expert - Step In Front of the Camera

Add quality sound

Hi, it's jane gardner again. And today on step in front of the camera, I promised to have a look at audacity because it should be in your tool walks for doing video and I'll say why later, but let's first off find out where you can find it. So let's go and have a look at the presentation.

So audacity is a software that you can use that's free. It's open source, which means it's free and it's a digital audio editor and recording application software available for windows mac, linux and other unix like systems. And so basically you can get it at audacity, I believe it's dot team org back slash download.

Of course you can download it from there and you can download it for windows mac or linux and you have to of course choose if you want it as a 32 or 64 bit version and you can then choose which one you want and download it. So that's um, go have a look at it. We just get my screen here.

Here we go. So I've got it on my desktop and first off, we're going to show you once you've downloaded it and you open it. This is what it looks like. And the first thing you want to do is check that you've got the right microphone and the right speaker as well. It doesn't matter about speakers, you can always change your speakers, but you have to have your microphone set up and this is where you choose your microphone, the system asks decides which one of those you have available and then you pick the one that you want.

So there's my microphone. And then you could do stereo, but you don't really need it. But you could try it out just to see. Um, and of course, or you could do mono recording and of course you can expect your speakers. So for later. So I used my real tech audio.

Mm hmm. And then up here, this is the microphone volume been a while since the recording volume 0. 0. I don't think so. So we've got to change that. Get up to 50%, see if that works and speaker. Well that's already maxed. And so really what you do is this is of course pause, this is play, this is stop, reverse forward and there's a record button.

So let's do this in real time. And we're going to see later whether or not we can hear the sound. So yeah, so audacity is a great tool to use for you when you're doing video, doing podcasts, doing any recordings for voice because you can come back later and edit your audacity. And you can also import your audio from your video.

So if you split it out of your video using camped asia for example, you can import it up here. I don't think it does work. So you can import your audios from here and expel export, we'll talk about in a minute. But so you know what I'm busy recording and you can see that what my recording levels are. And they're looking pretty good.

You can sometimes see that it goes into the red, which is not what you want. So let's stop that for now. And then I'm going to find out if I can hear this by playing it back, but you probably won't be able to until I figure out how to turn on my stereo. So hold on, stop that.

And then let's go back to the beginning. Mm and then we'll show you some editing is that you always use so you can play and I can hear it but I'm sure you can hear it uh doing any recordings um for voice because you can come back later and edit your audacity. Um and you can also import so you can make the volume.

The way form of this look bigger we are. Where are we here? There's your gain again. Remember, gain. And let's see. Mhm. And of course we will talk that later. So what you can do is go back to the beginning, go back to the beginning.

And actually this has got pretty much a lot of sound on it, but you can zoom in zoom in so in and then you can tune out of course. And then are we here tracks. So anyway, um you can select part of it and say this. You think this is the noise sound in your track.

Then you click here, then you go and edit. So we can remove that. We can do effects is the most important part. If you think you have your have too many, too much background noise, you can do a noise reduction. So you click there. So first you still have to select the auto that you want to jews the audio that you want to choose to make it sound?

Say that's your nose profile and then where is that noise reduction and then select all the otto you want filter and how much you want filtered out. Example. And then you tell it how much of this you want to be filtered out. So let's go back to your fast noise reduction and go, so let's listen to that, see if we can tell the difference.

So audacity is a great tool to use for you. Yeah, I even don't like that noise really, I like the noise that was there. But anyway, so audacity has a manual and I could probably do some trainings on how to use audacity. But yeah, it's really important for making your audio sound great.

So let's get out of this for now and say that this is one of the tools that you should have when you're doing video, you can do it use camped asia two or another tool. But um, this is a free tool. So we can always like free and yeah, so audacity is one of these, you should add to your list to use for making your audio sound great for your video. You can try it with and just use it for doing podcasting.

So you could record your voice in audacity and add music and all that kind of thing without ever having to use video. So you could use it for podcasting and you can use it for, I'm creating better sound on your video.

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What is Gain?

Welcome welcome welcome. This is jane gardner again and today we're going to do a follow up on something that I got stuck on sound. But we'll go over sound again and talk about gain what is gain. So it's always important to have a good microphone when you have a studio. So I think I've been recommending blue yeti or you can get an audio technical.

You'll notice the difference in sound between what you use with a laptop with a microphone with a blue yeti, etcetera. And a blue yeti is a usb so it plugs into the computer and let's go and have a look at the presentation about it. So we're going to look at game today.

