Making Movies
Kodak Zi8 Camera, MacBook Pro, iMovie & YouTube
Well, I bought this video camera recently (Kodak Zi8) and since I got it, I really haven’t had the time to do much about it, honestly. So, finally, I decided to  make it happen and try out some video last night. It took a couple of takes to try and get the camera angle right, etc. but I finally got something that looked and sounded pretty good – especially as a first go-out. You can check out the finished video for one of my new tunes “Hole In My Heart” on my YouTube page here. If you like it, try subscribing to my YouTube channel as I plan to make a lot more of these soon (initial goal might be one a week, but we’ll see how it all goes!).
In any case, I’m still working out the kinks in terms of video quality and audio quality after the upload process (seems like it’s losing something/compressing a lot when exporting to the web for streaming) but I think there are a few relatively easy things that I can do to tighten this up. For starters, I plan to try using my Lauten Audio Horizon tube condenser mic and see if I can plug that directly into the audio input of the camera. I can also film in a higher res (HD) and see if that helps. I might also just try recording the audio to my Pro Tools rig, then dumping it into iMovie and sync’ing the two, but that might be a little advanced for this guy at the moment. I bet there are also a few export settings in iMovie that can help alleviate the graininess of the finished product, but we’ll see – one step at a time!
Hope you enjoy the video. Please let me know what ya think and stay tuned here and on my YouTube channel for updates and more video soon!