Editing :) Visited some beautiful waterfalls the other day! Tried installing that echo removal thing kb recommended, but somehow i can only get it as a standalone thing. We filmed an interesting interview with a vinyl shop owner back in Singapore but the aircon was running the whole time. Sound is terrible, nobody's gonna listen to that crap. I think I'll just scrap it or turn it into a blog post or something. Ain't got no space on my computer for that shit.
Which one? Because the iZotope RX 3 plugins work fine on FCPX here and have a decent dereverb module. And their denoiser is pretty usable too.
You gotta pay for RX. You don't have to pay for a time-limited version of Unveil, and Unveil kicks the tar out of RX-3 for removing reverb. It was Zynaptiq's release of Unveil that caused Izotope to add a dereverb plugin to RX4, in fact. RX5 is closer but I would again argue that unless you spring for Advanced, RX is a less-than-useful plugin (and I own about $4k worth of Izotope). You also have to know what you're doing with Izotope whereas Unveil you twiddle the knobs until it sounds good.
Aha. I'll take a look at Zynaptiq then. It's rare but sometimes a hostile set produces a stupid fix-it-in-post attitude.
The great thing about the Zynaptiq plugs is they run without anything disabled for ten minutes without you having to pay them a dime. Which, generally, is enough to get in in Audiosuite and fix it. I've got a movie. It was shot in Vieques Island by a crew whose sound mixer quit on day 2. The last film that shot on Vieques Island was the 1948 version of Lord of the Flies, which had so many problems with the frogs that they bailed for Paris and looped the whole movie. Me? Not only did I have frogs, I had an airport, traffic, generators too close on set and drunk cowboys just off to the side while actors whisper their lines menacingly. That movie is on SyFy pretty regularly because I got deep enough in RX that I had to automate 11 different parameters in real time. I know me some room reduction. FRONT LINE: SPL DeVerb. Cheap, easy, usually fixes things that are easily fixable, low overhead. NEXT: RX Dialog Denoiser. Only comes in Advanced, but is light enough you can run multiple instances inline without blowing up your CPU. NEXT: RX Connect. Now that you're able to loop into and out of Pro Tools without having to export/reimport, it's a lot easier to get surgical on RX, but that's new since RX 4. And, you still need to know what you're doing. NEXT: Unveil. Stupid-high CPU usage, but it often gets things you can't get with anything else. AND, there's no science to it what does as the knobs are labeled nonsensically. BUT you don't have to own it, unlike everything else listed above, to use it. I used Unveil to make the dialogue in Birdemic 2 in a couple of scenes "good enough to understand" but not "good enough to sound professional." Which is very different from the "bad enough that it really outlines our horrible ADR process." Opening scenes: no Unveil. "What can I do... to ever repay you" : enough Unveil to make it make sense.
Hmmm. It appears that FCP X is a big enough piece of shit that plugins don't... work. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4903979?start=0&tstart=0 This is a perpetual issue with Apple, Final Cut and audio. I remember going out to their dog'n'pony for Final Cut Studio, back when they got serious about it, and they said "and now you just pass the audio over to Soundtrack Pro..." crash FWIW, FCP X is where all of us who do this stuff professionally said "pool's closed, everybody go home" because really, it's iMovie Pro, not Final Cut. Maybe try Premiere. That was pretty much the battle we all engaged 2 years ago - Premiere or Media Composer. In Adobe's favor, it's really cheap and loops seamlessly with AfterFX. In Avid's favor, you can actually loop out to useful audio programs. To Adobe's detriment, it's almost as fisher price as FCP X. To Avid's detriment, you can buy like five seats of Premiere for the price of one shitty MC license, and then five more to add Symphony which actually allows you to do stuff, and then you still have to loop through AfterFX and it's a total pain in the ass.
Thanks man! Feels like I have my own support team for my little youtube project :P Looks like I won't be switching to Premiere while traveling but I'll definitely rethink my setup once I'm back home. I think i'll let it be with the audio for now, it's not like I even have the skilz to operate any sort of software anyway. Can't even watch tutorials because I don't know the lingo! like,what the hell is mud? The more I do this, the more I realize how steep of a learning curve I have in front of me. Any idiot can shoot some crap on their iphone and stitch it together in imovie (and i'm not far from that idiot right now pretty much). But ahead there's figuring out proper camera settings, everything about audio, color grading and I bet 1000 things I never even heard of yet. I'll just take your advice from a while ago and not half-ass it to the best of my abilities right now. Anyway, all this technical stuff is great but I also need to figure out a way to make it more interesting because that's really what counts in the end.
So here's a thought... Your perception of what you are doing is, a Daily Travel Log. My perception, on the other hand, is that I am watching Elizabeth have amazing adventures. So maybe what you do is break out of the "daily" idea - It's morning, we are doing X. It's afternoon, we are doing Y. It's evening, we are doing Z - and do something different. You could pull together an episode of hostels, an episode of people, an episode of Stunts (like the "dive" into the water at Chang Mai), an episode that is just smashcuts of you making puzzled looks on your face, etc. These could be series, and then could be shorter. "Elizabeth Travels: Amazing People #4", and then have 2 minutes of cuts talking to the "sexiest Americans", or whoever those two guys were. These episodes can be a variety of lengths, depending on the content. Anyway. That's another way to look at Elizabeth Travels. Not as a diary, but as a collage.
Good point! One of the problems with that is that things are really unpredictable so I would not be sure when i've filmed enough/forget to film stuff, it would be generally harder to organize. Also, another thing is that by trying to make it daily i'm forcing myself to complete a thing even if i'm not 100% satisfied so i can move on to the next day. Figured I'd learn faster that way. What you suggest is way harder in my situation, but maybe it's a challenge I should actually take on... I'll give it some serious though. Right now, I was thinking of switching to that type of videos when I'm back home in a more stable situation and I don't have so many exiting adventures anymore. Maybe I should try harder to give a "theme" to certain days. I like days when we're on a "mission" because it always turns out fun, even if our mission is mundane. Share more personal thoughts and impressions. Still struggling to find my voice :)My perception, on the other hand, is that I am watching Elizabeth have amazing adventures.
Yeah, it would definitely be harder to do thematic episodes while you are on the road! Definitely. However, it could be something you look at doing when you get home. You will have this enormous store of video, and you could revisit it, and produce new videos and new perspectives using the existing video. That would also allow you to tell larger stories, connect together cultural harmonies across different countries, etc. Anyway. I like your videos as they are. And I like watching your journey, both physically as a traveller, and your visible journey as a video storyteller!
I think your pathway to learning is exactly what you need to build the discipline to do what goobster suggests. As you're learning, this is a lot harder than "point a camera at myself having fun." But I think you have an eye for it and I think you're improving. Keep it up.
Thank you! It's been fun and I'm finding myself liking it a lot. Wishing for some better tools (hardware and software both) and better guidance all the time. As much as my entrepreneurial self does not want to admit it, some kind of internship at a legit production company where I can steal all their knowledge would be awesome right now :)
Truth: a "legit production company" will mostly teach you how to work with a bigger crew. There are people who could teach you a thing or two, but they're shooters or mixers on The Amazing Race, and I know those guys, and I wouldn't want to be them, and neither would you.
I suspect the typical travel videos are that long because they're looking to get whatever legitimacy they can from being rehosted on one of the shitty OTA side channels. Go short. See if anybody bitches. I'll bet they don't. "because everybody else does it" is a viable reason when you can find the underlying (logical) cause. Should you get some paltry pick-up deal, you can edit them longer.