It's one of your knobs, usually on your, all the microphones, so you need to be able to understand what that is. But we'll also go over some of the other, knobs that you might find on your microphone. And first off, we'll be talking later about audacity, it's a free program you can use to record your sound if you're doing some editing. Obviously, usually when you're in your broadcasting software, you have sound, of course you don't need to use audacity to record the sound.

But if you want to edit or if you want to just do sound recordings for podcasting, audacity is a great free program you can download and you can edit your sound and improve your sound and you can just record your sound in audacity. You don't need to use anything else. But um, so that's one of the things we'll talk about later.

But I just wanted to mention it and just because it's about sound. So on the blue yeti, this is an older version of a blue yeti. But you have basically your button for turning your sound on or for muting yourself, that's the little red button at the top and then you have your gain knob which we'll talk about in a minute and basically the gain is the volume or the loudness of the audio you're recording that's going into the microphone.

So basically I can change the, you won't notice it if I did it here, but I can change, let's go back to have a look at it. I can turn the gain knob to your right or to the left and find the loudness of the voice recording to go into the microphone. And the only way you can really figure out what you prefer is by testing it.

So do it at a certain level and then record it and see what you think if you like it when you play it back. If it's not loud enough, that means you're going to have to edit it in say camped asia or audacity to get it to the volume you like. So you might want to try and get the volume you like first by using your gain volume. So that's the volume of the audio as it comes into the microphone and as you know, a speaker is that is has the loudness of the volume of the audio as it comes out of the speaker.

But anyway, so let's have a look at the definition. So is the volume of the output of the channel basically controls the loudness but not the tone of the audio. So the gain is the loudness of the input onto the channel. So that's really very simple and it's a matter of editing and trying and testing and using audacity to see what you think about the recording and yeah that's that's about it for gain and then on the yeti and other microphones, sometimes you can have more than one knob on your microphone.

So this one it has the gain above it and then it has another button dial that goes to different types of sound recordings. So we'll go and have a look at that now. So you can have different settings for what the microphone picks up for the sound. So I think we all know what stereo is. It's one of the settings maybe you could have and it will make the pick up all the volume in the area to make it stereo from two directions.

Let's pick up about omni directional. That's basically picks up all the sound around in a circle around the microphone. So that would be good for a conference or for if you have one or more persons speaking to the microphone and picks up the other person as well or the third person or if you're playing music and you want to pick up everything that's happening in the room.

Um bi directional would be good for if you're talking to another person and interviewing them, it will pick up you and it will pick up the other person. But cardi oid is usually the one that you want to use when you're podcasting, it has the best quality sound and basically it picks up the sound in a small area in the front of the microphone.

So if you were to turn around the microphone, your sound would not be as good as if you're speaking right into it. Where and basically you actually speak into the area where you have your, let me just point you would speak into it at the area where you have your button that turns on and off the sound and the volume and that's the volume actually for the speaker.

If you were to use your microphone and playback your sound or you're recording in your microphones, that speaker, you can change the volume of the headphones so that you can hear it better. So that's the volume of the microphone headphones. So there there's a fairly simple um information.

But I think um if you have to know knew knew nothing about microphones, you would find it a bit useful to be able to use this. So I hope that was somewhat useful um just play with your microphone, make some test recordings, use your audacity and record a recording, make a test, change the buttons, do another test, just see which is the one that you prefer um for podcasting.

It can be a different sound than from obviously doing music and everything. So you need to have your microphone settings the way you like them and yeah, so I just wanted to do explain what the gain button was dial if you were using it. I saw it on your microphone. I see that the microphones for the yeti have quite changed since I bought 13

Years ago. A lot of them don't have the various choices. They just have the one because they're specializing in podcasting so it makes it easier for you. So um that's what gain is, it's the loudness of the audio that's coming into your microphone and I'm probably fairly quiet. So I should probably turn up my gain.

But we'll check that out when I do my recording. So you go and play with your microphone and then play it back and see how it goes.

For more on equipment and resources for a Show go to http://jgtips.com/rguide

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Interview on Location Microphone

Hello again, it's jane gardner of step in front of the camera tips and tricks and before we talk about all the, physics or how to optimize your sound. Let's go over, the lavelier, microphone and why you want to use maybe use that in your business.

