Listening to computer videos.

[larryh]

I am finding a couple things here. First some of the videos I am making sound pretty decent, others seem to be over driven sounding which no doubt it part record and part camera audio. Sitting here at the desk with two (small) Altec Lansing speakers I got one time to use on a crappy television the sound is not pleasant on some things, too shrill. I have found that if I get up and stand about 6 feet away from the computer then the sound is much closer to actually being in the room with the machine. As I say, it may be due to these tiny speakers but maybe not. I had a better set but one night one of the speakers blew out oddly on My Sister Eileen when the blasting of the subways took place. How was that for realism! Who would have thought.

When I get far enough along I intend to do over those early videos where the machine is looking crooked an much too close. The other problem is that the camera video has no control over the volume so even when I try to mute the machine the camera seems to want to make up for that and you end up with even more high end echo.

Larry

[52089]

You'll find that the typical camera does its best to even out volume as much as possible and of course compresses the sound. Youtube compresses things even further, and small speakers affect the sound on playback. That's quite a lot of things that "go wrong"!

Some of our members use a separate digital sound recorder when making videos. This better preserves the dynamics and range of the music. I haven't taken that step yet, but hope to eventually.

[larryh]

Are those like video cameras I see or something else. One reason so far I have stuck with this camera is all I haves to do is push the button an it records. But has its flaws which are not helping me for sure. When I made cassette tapes for friends I could set the distortion limit an they came out sounding as good or better than the machine. Some things on the camera are close to the player but some have issues and I think that auto record is of course the problem.

Larry

[52089]

No, what I was referring to only records sound. It's like an old tape recorder but with digital memory instead of tape. The idea would be that you would record the video with the camera and the audio with the sound recorder, then use a computer program to merge them before posting. If you're not computer proficient, this would probably take you a while to master, but the results would improve.

[VintageTechnologies]

Read your video camera manual to see if the camera permits manual recording levels. I suspect some low-end cameras won't do it, but yours possibly might. You are faced with a trade-off between consumer convenience versus professional complexity.

Some people record the video and digital audio with seperate devices and then sync them in a video editing program on their computer. Very time consuming and complex compared to the way you have been doing it, but they achieve the best results for their effort.

[Wolfe]

Amazed at the people that have gone to considerable time and expense and patience to amass nice record collections and machines - then they can't be bothered to record them with little more than a cheap camera with built in microphone (no offense to the OP.)

A decent stationary camera and halfway decent microphone would surely be within reach of many of these collectors.

[larryh]

Well I don't know where my Sony Camera fell as it was recommended by Apple when I got my first computer 10 years ago.. It was in the 350 range then but digital cameras were reasonably new at the time. I would eventually like something better but I admit to having issues with all the complex settings that nearly any thing has today. It might be part of the appeal of simple things like acoustic phonographs.

Larry