How to Put Your Summer Vacation Up On The Web The Secrets of Shooting, Editing and Posting Your Summer Vacation Videos By Mark Shapiro page 3 of three For good audio, use an external microphoneThere are a couple of tricks to getting good audio. Because most camcorders are not designed with high quality, directional mikes built inside, if you want to capture the sound of a particular person or thing, you need to get up close. Zoom out wide and get as close as possible. The microphones built into most camcorders are excellent for capturing the overall sound and ambiance of a place but don't work well when you have to capture voices from a distance away. Most camcorders, except for the basic entry-level units, have an external mike jack that enables you to use an external mike.
A basic telephoto or shotgun mike, attached to the top of your camcorder, will enable you to get good sound from a distance. You simply aim the shotgun mike where you want to record and it’ll pick it up If you are serious about getting good audio, invest in a wireless or directional mike that mounts on your camcorder and plugs into the external mike jack. By using an external mike system, you can make your audio sound incredibly better.  A Basic wireless kit like the Azden Pro includes a receiver that mounts on your camcorder, a wireless handheld mike, and a wireless clip-on lavaliere mike perfect for tour leaders .
For the best travel audio, consider using a wireless mike kit. A wireless kit includes a wireless microphone or two, and a receiver unit that sits on your camcorder and connects to its audio input jack. I prefer a wireless mike kit that includes both a wireless handheld mike and a wireless lavaliere mike. You can use the handheld mike to record a narrative of what you are taping. Your traveling partner can do a "live" interview on location. Or, with the camcorder on a tripod, you can get into the shot, and record your own description.
My favorite way to use wireless, especially on guided tours, is to connect the wireless lavaliere to the lapel of the tour leader and capture their commentary directly as they lead the tour. You can then aim your camcorder at whatever you find interesting, instead of concentrating on what the tour leader is saying.
By using a wireless mike on the tour leader, you will get much better sound than the sound captured by using the camcorder's built-in microphone. You probably know what tour guides sound like in buses and in crowded, noisy museums. You will be amazed at the difference a wireless mike kit can make. At the end of the tour, you might want to tip your guide leader a few extra bucks for the favor of wearing your mike. Also, when you are traveling in exotic location, try to capture as much local sound and music as possible. If I am vacationing in the jungle, I try to remember to just put the camera down and let it record the ambient sound for a minute or two. Same thing for a beach park or I always try to buy a CD or two of local music and then dub it to my finished videos to give them more of a travel atmosphere. Editing Your Video Editing your video is probably the most feared part of creating video. Basic editing is really not all that difficult especially with the plethora of easy to use video editing programs that are available. Chief among these are the free bundled programs built into most computers nowadays. I am referring to Microsoft MovieMaker for Windows users and iMovie for Apple computers. Not only are these programs free, they are easy to use – even if you are a beginner. And, if you are lazy or in a hurry, you can use an automated video editing program like muvee that will go through your videos, pick out the best shots and then edit them together to the beat of your favorite music or songs. How much should you edit your films? If you are planning on uploading them to a web service like YouTube, you should opt for short. One minute or two. Three at the most. Instead of creating one long, epic video of your family’s vacation, create a series of short episodes or chapters that can be easily uploaded and digested by the viewer. Most web sites (including YouTube) have limits to how big your files can be. By keeping them short and sweet, not only do you come in under their file size limits, but it makes the videos more enjoyable – more watchable – for your audience. If your trip lasted a week – do a series of videos with each one that captures and summarizes a single day. If you visited numerous destinations with your family, do a video for each destination. Also, by breaking the videos up this way, it turns the sometimes arduous process of editing into a series of short, and more easily achievable tasks. Create a standard title opening and close and use it for each clip. Putting Your Video up on the Net There are hundreds of web sites that now accept videos. Each has their own rules and regulations. However, by far the most popular is YouTube. YouTube is currently the world's most popular video upload site and gets about 65,000 or more videos a day submitted to them. YouTube says that their videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online and that their visitors spend an average of 17 minutes per session on the site. According to Nielsen NetRatings, YouTube has nearly 20M unique users per month. So how do you get to join the party and have your videos online at YouTube? It's really easy. One you have edited your travel video, you need to output it in a compressed format that can be uploaded to YouTube or any one of the other video hosting sites. These include formats like QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or .MPG files. Not a problem, eh? But which is the best Video Format for YouTube Here is the issue. Once your video is uploaded to YouTube, it gets automatically transcoded into Flash Video (FLV) with a size of about 320x240 pixels. The audio is converted to mono. The video is then streamed out over the net at about a 200 kb per second rate which, when compared to a typical DVD rate of about 8 megabits per second, does not provide a high quality video viewing experience. However, according to the people at YouTube, if you really want your stuff to look good, they recommended saving and uploading your video as a MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 320x240 resolution with MP3 audio. They also recommend 320x240 resolution (half screen size), MP3 audio and a 30 frames per second frame rate. Also, as you are limited to a maximum 100-megabyte (Mb) file size and maximum a 10-minute length, a 1 minute 100 Mb file will look better then a 10 minute 100 Mb file. The more raw data you can send to YouTube, the better the flash compression process should be. As mentioned earlier, creating three short two minute videos is better than sending one longer six minute video. YouTube Upload Pagehttp://www.youtube.com/my_videos_upload You can upload video from your computer, your desktop webcam or even your cell phone Here is a list of other sites that you can use to host your family videos. (Also, don't forget MySpace and your personal web sites) If you are worried about privacy issues, many of these sites allow you to password protect your personal videos. With the advent of compact, and easy to carry camcorders, combined with the simplicity of basic editing and posting to the web, you really don't have much of an excuse for not capturing your family's best vacation moments and then sharing them with your circle of family and friends. back
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