So we looked at the blue yeti, which is a, it sits on a platform and you can also get audio technica overhead boom and get it close to your mouth, which reminds me I should get a bit closer. So now let's talk about the lavelier so let's get, get yourself a picture of a lavelier and let's have a look at that.

So ignoring the quality, I guess, of this lavelier we'll just assume that you're going to get a good lavelier mike and let's talk about lavelier clip on microphones and why you want to use one to clip on your microphone. Well, obviously it's first of all, it's, it's very portable.

You can put it in your bag and carry around anywhere where you want to go. And it's very flexible so it helps you to free up your hands because you just clip it onto your lapel blouse and then just put the transmitter which connects up to your recording device in your pocket. So it's perfect for doing things like that for podcasts.

You may not need to show your face. So there's an advantage of using clip on your lavelier mic. It's not obvious. , but it depends on the quality of the lavelair microphone. So let's have a look at some of the pluses and minuses. So the, the lavalier microphone doesn't record the full range of frequencies of your voice.

So you lose a little bit out of the bass frequencies or the lower frequencies and that's consistent across all the different types of lavelier microphones, whether they're inexpensive or expensive. So one that would be a good lavelier there is a r0dor lavelier mike and it's gotta uses a standard audio audio input jack.

So you could fit it into your smartphone, the input jack, if they still have it on your smartphone or most audio input jacks on any computer. Or you could try setting it up with your ipad etcetera. And it's, it's some of them are specifically designed for mobile phones and tablets and things like your macbook air or macbook pro.

Of course you have to have an audio jack. So it's the same jack that used to record and also to plug in your headphones. So you may find that the other types are not meant for low powered devices like smartphones or tablets. So if you try it and there's no sound, you plug it in, it's probably not gonna work at all.

So you'll have to get a different one. So you have to decide how you want to use it. So you could use, you could basically have the same components for all lavelier microphones, you have a clip and this is for you to clip onto your clothes, you have the audio input jack and you have the microphone and some lavelier microphones don't come with a little sponges, which is actually a pop filter that you put over it and it's what a pop filter does. That removes the most explosive sounds when you pronounce the word peace.

Alright, so if you're not pronounced p, you may hear okay api because I'm not using a pop filter, but if, if you're whenever you, so you could always remove the pop filter if you don't like it, but it's great for removing the popping p's. So basically, if you have a limited budget and you're wondering what microphone to go for the rodr smart lavelier mike, is best option.

Obviously if you have a microphone like this, it's very portable and so you could probably use use it when you're driving in your car as you probably know the built in microphone for your smartphone can be very sensitive and pick up a lot of the noise on sounds of the road of your car and so sometimes it's very brittle or weird.

So, but if you were to get a lava lier microphone, it basically wants to capture your voice above everything else. So it captures other sounds as well. But because of the proximity of your mouth or your throat, to the microphone, your vocals will be the loudest of all. And then of course, that's what you want now in a studio sets in a studio setting, it's still useful.

You can move around obviously if you're one of these people who likes to stand while you're doing recordings or presentations where you like to wave around with your hands and move about, I would certainly recommend it for people who are doing demonstrations, exercises and that kind of thing, because it's not gonna, it's probably going to carry most of the of your voice, but it's not gonna do as much of the surround sounds that is around you because it's focused on your voice.

So you don't have to worry too much if you're looking at it. Having it in your studio about things like echo and noises outside of the lavalier, as you can imagine, the lavelier mike is the one that most reporters used and they're using them outside even as well as of course in the studio.

So it's worth getting, I think to me, if the time comes when we're back to interviewing people and sitting across from each other and interviewing people, you can clip a microphone on the other person and then there's a transmitter and you have a microphone and it's a little more natural than having to move one of these microphones in your hand. So it's worth investing in if you think you'll be doing that kind of a lot of stuff outside, and I get a bit more a better sound than you would if you used your smartphone.

And I guess I should have put up a picture of a smartphone, but I haven't really considered that as a possibility, especially when it comes to developing a tv show or and such like that. The most important thing for your show is to have good quality sound. So we'll be talking further on that next time and after that we'll do some physics and how to get the volume right on your microphone.

So it sounds good. I'm not sure how this is sounding. I still just for you to know, I've realized that the computer sound, it should be muffled in my studio. After all, it's been I've been picking it up, I think it's the fans getting older and so it's changed the sound, and so I'm going to have to get myself a quilt to put over it while I'm recording to try and cut down the sound of the fan. So, my apologies if you can hear a hum in the background.

