[sdiy] open letter to Aaron Lanterman

[Aaron Lanterman]

On May 7, 2010, at 11:20 AM, Barry Klein wrote:

> Why is the audio crappy?  Was it the hardware used or a file conversion
> artifact?  Bad audio when you are trying to demonstrate...audio... well....


It's because I took it with a $99 camcorder from Target that I just happened to have in my laptop bag, that tend to blow out the microphone when the person holding the camera speaks, which I remembered I had and grabbed when I got the idea to try taping these. I took quite a few videos before looking at them, and on later ones I tried talking softer, but that didn't work too well. It just seems to overload from sound from immediately behind the camera.

When I got the idea to tape the demos, I'm sorry I didn't have all the students stop while I went to try purchasing a more expensive camera with an external audio input and perhaps some lapel microphones, and I didn't go home to get my mixer, and spend a lot of time setting up a professional recording session covering the particular moment I was checking off a student project and telling them to go build a final version. I'm sorry I didn't take the time to stop and review the video and reset speaker levels for a better mix, when there were five more students - whose circuits *weren't* working yet - waiting for me to help them. Oh, and I think I checked off the first one around midnight, so I'm not sure where I would have gotten a camera then anyway...

Perhaps I should have left the camera in my bag; perhaps I shouldn't have bothered posting them at all, once I noticed the clipping. Perhaps I should have spent a few weeks loading these clips into ProTools and bought a CEDAR plug in to try to fix the clipping. Perhaps I should put a disclaimer on each one explaining what I just explained so I don't have to explain it for the nineteenth nine. Perhaps I should just go take the videos off the net altogether.

- Aaron

P.S. Barry, I'm not venting at you in particular... but after two dozen posts like this it is getting tiring; your post just happened to be the one I was reading when I decided to vent. I have been spending days and nights in lab helping students get their project works and am quite fried.