New Course: Fundamentals of Lighting for Single-Person Interview & Talking Head Video
We've just released a new course! This course covers the fundamentals of lighting for single-person interviews and talking-head videos. We cover the basic concepts of lighting, walk through the materials you'll need, and– finally– lead you through three different hands-on lighting design demonstrations. At the end of the course you'll be equipped with all the conceptual tools and experience you need to beautifully light your talking-head interviews with ease!
New Course: Fundamentals of Mixing in DaVinci Resolve Fairlight 18.1
This week, we're happy to announce our new course on how to edit and mix dialogue, prerecorded music intros and outros, and basic sound design in DaVinci Resolve's Fairlight! The course is available here at school.learnlightandsound.com.
DaVinci Resolve is an amazing video post app for editing, coloring, adding visual effects, and mixing sound. And with free and studio versions, anyone can produce very high quality videos and films.
Fairlight is the incredibly powerful audio mixing page within Resolve.
In the course, we’ll teach you how to do all of this in Resolve version 18.1:
- How to configure the Fairlight settings
- How to import and sync your audio clips
- How to get around the Fairlight page
- How to use track layers
- How to choose which mic channel (lav vs. boom) to use in a dialogue edit
- How to set up your channel mapping
- How to use effects to clean and sweeten the mix
- How to use key frames and automation to dynamically adjust track and clip levels
- How to add and mix basic sound design
- How and when to bounce tracks and timelines
- How to loudness normalize your final mix
What is NOT covered:
- Video editing in the Cut and Edit pages
- Color grading in the Color page
- Visual effects in the Fusion page
One of the tricks with online courses is what to do when you have a question. We have you covered there. You can email me any time when you sign up for the course. We also hold weekly Sound for Video Sessions where we cover sound for video topics in more depth and even have Q&A sessions once or twice a month.
Come on over to https://school.learnlightandsound.com and sign up to learn with us!
RODE's New Audio Gear at IBC 2015
Of the new products RODE announced today at IBC, the two that are most intriguing to me are the i-XLR and RODELink News Shooter kit. I haven't seen prices on any of these yet.
The i-XLR looks like a pretty nice way to record with an XLR based microphone into an iPhone or iPad. Depending on how well its preamp and analogue to digital converter work, it may be a nice, low-cost choice for someone that is just getting started and don't have a big budget for an XLR based audio recorder. Not sure whether it can provide phantom power so that would limit it to dynamic and self-powered microphones but that's often what you're using when in a reporting situation. But it should work with something like the NTG4+ or NTG2.
The RODELink News Shooter looks even more interesting to me. The obvious use for this is on a reporter's handheld microphone. And that's great, but it can also be used on a Shotgun or boom microphone as well - it supplies 48v phantom power. That's an interesting scenario. It can also still be used with a lavalier microphone and...it can be powered by two AA or a Sony NP-F style battery! Nice work RODE! You guys are cranking out some interesting gear for the film and sound enthusiast crowd!
The carbon fiber Boom Pole Pro looks interesting as well. It is not internally cabled off the shelf but evidently you can remove the top cap and cable internally yourself. Though I'm not sure on two things: 1) if you put a straight cable inside the pole, you'll run in to potential noise when cuing the pole between actors as the cable slaps against the inside of the pole and 2) Not sure where the cable exits on the bottom of the pole. Do you just remove the bottom cap? In any case, will be interesting to see this up close.
