is recorded at 44100 samples per second. But, no two devices will ever quite agree how long a second is, at least, unless they are connected (this is a major fact in professional recording).

His voice and the video only got off by about a half-second in 6 minutes of video. Acceptable, but annoying. I'd have to modify the audio (insert or remove gaps ocassionally), if the video got much longer.

I burned it to a DVD using iDVD. The thing I found annoying was that, as far as I could tell, I *had* to use a Apple garish theme for the DVD menu. I'd actually prefer just a simple text menu with one item ("play again").

I'll post a YouTube version of it soon.

This is an entry in Blogger by Tom Shorock