I what I do is I try and take it out in the recording, but of course that's that's extra work. Right? So you want to try and get good quality sound while you're recording so that you don't have to try and we'll be giving you some tips on that. And how do you use gain to get a good quality volume to your sound?

And hopefully I have one today. I haven't checked it. So I was playing around with it a couple of days ago to see if I could get a good sound. So yeah I might have to do some editing in the recording to up the sound a bit because I'm a pretty quiet person. So that's it for today and tomorrow.

For more on resources and equipment for broadcasting stepping in front of the camera, go to http://jgtips.com/rguide

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My Favourite microphone

Welcome welcome welcome. It's jane gardner again and it's step in front of the camera again, tips and tricks. So today we're gonna talk about the blue yeti microphone. I'm going to be using pictures because I don't want to move my microphone, but I use the blue yeti.

It is a stereo condenser microphone and so it is great for , it has a usb cable on it. So it also, so you can put it into the computer, so make sure you have a usb connection available. So let's have a look at the front of it. I took a picture and let's have a look where are we here? Oh there we are.

So on the front, the front of the blue yeti um you have your volume for your micro mike, sorry for your speaker. So your headphones so you can connect your you're obviously your headphones into your microphone and always listen to what you're saying in terms of what it's producing for you.

You can also do the recording out through it to listen through the headphones and of course the button, the mute button flashes when you're muting and it's a steady red glow when you're recording and it's on. So that's always good to check because I've many times had it off when I should have it on.

But basically, the blue yeti has been really good for me. I haven't really had to do any volume changes in terms of my once I do a recording, but let's look at the back of the blue yeti. So we've got a nice label here and we're going to talk in depth I guess a little about what everything is now gain is basically what you need controls the amount of audio that you want to capture or the level audio that you want to capture on your blue yeti.

And then the pattern button has the pattern of how the microphone takes up sound. So we'll go over gain and the pattern. So you really have to do some recordings and test your you're a microphone when you get it to see what you like the best in terms of gain. If it's always in the same position in the studio and it's real close to your voice.

Then you can probably put it low but until you try and test it, you won't really be able to tell what settings you want for that but for the pattern that is pretty obvious. So let's go over the patterns. So we have the stereo mode and so it's multipurpose it's good for lots of different types of recordings.

If you're not sure what mode you need to record in, then you can just put it on stereo mode and try it out and put a real on the recording and see if you like it or not. The next one setting is omni directional. So it's a complete circle uh symbol on the microphone. And the blue yeti will actually capture audio from a 360° angle all around the microphone.

So it's useful. And let's say you want to record a conference and you can have various people speaking around the table. And you can actually capture this, there's voice because this actually tries to catch the sound of their voice from whenever they're sitting or whatever sounds there are in the in the space and you can hear most of what people are saying, even if they're sitting around a table. So it's good for conferences or when you want to record in any direction.

Now in a studio setting, I don't think it will work for you because you don't want to catch the sounds of the computer as much either or any, clocks or whatever else in the room. So it's best to not use omni directional if you're trying to do a screen casting or recording of a video.

So the third one is cardio mode and it gives the best quality of audio, it's meant for podcasting or for recording voiceovers and it will only be recording the audio from right in front of the microphone right above where obviously the mute button is. So if you switch it to cardio mode and you speak right in front of the microphone, you do well.

But if you speak and from behind the microphone, it's very weak. So you want to be able to be up nice and close at a standard distance away from your microphone. And if you're doing screen casts, I would recommend using the cardio mode because it gives the richest quality of audio. But of course you can't really tell until you set up your studio and do a little quick recording and see if you like the sound.

So the next and last option is bi directional. So it's similar to cardio to stereo, but it's strictly captures audio only from the front and the back. And this is useful if say for example, you're doing an interview and the other person is sitting in behind in front of you so that the back of the microphone as well as the front of the microphone is capturing the voices.

And so you can place the blue yeti right in the middle and I will capture both your audio and the person that you are interviewing. If there are people on the left and right, technically speaking, it won't be capturing that audio but you could always see if it does or not. But it's going to be pretty noisy if you're trying to capture all for directions.

So it's probably best not to do that. So there's four patterns to the blue yeti and basically it's kind of difficult to show you the difference because it all depends on your own studio environment. But I'd recommend either trying the stereo or the cardio this pattern. And of course you're going to have to check your gain and see which you like the most.

