(Occasionally I like to post something technical, especially when it will help our SalaamGarage community with their digital storytelling and save them all the research hours I just clocked….)

I would imagine taming a tiger would be easier because I can easily see when the tiger is trying to chew my head off. This process has a lot of invisible irritations where I don’t know what is going on until much time and processing has been eaten up (versus a simple decapitation).

So, I thought I would just make this easier for others after logging hours and hours of tutorials, emails, Facebook communications.

1. Shoot your DSLR footage (albeit it 12 min increments :-l)
2. Keep the DSLR audio capture on, though you won’t want to use the sound later. That audio will serve as a ‘map’ to synch your ‘good’ audio.
3. Capture ‘good’ audio on a separate device. I use a jerry-rigged Olympus with my XLR adapters from my old video camera (below) because when I got into this the Zoom h 4n wasn’t on the market yet.  I will upgrade to the Zoom h4n soon because I want the XLR plugs among a few other reasons:

http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1350

4. Finish capturing content.
5. Really think about how you will organize your content. I do something like this:

6. Offload the entire DSLR card contents over to your harddive, not just the footage. Yes all those files and folders that seem useless and you don’t know what they mean. Those too.
7.  Offload your ‘good’ audio file (s) onto your hard-drive as well.
8. I say hard-drive because I do not keep anything but applications and a few folders on my laptop. I have a Drobo that houses all of my archives of everything (photos, video, audio).
9. You can’t just import clips from the DSLR into Final Cut Pro (FCP) and start editing. They have to be converted.  Even though Canon has a plug-in for FCP to convert video files from your DSLR, I found it to be slow and confusing. So instead, I use this software to do this:

This one is free, though no guarantees with upgrades, etc:
http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

My friend also recommends this:
http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-grinder/

10. Follow this how to (convert your DSLR clips) vide by Philip Bloom (who I think is great when it comes to tutorials:)
http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/education/technical/frame_rate_conversion.do

11. From there, you need to work on your audio. I like Audacity to do simple clean up jobs and processing audio.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

It is important to capture it the best audio you can at first at ‘time of capture’ (I just made that up), but you can do a few things with Audacity that makes good audio sound better. You can also do major logging and labeling with Audcaity. I spent 6 months with that on a project last year in 2 languages…  :-)

So, import you audio and MAKE SURE you work at 48000 Hz.  Otherwise your audio will not synch and you’ll have and hear a very trippy (and maddening)  ’audio drift.’ You can set that in the lower left corner of the Audacity timeline.

12. Work on your ‘good’ audio a bit and export as an MP3 file into the project folder.
13. Now that your video (with its bleh audio from the DSLR camera) and good audio captured from some kind of separate device are downloaded it’s time to open FCP.
14. Import your content info FCP. Again, keeping everything organized.
15. Lay down all your content on your FCP sequence.
16. Open Plural Eyes and sync your audio.
Here’s the software:
http://www.singularsoftware.com/pluraleyes.html

And a tutorial:
http://bit.ly/caDZau

17. Your video and audio should be synched.
18. Remove ‘bad’ audio (the audio from the DSLR camera). Here’s how (Thank you ShaunPhotography.com!):
In FCP, first trim both clips to be the same length (Hit ‘B’ to use the blade tool). Then you can just pick up the zoom audio and drop it right on top of your old audio in the timeline. Select both the zoom audio and the original video by clicking on them holding the command key, and once they are both selected hit Command-L (link) to link them.
20. Edit and export your masterpiece.
21. Upload to Vimeo. Here is a nifty how-to page on Vimeo, where I will stage the rough cuts for my clients to view:

http://vimeo.com/help/compression

This works and will save you tons of time. AND… it will all change in 3 months. Have fun! Amanda