Daniel Rucci's Video Tech Blog

Elimiate breathing sounds in voiceover audio with this handy filter

2011-03-31T15:43:00.000-07:00

When you're cutting clean, well-recorded and professional VOs where the breaths are real loud and clear you can usually use the expander filter to pot out low-volume breath sounds instead of cutting them out manually.

Set the threshold at the level perhaps just above where the breaths are (they were at around -30db) you can use the ratio slider to move them down in the dynamic range so they're essentially inaudible. Then you want to set the release time a little long because otherwise you'll start to lob off the ending consonants like S and F and "Sh"

There is a reason why I qualify this as specifically applying to professionally recorded voiceovers and that is that in non-boothed or poor recordings the signal-to-noise ratio is low, or in other words there's a loud noise floor surrounding your lovely voice, and this filter will give you a different result in that case. You'll hear the noise floor coming in and out, depending on your attack/release times: no good for most uses. In professional recordings done from a sound booth, or with the microphone very close to the subject, your noise floor is reduced and this filter will be more effective.

Cascade windows on a mac, especially mail.app

2011-02-07T07:20:00.000-08:00

Reposting from: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050519021838783

"In any program that has a 'Window' menu, you'll find "Bring All To Front." However, if you hold down the Option key after opening the menu, this becomes "Arrange In Front." Select it, and you get a (nasty IMO) Windows-esque cascading arrangement feature."

Very helpful in the case that you have a million mail.app windows open and spread across the desktop and variously sized.

Manually controlling your MacBook Pro fans for better cooling

2010-06-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

I do a lot of high powered video editing on my MacBook Pro and I often run compressions in the background while I'm doing other work. Sadly I've found that even when I'm using 150% of my cpu, the computer doesn't manage its fan to run at maximum speed, even when it's clearly and catastrophically overheating.

In comes this handy little utility from Hendrik Holtmann. Control your fan speed with preset preferences right from the menu bar or prefernces pane. Lovely little utility.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23049/smcfancontrol

as I type this I'm running a heavy h.264 compression in quicktime and i've got SMC Fan control running my fans at maximum speed for a total savings of 10 degrees.

Please donate and support his free software.

if you want to UPLOAD a movie to youtube, here's what I recommend:

2010-05-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

for HD:
1280x720
"movie to quicktime movie" (.mov) or "movie to MPEG-4" (.mp4)
codec: h.264
Data rate: 13,000 kbits/sec
frame rate: native to the project
key frame rate: 24
audio: mp3 or aac
audio bitrate: 128-160 kbits/sec (or 80/96 if audio isn't too important)

and for SD:
all the same as above except NTSC pixel resolution 720x480 / 720x540
and video bitrate 8000

Extracting assets from Keynote 5.0.3 (iWork 09)

2010-04-27T14:45:00.000-07:00

Here hopes this saves you some head-desk-banging when trying to extract images and videos from a keynote.

1) in iWork 09 > Preferences> select "Save New Documents as Packages" checkbox

2) save a copy of your project as an iWork 08 (available checkbox/dropdown in save-as dialogue)

3) in finder, find the file you just created, control-click (right click) and select "Show Package Contents"

Voila.

The CMOS Rolling Shutter Problem

2010-04-26T01:23:00.001-07:00

I will dedicate a more thorough posting to this issue some time soon, but much of the problem with the DSLRs out there today, as well as any small camera on a phone, flip camera or iPod, is the rolling shutter.

Check out this rainbow picture I took from my car, out the side window, while moving at highway speeds. Can you see the curve of the power lines? Doesn't it look a little unlikely?

It's unfortunate, but CMOS imagers are in use nowadays partly because they use far less power, which is a major consideration for mobile devices. I'll have to wait until we graduate to a better sensor technology than CMOS, that uses less power, or when battery technology advances adequately to the point that we can use less efficient sensors.

This rolling shutter artifact occurs because CMOS sensors read the image one line at a time over the course of the shutter time, and read from top left to bottom right, like a book, hence a rolling shutter, rolling across the image and line to line. You can deduce the orientation of the sensor, and therefore the camera if the image or camera are moving quicly. This is likely an interesting factoid in many forensics debates in courtrooms. You could determine which orientation and in which hand a camera was used because of this artifact!

Create a Mac DMG package with background

2010-04-01T15:01:00.001-07:00

Check out this great tutorial for making your own installer package. I'm using this to roll out my first iPhone app.

http://chromasoft.blogspot.com/2010/02/building-dmg-installer-for-mac-simple.html

bricked iPhone? Here's how to wake it up from a coma

2009-09-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

Today I was using my iPhone and it just stopped-completely with no warning and for no reason at all... It was 200% unresponsive and dead to any and all combination of pressing and holding buttons... I did a little reading and this is what I found that worked:

To wake your bricked iphone from total unresponsiveness:

1) Toggle the vibrate switch (the one above the volume) back and forth two times

2) Then hold the Home and Power buttons for about 10 full seconds.

The apple logo will appear and your phone will be back on its way to rebooting from a no-wakey comatose bricking.

For those who want to know how to edit

2009-09-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

Read this article I just found. This is a terrific outline of the most important points of story editing for fiction films, and many of the techniques apply to non-fiction as well. I've been looking for someone to compile these ideas into one list and lo and behold Oliver Peters had it all along.

http://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/12-tips-for-better-film-editing/

in fact... holy cow.. Oliver's blog posts are all incredible information even for advanced final cut pro users

What Codec does Vimeo encode into?

2009-09-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

As of August 2009, this is what vimeo encodes into for playback on their webpage. I reverse engineered this with the help of several cool techniques, programs and consulting with Vimeo staff.

HD 16:9
1280x720 .mp4 container
video: H.264 codec @ 2000 kbits/second 2-pass VBR
audio: AAC codec, 128kbits, stereo 44.1kHz

SD 16:9

640x352 .mp4 container

Video: H.264 codec @ 750-800 kbits/second 2-pass VBR

Audio: AAC codec, 128kbits, stereo 44.1kHz

SD 4:3

640x480 .mp4 container

video: H.264 codec @ 1200 kbits/second 2-pass VBR
audio: AAC codec, 128kbits, stereo 44.1kHz

Keep in mind that many videos on the site are still encoded using their old method (.flv container with On2VP6 codec). For playback these videos are scrunched down into a small player for normal viewing, and stretched to fit your screen width on full screen, but this is the actual codec information of the video file, and it's also based on

SEE THE FULL CONVERSATION I HAD with Daniel Hayek at Vimeo HERE:

http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:17060