I've been trying it quite a bit and I haven't really found the one that I really like yet and when I do I market on the microphone so I can always get back to that setting. So there you go. Maybe we should actually talk a little bit more about all those types of things like gain and just so they understand it a little bit more, so do better because at some point we're going to have to talk about editing your sound and making the best it can be in terms of your videos.

So yeah, I might be good to talk about game next time or if we need to talk about gain. It depends, it depends on using audacity whether or not you need to understand gain and certainly the volume of what you're speaking, you always have to you know, stop your recording and then go listen to it and see if the the volume of the voice is loud enough.

Ah this one may not be because I've been trying to gain but anyway, that's for next time.

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Do you have a livestreaming game plan?

This Video is part of my Offline to Online in 10 days PROGRAM

Welcome welcome welcome, this is jane gardner and welcome again to how to virtualize your business today. I'm going to be recording about how to market using live streaming and I'm really excited this because it's part of my course offline online program and business in 30 days.

So let's go and have a look at how to market using live streaming.

So I'm going to hang out with you today and we're going to look at why you want to do live streaming.

You want to do live streaming because you want to be

the face of your business,
you can educate,
you can entertain,
you can obviously instruct
you can train,
you can sell,
you can connect and
you can communicate because
people get to know I can trust you because you are of business.

The internet is a more focused personal venue and platform and when you use it right,

you can get to be influencer and you can be the face of your business.

So to be the face of your business, you need to show your face obviously. So this is why I'm here, even though I'm kind of small down in the bottom there and they need to show up on a regular basis because you need to be able to do it with daily weekly or we'll forget monthly because people will forget and you need to have a very detailed agenda with a show maybe with giveaways and education and training for those who come and you can have people that you interview to get knowledge and people get used to you being here on the internet and they want to get to know you and trust you. So that's always good.

you need to show up regular so that you have your visitors can come to see your show even when you're not promoting anything, but just have a show, have a training.

So people get to value coming to stop by.

So they come to expect you whether it's every monday or every sunday like for me and if they receive good information and they get value out of it,

they will come again.

So you have to consider the idea of having a show.

You can train visitors and clients to show up by making sure that you always show up on a regular basis at a certain time.

So you can also be recorded video that you share, but you can connect such that they know they all joke with you and ask about your family even if they get to know you well enough.

So always good to be able to connect on the internet.

So this is why you want to come out and be the face of your business because

you will have a tribe of raving fans who

like you

trust you

because they know you're going to be giving value and entertain or educate them every time that you show up and

they know that after an enjoyable half an hour or an hour with you, that they'll actually have something they can take away with from you from your show.

So that's why you need to live stream to come out from behind the curtain and be the influencer expert and authority that you are in your business.

So as I'm in this for a course, there's homework for those who are in the course, download the marketing plan and start planning how you're going to be unique different from your competitors and who is your target audience and do some research on the success competitors. What they're doing.

Are they live streaming or aren't they live streaming? What about your audience? Are they here right now? I don't know, it's six o'clock my time. So it's probably probably in bed already, but I will still be here because my video will be here.

So there you go. So do your homework by the end of the program. You should have a content creation and marketing plan using live streaming. So I'll mention it as we go along so that you know which section of the marketing plan you should be completing. But for now just download it and find out where you should start by having a look at the marketing plan information.

For resources needed to livestream go to http://jgtips.com/rguide

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how to prevent ambient sound from ruining your videos

Welcome. Welcome. It's jane again, doing another show. And um this time we're going to be talking about the audio acoustics in your room. I know I kind of skipped over this and went onto microphones, but we're going to say, we're going to talk about padding and acoustic panels.

So laura still going to have another episode where we talk about audacity, the free software you can use to record your um voice and but you can also use audacity um to basically um, make a recording of you speaking and then listening to the recording and seeing what kind of sounds you sound you hear other than your voice that you don't want to hear.

Because audacity has a few things in there where it can cancel out those sounds and and take them out. But we're going to talk today about how to try and take some of those problems in your sound out before you actually record. So today, um you've either realized that you have an echo or maybe your audio is perfect. You don't have to do any of this. So even better.

But if not, um, and you have something noisy that, you know, you can't get rid of, for example, your computer, but you could put it into an acoustical box, like a box um with acoustical panels on it, so it absorbs sound and it doesn't come out or something like that.

But you can probably find something fairly reasonable to do this, but you cannot easily edit bad audios noise in post production. I mean, you can, but you know why why, why try and get it, you know, make it better the first time.

