Telling a story is not easy. Telling a good story is powerful. And a story well told makes for very effective marketing.
I'm adding video marketing to the range of services I offer. Best practices for video marketing focus on storytelling for good reason. It isn't about the best technical equipment, the right settings or even the lighting. Those can support, but not make, a great storytelling.
I recently recorded narration for an auto-running Powerpoint presentation using the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB interface and pre-amp. The results were good and I learned a few things along the way. The first lesson is don't record the narration in Powerpoint directly. I learned this lesson a long time ago and had to re-learn it as apparently I forgot. Powerpoint doesn't do a very clean job of starting and stopping recording and makes it hard to access the clips afterwards to trim them of the various pops and clicks.
It is the holidays which means I really need to finish that DVD project from this summer's trip. The movie itself is done with titles and credits and audio. It was created with Aperture's slideshow tools and came out great. The Ken Burns effect seems to know which way to move when -- I think this is luck, not image interpretation in the software but it came out perfect.
Roland's R26 Portable Recorder offers 6 mono or 3 stereo channel simultaneous recording. This means you can capture surround or other useful combinations of main + ambiance with one small, portable device and easily move the audio into the computer for use with video. I've been delaying an outboard portable capture device for a while now. I thought about a Zoom or Tascam but just hadn't gotten around to deciding. Turns out that may have been fortunate.
