This is my last post about the Podcast and Portable Media Expo. A great little trick that was shared at a session called “Podcasting the Written Word” was the “clicker trick.” We all make flubs when we’re recording audio. Generally, we just pick up with the sentence and clean it up in editing. If you use a clicker to signal after you’ve flubbed though, it makes editing a lot easier, because you can see your mistakes (represented by two spiked lines). Here’s what it looks like:
(Believe it or not, I have a clicker that a teacher gave me, suggesting I use it as a way to quiet and “refocus” workshop participants. Luckily for everyone in my workshops, I decided not to use it for that purpose.)
Another good recording tip from this session was not to re-record too many times to try to get the “perfect” take. Generally, your first take will be your most enthusiastic and best.
Saturday’s key note was from Drew Baron of Rocketboom, a daily video blog. He casually mentioned that Rocketboom makes their video available in 9 different file formats. The necessity for this seems like a huge problem. This needs to be easier for end users. I’m all for having choices, but there are real benefits to some level of standardization.
I also attended a session called “The Secret Lives of MP3 Files” by Doug Kaye that covered a lot of good technical details on file preparation. Here were a few useful general guidelines he shared:
- Record as wav or aiff using a 44.1 khz sample rate (needs to be a multiple of 44.1 khz for maximum compatibility)
- In general, encode at 64 kbps; may want to use higher bit rates for stereo
- For recordings that are mostly speech, before mixing down to mono, make L and R channels inidentical (copy and paste L onto R) to maximize encoding efficiency
- In mastering, do peak normalization and RMS normalization; also presented was a new free tool called The Levelator that adjusts the levels of various clips within your podcast to even out the levels. According to their web site, “It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three.” I haven’t used this yet, but look forward to trying it.
I enjoyed this conference and hope you all enjoyed reading about it.