So we're gonna talk about um a couple of things um you may have already heard about if you do any podcasting, um audio foam panels. And the other one is called a bass trap, which probably we've you've not heard of and I'll show you a picture of because it's mostly used in musical music studios and I'm going to sneeze.

So excuse me while I sneeze. So what are based panels? Bass traps and phone panels? Well, essentially to do one thing, which is to absorb echo and clean up your reverb in your recording studio. But although they may look the same, they're actually a bit different and they serve different purposes.

So the smaller the room is, the more padding you will need in order to absorb sound because of the echo when you speak your voice and your audio just bounces all over on the walls and comes back to you if it's too small. So we probably going to have to put up some acoustical panel to reduce the echo, for example.

So bass traps are used to filter out or remove the low frequencies or the bass frequencies. Now it really depends on what you're building your home studio for if you're going to record music for example, traps, it will help you because they will um help you to control the bass frequencies when recording.

Um but also there are bass frequencies in your voice. But generally speaking for bass traps, you would find a lot in recording studios, music music recording studios, if you're doing podcasts or videos like this, then you may not need based traps, but you definitely need foam panels. So phone panels are for mid to high frequencies and bass traps and foam panels can work together, or you can use just either one, but mostly it's used together.

And if you don't need it all well even better, but if you're not in a recording studio or using musical instruments, you can skip the bass traps and you can just focus on getting phone panels. So we're gonna show you some of the what they look like, just so when you're looking in the catalog, you can figure that out.

So we're looking at um having a little bit of a cold, but we're looking at the acoustics for your studio. And for example, these are foam panels that you can get there are triangular in in cross section and so they absorb sounds since their phone. And um here's a picture of a bass trap over on the left in the corner of the room.

And those are foam panels adhering to the wall. So bass traps. Um they're basically is is in the corners of the room, is where your rules meet each other and there triangular. And so of course they absorb more sound because they're thicker in the middle and these angles are the ones that reflect the most amount of audio.

And it's responsible for serious audio problems sometimes in in the corner of the room. So it's always good to put some acoustic panels there. And those are the base, it's triangular. Ones are the base type, which you probably don't need.

Um so if you were to get the bass drops, they'll fit in nicely here and then 90° angle on the wall. Um the triangular. Um but you don't really need bass traps if you think your audio is pretty good when you do your test and you're not recording music. So in this section, you can position your acoustical panels, phone panel in the corner to absorb any sound that might be echoing off in the corner because the it's not as critical for podcasting and doing videos.

It's basically you can curve it and attach it and it'll act in a same way, very cost efficient way to do it. Um so the next one you want, of course to cover is your hard surfaces, for example, the door in your studio. So you can also put um phone panels around the door handle, cut it. That's what's nice about foam.

And because hard surfaces also tend to reflect audio, make audio bounce. And that creates an echo. So you can basically, this is uh what acoustical panel looks like. It's a triangular in nature. You can get it of course on amazon. And so you can use it um you've got to use more than one, of course, but you don't know how many until you actually try it out.

So you might want to just start with a few and then try and see what it does to absorb your sound and then if it's working, that's great. If it doesn't work well, you just don't use it. Um, so most importantly, it comes in two different colors.

So you can have some fun and arrange your foam panels anyway you want and it makes your studio look cool. So the recommended coverage area is 48 where feet for your studio and this is just a rule of thumb, it really depends how big your studio is, but you should have about 48 square feet of it on one wall.

And then, so you can always get packages of 12 square feet packages of that, for example. Or you could get 12 square feet, which is 12 panels and then times 12. Now that being said, you don't have to go and get 48 square feet of old ones because as I mentioned before having too much of this panel actually can affect your audience in ways that you don't really want it to.

So you can do more harm and good, so start with your 12 square feet and you can scale up by adding another 24 or another 12 to different areas in your home studio or office studio until you get the right balance and removed all the acoustical problems like echo and buzz from your studio. So obviously if you have a perfect studio and there's no problems with sound after you do a test and I would definitely use audacity because it has a um, it has a noise um leveling I think, and it also has a noise removal and so when you take out the, your actual voice, you can, you can see the little um noise being made of ambient noise before we actually speak and we'll, and we'll talk about that later um because it's, it's really good to recorded and then listen to it um very quietly in your headphones to see if you're happy with the sound of your voice.

