3 Simple and Cost-Effective Methods To Improve Acoustics of Podcasts

3 Steps Before Recording:
www.RecordBetterAudio.com (episode 2-April 16, 2007)

1. What is directly below you and your microphone? Cement or hardwood floors must be covered with carpet or a rug to prevent sound waves from bouncing off the floor up into the microphone. If the microphone is sitting on a desktop stand, a small piece of carpet should be placed under it.

2. Use a pop filter. A pop filter is designed to break up the breath of air from your mouth when pronouncing certain words with the letters P or T in them. The pop filter is a thin piece of fabric mounted on a stand. It is usually placed 3-6 inches from your mouth and the microphone is placed about 3 inches from it. It is simple, but worth having and costs about $30.

3. Find a towel and wrap it entirely around the microphone except in front where the pop filter is located. This will help to eliminate any ambiance in the room and absorb it before sound waves are recorded in the microphone.

1 hour

Letterboxing

So, why is letterboxing an important concept to understand?
The students last semester who attempted to podcast a 3 hour lecture ended up spending about 9 hours trying to make that podcast available online. One of the reasons it took so long was trying to transfer the widescreen film to video formats A.K.A. Letterboxing. We will make sure the video camera is set to record on widescreen to prevent this time-consuming task from being a necessary step.

Letterboxing is the practice of transferring widescreen films to video formats while preserving the original aspect ratio. Since the video display is most often a more square aspect ratio than the original film, the resulting video must include masked-off areas above and below the picture area (often referred to as "black bars," or, more accurately, as mattes). Letterboxing takes its name from the similarity of the resulting image to a horizontal opening in a postal letter box. LTBX is an acronym used for programming using this format.

Letterboxing offers an alternative to the pan and scan or full screen method of transferring a widescreen film to video. In pan and scan, the original image is cropped to suit the 1.33:1 (or 4:3) ratio of the television screen. In contrast, letterboxing preserves the original composition of the film as seen in the theater.

Letterboxing was intended for use on a 4:3 display in a time when widescreen TVs had yet to catch on. Any letterboxed material will usually be stretched to fill the display on a widescreen TV and look distorted, however, using the vertical stretch feature on the TV or DVD player will correct this.(Wikipedia 2007)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterbox
1 hour

May 14, 2007

Today is the official 1st day of the semester, but I've been familiarizing myself with podcasting for a couple of weeks now. So far so good. I've subscribed to a few different podcasts, which was my 1st assignment. The trouble I'm having is that I only have a 4GB ipod nano so I've had to delete a lot of music from my ipod to make room for podcasts. Since my ipod doesn't have video capabilities I have been unable to transfer many of the podcasts from itunes to my ipod so I've had to sit at the computer for quite a while to watch all of the podcasts. So far my favorite podcast to listen to is by Mark Hoppus. He's pretty interesting and he introduces a lot of new up-and-coming bands. Mark was in Blink-182 but now he is in a new band called Plus44. http://www.himynameismark.com/podcasts/podcast.xml

So far I have spent 4 hours familiarizing myself with how most podcasts work and subscribing to and listening to numerous podcasts.
I just found this video which describes how to download a podcast from the iTunes store into your personal iTunes account. This is a very easy process, but I'll post this video just in case. See "How To Download From iTunes" under links on the left side of this page.

Joni
4 hours