4 thoughts on “Spartan Daily SoundSlides

  1. Very nice work! Love the photos, and the audio quality is excellent. Wish I could hear some GAME, though! Hang around while they practice and hold the mic out! You’d get some great action sounds that way.

    Now, if you don’t mind, I have a couple of pointers:

    (1) Length of time each photo should stay onscreen: 5 to 6 seconds. You can make exceptions with a few photos in any one slideshow, but as a rule of thumb, 5 to 6 works well. So, do the math: If you have 20 decent photos, then try to edit that audio file down to 100 seconds, and not more than 120 seconds. Fewer good pictures? Shorter audio. A total of 18 to 20 pics makes a nice Soundslides.

    (2) Don’t leave totally silent gaps between the different speakers in your audio. You can copy and paste a little “white noise” to go in between two speakers. It will sound more natural that way. But also, the silences should be much shorter than they are here.

    That’s not to knock the reporter’s work at all — it’s really very good, especially considering it’s a first effort!

  2. I was surprised to see that both the reporter and many of the photographers who did their first pieces while at Capitola ran into the same audio problem, getting the audio equivalent of a detail. Everyone typically got a good amount of ambient (I forget what happened to Kim’s, I think it turned out that she was not close enough or forgot to change the mic gain settings), but few made a conscious effort to get the small detail noises; a coach’s whistle, teammates clapping or high-fiving, etc. I think it goes back to planning in the beginning and perhaps even storyboarding with something similar to Andrew DeVigal’s three-column script.

  3. Well, finally some content delivery, instead of all that methodology talk….. 🙂

    Good stuff.

    The bad…. The dead silence between the talkers needs to be filled….with ambient sound….guys swearing and screaming, ect…. I guess U don’t have that. because it’s too far away to hear without a shootgun mic. … I bought a small MP3 recorder for like $20 that have a mic. on for recording. I am thinking of using it as a backup, and/or just clip the mic on their shirt and drop the MP3 recorder/player into the subject’s pocket, and let it run for hours. Quality may not be good, but we are not doing Beethoven here.

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