I finally got the next video up late this evening. It’s Part One of the Tinyfest weekend trip and covers getting to that event, from like 5 in the morning to noon on this past Saturday.
The biggest frustration was that I used the small and convenient GoPro to shoot the clips for it, and the audio is thus naturally rough. I’m going to have to figure out a fix for that, and the fix is probably just making it easier on myself to use the big camera and its external mic a lot more often. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with the film as published.
The footage from the event itself is vast, and as I’ve started going through it I’ve realized that most of the audio is simply not there at all. I don’t know why that is exactly, but I’ve had it with the cheap kit mic, and quite ready to spend a couple hundred on a better one Right Now. The good news about this is that I’m going to have to learn how to do a voiceover of existing footage and substitute that narration for the raw stuff. This is a technique I’ve wished I’d already mastered before at various times. The time is now, it turns out …
Getting back to my rental sanctuary was a blessing, and the changes the trip worked on me made it even better. I’m going to miss this place someday.
But not right now, because that would be foolishly inefficient.
Ars longa, vita brevis. ‘That’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head’.
After some late-night testing I figured out the problem. A switch on the mic, one I don’t even use, had got jammed into a halfway position, causing the audio to silently fail.
The good news is that it still works, so I won’t be blocked from creating video with good audio while waiting for a replacement. The bad news is that I can’t really trust this kit mic under fire, so I do still need to replace it with something better. Which I will do, soon, but it doesn’t have to be tonight in a rush.
Live and learn.