I had an interesting day in VideoForum 2007 at London’s Earl Court on Tuesday. Here are three products/newsbytes that may be of interest to digital storytellers:
1. Edirol R09 portable audio recorder looks ace. When I chose the M-Audio Microtrack, Edirol’s products could only capture audio at 44.1k and I needed 48k, because this is the native rate for audio for DV video. What the R09 seems to offer above the Microtrack is a more robust built-in microphone, replaceable battery and the chance to add reverb at the point of recording, which may be useful if you’re recording music. There’s a discussion, camparing the two at thesession.org
2. Adbobe Soundbooth. Much simpler than Encore, Soundbooth does enough for most digital storytellers. What does it offer that Auddacity and SoundStudio don’t? Well, the top and tail functionality is innovative: you drag bars to the start and the end of the waveform, you can drag in a fade to the start and end and there’s a one-click normalisation button.Soundbooth also throws in some musical scoring which lets you match the feel of the music to the story. Grab this free beta before Adobe starts charging for it.
3. Hot news: Abobe announced that its Production Suite is being made available for “Mactel” – their word for Macintoshes that have the Intel chip. It’ll be great to be able to use the latest version of Premiere on Mac once again.
I’ve been visiting this event for a few years now and it gets bigger every year; thanks to Kieron Seth for organising VideoForum07.