AI_Podfic

[paraka]

In other fandomy podfic news, I started a new podfic comm, ai_podfic. It's been doing well so far. :) I made a blanket permission post and now there are a bunch of new AI authors offering their fics up for podficing :D I also spent the weekend trying to make a complete video podfic tutorial. Which turned out to be a lot more frustrating than I imagined.

I don't actually use Audacity when podficing, however it's the program most people use so it's what I used for the tutorial. Audacity wasn't really the problem, just, it slowed me down a bit since I'm not used to it.

That, and the fact that I couldn't use my normal mic. I wanted to show what it looks like to record in Audacity and my normal mic is an external recorder. So I borrowed a mic from kronos999 only to discover that there's something wrong with the audio in jack on my desktop and it wouldn't acknowledge the mic. So then I recorded the fic on my netbook. But the reason I bought my external recording mic was because my netbook adds this funny pulse to anything I try and record. So I scrapped that recording and used kronos999's netbook and recorded it there. That one took, however the sound quality is totally not up to my usual standards :-/

Then I moved the recording onto my desktop so I could edit it there (hello, actual mouse). I got through the entire thing only to have my screen recorder crap out on my and not save anything :-/ (However, if you'd like to listen to the podfic, I do have it up. I'll probably make a better version of it though before publicly posting it: mp3 / m4b)

At that point I gave up on recording, out of pure frustration and moved on to editing what I had already recorded. I'm a vidder, that part should totally be easy, right? Wrong.

Part of the reason why I haven't vidded in forever is because all I had on my computer is Adobe Premiere Pro, which is way complicated and nothing like Premiere Elements 1.0 that I had previously been using. So I put the video into the timeline, only while the audio would move, the video wasn't changing. Then, when I tried to cut out parts it would work fine the first listen to, only to jump to a completely different part when I'd listen to it later. >:-/

So, then I tried to find a free video editing program I could download and use. Talk about fail. I tried 3 different programs that sucked before giving in and downloading Window's Movie Maker. You know a video editing program sucks, when you switch to Window's Movie Maker!!!. And things seemed to be ok there for a while until I realized that the low quality in the preview screen wasn't like that because it was a small screen. When I full screened it, all you could see were blobs moving around. >:-<

Finally I downloaded a trial version of Sony Vegas and actually managed to get some progress there. I think the video recorder turned out a weird file, because when I put it in Vegas, I ended up with about 90 seconds of audio with no video. For most of the tutorial that was fine, however it kind of defeated the purpose of recording me recording the fic live.

So, that's the point where I gave up. I was hoping to get back to it and have it done by this weekend but it was stressing me out, so I took a step back. I'll go back to it next week. This week/weekend is just too busy to get to it (my nephews are going to be in town for Halloween! I get to see them in their little costumed :D).