And also, of course you're happy that there isn't too much buzz or noise and you don't have to clean it up. Well, if you want to clean it up then it would be worth getting some foam panels for your home studio to set up and I might order some soon just to try it out. Maybe we'll see what the difference is if I put some foam panel up, if I remove any of the noise, although my basically I found that the microphone having a good microphone, like the blue yeti or the audio technica is great for um, sound that you really don't need to worry too much about not sending natural.

Um, so that's that's it for today. I'm gonna make a note to um do one on audacity, how to install it maybe, and then show you the possibilities of using audacity for your home studio as well. As of course, later on you will use other software like beauty editor, but this is a good start.

Um so we've gone through most of the sound um possibilities for your studio and now I think we've done a couple of microphone types and I think we should probably get onto lighting. That's pretty important. And so my lighting right now is pretty cool, pretty white. And so I have to adjust that, make my face warmer.

But that will be for next time I'll show you that you have a lot of control inside your web cam that you buy as to changing the colors of your video. Thank you for listening. This is jane gardner.

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Microphones Blue Yeti review

On Step in Front of the Camera series, I look at the Blue Yeti microphone and the settings on this version which gives you sound choices for your recordings. Do you know the difference between cardio and omnidirectional sound? Sound quality of your recordings whether for podcasting or video will give you success so the microphone quality is critical. For more tips and techniques, go to stepinfrontofthecamera.com

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Control your Look while on Camera

Hello everyone today. I'm going to be showing you some fun stuff about color and your webcam. Now, this is not me speaking. This is a recording I had to use outside of seeing me live. So ignore what they're saying. But this is behind the scenes in my xsplit software.

And I'm going to be showing you how to change the color on your computer. Well actually no on your software. So I've got two scenes here and each scene has a logitech brio in each scene so I can change one scenes color from another. So I've opened up the webcam here for the webcam and it has different choices.

And so the first thing we're gonna look at is chroma key. I've just turned off the green screen and matched it to the green color just in that scene. So it's black. And then you can put a scene behind that. But chroma key works really well in this software xsplit because as you can see my curtain is very wrinkled, but you can't see any wrinkles in my other scene where I've hidden it as they say, so, and then they have the parts to adjust color.

So this is brightness and this is in each scene. So you can go up and down with the scene. It has certainly defaults of course. And so you just fiddle with it until you find something that you're happy with in terms of the brightness. And then we have contrast. So obviously that contrasts very hi and then to very low, once you go down, there is the low contrast and you just find the one that you're happy with for the scene.

And then we have alpha and alpha is just basically I'm getting the image in there, it seems to disappear. So we'll have to talk about that later. That's one of these things you don't know about. And then we have hue, so you can change the hue of the scene, they're basically from green to red, yellow, more yellow.

Let's see where we're going here and we haven't done anything. That's that's where we go, we're going very green on that end and then yellow and then it probably will be reds at some point. But yeah, it's a little yellowy red. So we're just adjusting the colors to make it look like we wanted to and then we have saturation which is the next one and that will be how much color to put into the scene.

So right now it was okay, but this is way too much saturation for the color. And obviously you can go all the way back to black and white and remove all saturation. So you have quite a good control of your colors and your hues and your saturation and then ou can of course find the one that you like the best or you can reset it to what was set before.

And then you can also change the color of the background, but I don't use that I use green screen and chroma key. And as you can see each scene is different and separate different colors. You can control each scene with each webcam so you could have different colors in each scene depending on the person's hue or what you want to show their. So these are two scenes with two webcam settings and so basically two webcams in each scene.

So one webcam, even though it's the same webcam, it has different settings for each scene, that's what I wanted to say. So that's quite powerful. You can do that just like a studio and now we're going to have a look at what are we looking at now. So we're going to look at the webcam and how you can put change the settings inside the webcam as well.

And if you didn't know that there's an advanced section, that's very good. And so we're going to have a look at inside the webcam and how to change some of the settings in there if you need them to. So first we have to get the webcam open and but before that I wanted to show my invisible chair that reappears instantaneously the minute I pull the green fabric off of the chair so you can go rewind if you want to look and see how much it disappeared before.

It's very good when you have a very ugly chair. So now, so now we're going to go and look at the web cam in the background settings for the webcam whichever brand you have, they should have some kind of webcam settings for you for the camera to change the camera settings and let's go and have a look and then open up the webcam.

