So, I’ve started my first week of work of official internship for course credit at TXST university, under the organization Texas Cannabis Collective (501c4). We are an advocacy organization that does not deal with plant materials. We are social welfare reform for changing laws via lobby work and community action, news information, and helping in the community where we can.

I would say that I hit the ground running as I have so much to do and get done from the week beforehand. I attended an expo in Nashville, TN and recording live footage of audio and video. There is so much to learn from that experience and how the quality turned out. Both on what equipment to use, when it should be used, and ease vs quality. And that just scrapes the surface of things to focus on with this week.

For one, I’ve learned that a lapel mic in an expo room may sound like a good idea, it may look like a pro idea, but it is not a good idea for a sit down discussion where I could have just held a $40 Sure microphone to my mouth and got awesome quality in a noisy room. My guests sure did. I had so much background noise that it is almost impossible to remove it without my voice sounding like it has a bad echo.

The lapel was so sensitive that it was picking up my vocals and my guests vocals. This made it extremely difficult to distinguish on a waveform at first who was talking. Only a slight elevation in levels could tell the difference at times.

This would mean that I would need to go in and manually scrub through and determine who was talking, use a razor/cut tool in either Adobe Audition to select each section of speech. From there cut out what doesn’t belong to make that track silence. Just a note, I did record this as a multitrack recording using a Zoom P4 Podtrak, so I was able to isolate each speaker. At one point later on in editing I did decide that I should probably look into what is known as sidechain compression to create ducking. Luckily Audition has a ducking feature since I last used it in a way that would need this. Unfortunately it’s not really good for this unless it is blocks of speech without another person saying, “Yep” on a regular basis. It also means all background noise must be removed (noise reduction and dynamics using auto gate are fantastic for creating that silence if done right).

Once that is done, each track has to be mixed down to its own final audio track. I’m glad I thought of this before video editing my footage, because it would make establishing cut points in the video much easier. But for the first half of video it was a pain to get the audio aligned. Normally this is an easy task. As long as no length was cut from the initial tracks, you just line up the first speech with its video captured audio.

My DSLR did not capture any audio for any of the clips. It’s why markers/clappers are used on film sets. So, I had to take the time and carefully align the audio for the clips so that it didn’t look like a foreign dubbed art film. From there I needed to create alterations to the cuts so that it wasn’t just a wide shot the entire time and that color adjustments could be quickly and easily made.

I learned that Adobe Premiere has presets for motion (position of the video/image within the frame and allows it to move across the frame across key frames in the timeline) that can be saved and recalled easily with a drag and drop. So I created a couple of guest motion presets, and my own speaking preset, along with a wide shot preset. This allowed me to change the settings of each cut without having to retype all of the settings into the associated preset fields for color and motion.

As I write this I am still working on this project. It has been in the works since Monday morning, and I hope to have it finished by the end of the day. It has been a long tedious task, but I will have learned a bit more for the next time I film or interview ( I have one at Come and Take It Live in Austin this Saturday).

My work hours this week have been as follows:

Monday: 8am-9am, 10am-2:30pm, 3:45-6:45pm ->8.5 hours
Tuesday: 7Pm-10:30pm -> 3.5 hours
Wednesday: 8am-10am, 11am-12:30pm, 1-2:30pm, 3:50pm-7pm, 8-10pm ->10hrs
Thursday: 9:30am-11:30am, 12-12:30pm, 6:30pm-10pm -> 6 hrs
Friday: 8:30 am-10:30am, 11:30am-1:30pm,5:30pm-7:30pm ->6 hrs Saturday 11am-5pm ->6 hours

Total work hrs this week-> 40 hrs