Hart's Dynamic Media Blog

My colleague Steve and I were talking about the horrible sound that so many talking head videos have, and what would improve them. He suggested that the best thing would be to include some sort of Bluetooth (or similar) lapel microphone. That would make it easy to close-mic the talent without wires and, if the quality was any good, that one thing alone would significantly increase the average audio quality of all the video being shot today.

Well, I think Steve has a crystal ball (which I’m going to insist on borrowing) because Sony just announced exactly that. Well, it doesn’t come included with the camera, but is available in Japan for ¥21,000 (about $165) and I hope it will be available worldwide soon. The talking head videos of the world need it.

There’s has been some discussion about folks who purchased the download version of Adobe Audition 2 and what content beyond the program itself they should have access to. There have been some problems with people getting everything they should, and some doubts about whether the download version got the same things that boxed version customers should get.

First, I just want to say I’m sorry that there’s been such a headache for some customers about this. We always strive to make these launches as smooth as possible, but we stumbled this time.

Second, while the download version doesn’t have any physical goods, people who buy it should have access to all of the same content that comes in the box. Namely:

• The full manual (in PDF)
• All 4+GB of uncompressed music loops
• The Total Training videos
• The ability to register and download the registration incentive of your choice

Specifics about each of these after the jump…

Continue reading…

Finally, we can live in the sci-fi future of music production. I mean, everyone would look cooler with their own robotic exoskeleton, right?

I’m hoping for some more interesting posts in the next couple days, but in the mean time here are a couple more quick tips for 2.0:

• Click on the tab for any panel and then press the ~ key (actually the ` key, next to the 1 on most keyboards) to maximize that panel. Press ~ again to restore it to the original size. This is great for when you just need more real estate for what you’re doing that instant, like needing to see the full mixer panel with long faders during automation, or for maximizing the video panel when reviewing your work before export.
  
• Try using Ctrl+Shift+Click when working in the mixer and in the track controls to the left of the track. For many items (mute, solo, arm for record, input and output devices, and automation status) this will set all tracks to the same value. I use this all the time when opening a session on a new computer so that all my inputs will be set properly to my default device instead of to none.
  

Dan on our testing team was telling me how he was putting his new monitor in portrait mode to great use for editing in the Spectral Frequency Display, so I decided to try it with one of the 24-inch monitors that we have in the office. Wow! I wish I had one of these at home!

(View large image)

Using the full length of the screen to display the frequencies and setting the spectral controls to 16384 reveals amazing detail, and almost makes the song look like a piano roll.

(I wrote this on Saturday but didn’t post it until today. I guess I was tired enough to forget to post once I got in!)

I’m on my way back from NAMM now (it’s another on-the-plane post), tired and a bit bleary-eyed but excited about my personal whirlwind couple days down there. I came in the night before the show opened and had a packed two days talking to partners, the press, and customers about 2.0.

One of the things that struck me was just how crowded the whole show was. I walked onto the floor just a few minutes after the show had opened and I think it’s the most packed I had seen the aisles in several years. In fact, almost everyone I talked to commented on how bustling the whole show was, from hall E with the folks who sell wood for violins to the rooms upstairs with wall-to-wall pianos, and everything in between. I’m guessing the music industry is a trailing indicator of the economy as a whole, since so much of it is driven as a passion once the basic needs (food, shelter) have been taken care of. If that’s the case than the economy is trucking along here in North America at least–I’ve been to a lot of tradeshows that have been shrinking over the last few years, and NAMM was relatively slow the last couple years, but it was as big as ever this year. I think every space in the convention center that could have been used had a booth on it.

My personal winner of the hippest booth concept had to be Access Music, the folks that make the samplers, with their hanging rope wall. I’m not sure how inviting it made the booth, but it certainly stood out!

My winner of the most fun new product I saw had to go to Sibelius, who was showing a new sequencing product called Groovy which is specifically designed for teaching elementary school kids about music creation. Anything that helps teach more music theory to kids seems like a great thing to me.

I only wish I had the time to stay an extra day just for some time on the floor. I always feel like I’ve missed half the show and this year was no exception. I hardly saw any of the hardware on display, and was only able to check out a handful of demos. Ah, NAMM. It’s always interesting, always exhausting, and always LOUD.

Alright, it looks like the tryout download is now working as expected. The tryout link on the Adobe Audition page still links to the “notify me” page (and likely will until next week) but you can get the tryout from the main list of downloads here.

Enjoy!

Durin’s comment reminded to that I wanted to post about the fact that I was interviewed for two different podcasts before the 2.0 launch. The first was with Bruce Williams of Building the Pod. I joked that this interview was amazingly recursive–I was recorded into Audition for a podcast on creating podcasts in Audition that is entirely produced inside of Audition. Whew! Building the Pod is a weekly how-to for Audition. Even I was impressed by the power of the technology and what it promises for the future when we did the interview–even though I was in Seattle and Bruce was in Sydney we were able to do the interview via Skype over the internet and Bruce just recorded it straight into Audition

For t he second podcast I met up with Jason Lopez of Podtech.net, which produces regular podcasts on technology news and trends. Jason and I talked about the newest version, as well as some general trends in the audio industry. Jason has a background with traditional radio broadcasting as an NPR correspondent (among other things) and also produces his podcasts inside of Audition.

Finally, I don’t think it’s “aired” yet, but I was interviewed yesterday by Kevin Becka, technical editor for Mix Magazine, for a segment in their NAMM daily podcasts.

Some of my fell product managers were at Motion Graphics LA (MGLA) on Tuesday night to show off the production studio. Since it was mostly a graphics show the Audition section was short, but Giles Baker, the senior product manager for Premiere Pro, did a nice job with a quick showing of 2.0. The folks at Pixel Corps were kind enough to record and encode the event and now it’s posted to DV Magazine’s web site. They broke out the Audition section so you skip straight to it, but I’d encourage you to watch the rest of the videos if you’re interested.

Note: I had some trouble when I downloaded the movie because it asked for a .tif file. I just said “search” and then canceled and then the file played fine. You’ll also need the Quicktime player to view them.

Well, the good news is the tryout got through the posting process much faster than we had anticipated. The bad news is it won’t download correctly! The web team is working right now to figure out what’s going wrong and correct it so hopefully we’ll fix it so the download will complete properly before the end of the day. I think I may be just as excited to get it into your hands as you all are to get it!