And so first there we go, let's try that again and open up the webcam and here we go. I had to go find it and it was hiding in the background. So I went and cut out a few of the scenes so we don't we don't waste time chasing and this is what this one looks like for the logitech brio.

But of course your logic tech 920 is probably different or your other webcams but they all have similar principles. So usually they have a zoom and pan cross where you can change the angle of the webcam. You can zoom in and out with the webcam. You can't in oh no here I go zooming in and out.

I just can't pan so you can zoom in and out with your with your webcam. But personally I don't use this I use I use my software to manipulate what size I want objects to be. And then of course my webcam which I haven't shown you the position of is in the way so that's why I keep moving back and forth.

So anyway so andand also you can have on this one anyway, you can have a standard image or you can have a widescreen image but it doesn't show in this because of the software and of course you can have hdr which is better quality. That's why I probably got this webcam but I don't really use it because I don't want to use up.

It gives me I have to use more memory in order to store it. So the field of view is was interesting. I didn't know you could have almost three types of 65 is what I usually use because I want to try and keep my green screen very centralized but then there's 70's 8 and there's 90 and that gives you a wider field of view.

So then of course for me that's an issue because then I you can see outside of my green screen and so I want to keep it nice and tight so I always keep it at 65. Not that that's relevant for you, it depends on your camera, but these are some of the standard settings for a web cam in the back in the settings that you should try and make sure you set and there I am peering again because I can't see because it's in the webcams in the way. But basically the first one you want to look at is brightness and of course you can maybe adjusted in the software as well.

But if you don't have the software, this is where you can adjust the brightness of your image and there we go. Just you pick something that you like. Same with the contrast, you obviously can go up to 100 but you just pick what you like for your contrast. Auto focus. I don't like auto focus because it'll auto focus when I move and all of a sudden I'll be blurry and then focusing.

So I usually turn autofocus off and because I can manipulate it in the software as to what the image image is in terms of how far away it is from the camera, but that's for another discussion. And so then we're looking at color intensity and color intensity can go from, that's up to you know it's at 50% right now.

So I guess it goes up to 100 and so you can do something ridiculous up to 100% and then you just find it where you like it the best and this is an important one that had an issue with last time was the white balance. And so if I turn off the auto white balance which sometimes can be a bit too white. You can adjust it to what you want it to be what you like.

You don't have to obviously do the auto out and regardless I think I have a bit of a pink in my cheeks already, so I don't have to do too much but I don't want it to be as white as it was yesterday. So try and get some color in my face. So there you go inside your webcam. You can change all your colors if you don't have the software I have and as you can see just by comparing the two, they are quite different.

The other one is quite red and blurry and the one on the right is a bit more human. There you go.

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Body Language can affect your Confidence

There are many different things that will both influence your confidence and also be influenced by your confidence. Confidence is often a somewhat circular subject matter and this can often make it hard to know where to start.

This is the case with body language. Being confident gives you better body language. But having better body language also makes you more confident!

What Does Confident Body language Look Like?

Confident body language basically involves looking relaxed and calm. Many of us assume that confident body language will necessarily involve looking menacing or intimidating, but the reality is that this makes us look defensive.

Likewise, attempting to look aloof or cool will simply make you look like a try hard.

Remember the kids at school who smoked in their leather jackets and were just kind of tragic?

Being truly confident means you have nothing to prove, it means you aren’t overly concerned what other people think and it means you’re able to relax because you feel unthreatened.

For instance, while some people might think that having their arms crossed makes them seem aloof and indifferent, the reality is that it makes them look guarded and uncertain.

In contrast, if you have your arms apart and your legs apart, you are allowing yourself to be vulnerable. This instantly makes you seem far more confident because you aren’t concerned about threat from others and because you’re allowing yourself to take up lots of space!

Look comfy and you look calm. Look calm and you appear confident!

More Signs of Confidence

There are other signs that you are confident that go beyond comfort of course. One example is the subtle indication of ownership. There are many ways you can subtly imply ownership but the most common is touching. If you learn against a doorway, or if you put your arm across the back of the sofa, it creates the impression that you feel almost as though you own that thing.

That’s why leaning on a wall or doorframe is a surefire way to communicate a lot of self-confidence.

The same actually goes for touching people. And this is why touching someone on the shoulder can make you seem much more confident – especially if it is done in an encouraging and non-threatening way.

Remember though: body language is best read as a whole. It’s not so much a matter of each individual aspect of your body language that will convey a sentiment as it is the entire package.

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