Ramblings, photographs on a haphazard basis

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Enough is never enough


Not content to spend thousands on still cameras, I've decided to learn what I can about shooting video. There's an otherwise laughable point-and-shoot camera at the office that will shoot adequate video for the web--but the problem has been the audio. There's a tiny and inadequate mike in the camera, but that means the sounds that are recorded may have no connection to what's being filmed (can I still call it that?).

So, I’ve put off making video while I found a reasonable digital recorder and I picked up this Olympus WS-100 today. It's PC-only because it uses Windows Media Audio and that is next to useless to me on my Macs. Cutting the story short, however, I found there are a number of audio file conversion programs available on line, so I wound up with one, 'Switch' from Australia, and the necessary plug-in, 'Flip4Mac'.

Now I can convert .wma to mp3 or .wav or a myriad of other formats, and import audio into iMovie HD where there seems to be three audio tracks. I've been fooling tonight with two and I expect that'll be enough--most of the time.

The funny thing about technology is that there is never enough 'all of the time.'

When I get a little ahead in this, I’ll post a video of small town Nova Scotia.

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