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Editing Audio for Video in Adobe Soundbooth–Five Key Tasks

I’m a big Adobe Audition fan, and when I heard that the powerful multitrack audio editing program found in Adobe Production Studio would be replaced in the upcoming CS3 bundle by a more feature-limited version, I was less than pleased. That

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Finishing Up

This brings up a critical point on saving intermediate files while editing. Though you can undo all of the tasks described above while you’re editing the file, once you save the file, you can’t go back—Soundbooth applies all edi

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Capturing High Quality Audio

It generally only takes a video shoot or two before you realize that the weakest link on your camcorder is the microphone. Don't worry: It's not you, or really your camcorder for that matter, just the simple fact of life that all onboard microphon

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Checklist for using an external microphone

When you attach an external microphone to your camcorder, you're going to have to change some settings on the camcorder to tell it to ignore its internal microphone and record from the external. You'll also have to set gain controls to make sure that

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Choosing a microphone: the three questions

This leads us to the three issues you need to address before buying a microphone. Note that you have to ask the same questions whether the microphone is wired or wireless, since the issues are identical.What is the pickup pattern?First is the pick

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Choosing an XLR adapter for your camcorder

So, if you want to use a high-end microphone with your camcorder and you don't have an XLR jack, you'll have to find a way to convert from the XLR cable to the 3.5mm connector on your camera. We explored two alternatives.The first was a "line matc

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Choosing the highest quality microphone option

So those are the microphones and the ways they connect. But how do they perform?To test performance, we used a high-quality, digitized recording of a woman speaking, played back over computer speakers at a standardized volume. To create ambient so

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Connection options

There are two ways to connect external microphones to camcorders, though not all camcorders offer either or both options. First, of course, is your microphone port, which comes in two general categories. One is an XLR connector, which is typicall

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Microphone options

Figure 3 shows a good cross section of the types of microphones you should be considering for your shoots. Let's briefly identify them, and then cover the three characteristics of microphones you need to learn before buying. Figure

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Setting up Flat and Three-point Lighting

The dramatic shadows created by three-point lighting have been a staple of movies and television production since their inception, and three-point lighting remains highly touted in most tutorials, articles, and books on video lighting. However, a

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