The Making of Play: Music Video shot entirely with an iPhone
Play: Music Video shot entirely with an iPhone
Accousticalsurfaces.com
For those of you looking to upgrade project studios or home studios or are looking to build or retrofit studio space, www.acousticsurfaces.com is a treasure trove of information and products for almost any situation. From sound absorbing foam and acoustical ceiling tile to soundproof windows and doors, along with some of the best advice and instructions in the industry. Visit their site and click on acoustics 101 or soundproofing tips and you’ll see tons of juicy information. Even if you’re not looking to build a studio and just want a better understanding of sound theory, you’ll find a visit here well worthwhile.
Translator
Translator is a cross platform application – comes in Universal Binary Mac OSX Version 5.9 and Windows Vista/XP-compatible Version 2.9 flavors, and can translate practically every professional format, from Giga3/GigaStudio, EXS24, Kontakt, Reason NN-XT, SFZ, SoundFont, SampleCell, Kurzweil, Ensoniq, Akai, Emu, Roland, and many more. This enables musicians to use practically any sound for their sampler, no matter what format it is in.
Translator Windows 2.9 has a huge destination format list, mostly encompassing all the source formats. Translator Mac’s current destination list includes EXS24, Kontakt, Structure, Independence, HALion, Reason NN-XT, SampleTank, SFZ, Roland MV8000 and Fantom, Alesis Fusion, Korg Triton, and Battery 1. More formats are coming. visit www.chickensys.com $149
Nikon D 90 Camera
While I’m partial to the Canon 5d Mark II camera, perhaps more than partly due to the fact that all of my old Canon SLR lenses work with it, there’s no denying that the Nikon D 90 at 1/3 the price of Canon’s (Nikon is uder $1,000) is one heck of a camera. It has over 12 megapixel resolution for shootig stills. (Okay, Canon is 3 times more expensive, but has almost twice the resolution) The Niklon shoots video in 720 24p native. (alright the Canon shoots at 720 24p or 1080i – but remember the Nikon is under $1,000) Take a trip out to www.nikondmovie.com and you can see quite a few examples of video that has been shot with this camera. You can see how popular this camera has become with videographers by the sheer volume of 3rd party add-ons now available for it. And if $1,000 is too much for you, there’s a slightly lower end flavor of Nikon, the D5000, which goes for under $750. WHile you’re at it, if you’d like to see some of the video that the Canon can crank out, visit: http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2667. You can also find plenty of examples of video from both cameras on Youtube.
Free G
Sonalksis, maker of numerous high quality audio plug-ins has one that it completely free, called FreeG. Visit http://www.sonalksis.com/index.php?section_id=14, fill out a little form and it’s yours. The Sonalksis FreeG is an intuitive tool that can be used for a variety of applications to increase the control and flexibility of the signal flow in the insert chain of the host. To make the workflow and the overview of the signal processing easier, FreeG provides extended, customizable metering features and settings.
Micport pro.
More and more of my work seems to involve production, audio or video. Yes, I do own some pricy little gadgets, but sitting down and writing a blog about $4,000 microphones or $8,000 video upsamplers didn’t seem to make much sense. So instead, I’m going to talk about some of the very practical and relatively inexpensive great buys I’ve found in the past year or so.
It is about as simple as it gets. At one end, there is a connector for a microphone cable. One the other end is a little port that you hook a USB cable into it. This goes into your computer and you aleft with a very small and useful phantom powered mic pre, that works with just about any microphone on the market. I have yet to find any software aside from Protools that won’t work with it and it works well under just about every flavor of Windows you can toss at it as well as most of the Mac OS’s.
- MicPort Pro Microphone Interface
It’s about the size of a cigar. On the back end is a single button that engages phantom power and in the middle are two dials. One is for gain and the other for headphone volume. Yes, there is a very cute little 1/8″ headphone connector built into this puppy.
I ran some relatively unbiased tests with a make v.o., female v.o. doing some relatively staright ahead commercial copy. I then ran a couple of tests with them singing. I used a Neumann U87 and the Micport pro for test A. The other tests swapped out some fairly well known high-end mic-pre’s, along with an Apogee Rosetta to handle getting everything into the computer. The results were that while all of the engineers polled seemed to hear differences among the various mic-pre’s, nobody cold pick the Micport pro out. It offered a very transparent and high quality sound. And the street price for the Micport Pro, $150. The other amps we used were an Aphex 230, Milennia ST-1, John Hardy M-1 and an Avalon 737. None of the recordings used any eq or compression tweaks.
For more info visit www.centrance.com/products/mp/
The Mic Thing
Another item that most audio recording professionals will love is called the Mic Thing. SE elctronics came out with an item called the Reflexion filter, but the folks at SM Pro Audio have come out with a larger and in my opinion better product. This is straight from SM Pro’s site “The Mic Thing is a portable multi-purpose acoustic treatment panel suitable for minimizing room artifacts and improving separation during microphone recording sessions. Great for a range of applications including helping to control room ambience, minimizing spill from instrument amplifiers, or even creating temporary control rooms the Mic Thing is certainly one handy thing!” I simply couldn’t describe it any better
www.smproaudio.com/produkte.html When I bought mine, it came with a very good quality stand thrown in for around $250, with the shipping. One hint, replace the washers that come with this with some good quality washers. (I used plastic ones)The 2 side wings otherwise will have difficulty staying in position.
For home recording studios it will help as part of an overall approach to keeping you noise fllor at a low and managable level. I use one in my main room when we have to do ADR or dubbing and it not only keeps out the computer noise, but cuts down on transients sounds and bounce back. It’s not a sound booth. It can however be employed along with other measures to help create a clean environment for recording.
- DXA-6A Phantom powered XLR adapter
Beachtek XLR Adapter
For around $300 or so, you can have two channels of either passive or phantom powered XLR inputs into pretty much any camcorder out there. You’ll never get caught short trying to match great sound to your great video. Clean and quiet, Beachtek also has several other flavors both higher and lower prized if you require more bells and whistles or simply don’t think you’ll need phantom power. For more info visit www.beachtek.com These adapters are also carried by most of the usual suspects online and some brick and mortar.
While not exactly a gadget, these guys have and use them well. Retouchup.com is an insanely inexpensive photo retouching service. How insanely inexpensive? $2.50 will get you blemish removal and for $5 they’ll get rid of braces. For $10 they’ll give your photo the once over making it good enough to put in most any high quality magazine. Once you sign up, there is an easy path for getting your digital pix to them. They are quick and stand behind their work. www.retouchup.com
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I want that camera.