So, you’ve practiced playing some music, which might be original, or it might be a cover, and now you want to record a video of yourself playing it and you want to put your video onto YouTube.
At this point you discover a problem that many others before you have discovered:
- Your home video camera records good quality video, which is good enough to make a video which is going to be uploaded to YouTube. (Here, a “video camera” might be an actual camcorder, or a digital photo camera, or just your mobile phone.)
- Your home video camera has a microphone, but the recording sound quality is not good enough. Also, it’s mono-only (no stereo).
- You can easily record quality audio into your home computer. This is full quality stereo sound, recorded via a line-in or microphone input on the computer’s sound card.
- But, and here’s the problem we need to solve, there is no way to easily and automatically sync the two recordings.
Get a camera that accepts stereo line-in or external microphone input
Typically cheaper consumer video recorders do have external stereo line-in audio inputs, so this is a more expensive solution.
You may be interested kitchen.
A variant on this solution is the combination of an recent model Iphone with a USB audio adapter such as the “Mikey” Digital. (I have not used this device, but the FAQ assures us that the line-in is a digital stereo input.)
Alignment Software
PluralEyes from Red Giant claims to solve the alignment problem, and you can see from that page how much it costs: $US199 (at the time of writing). Also only currently available for Mac, so if you don’t have a Mac, you’ll have to buy one of those as well, or wait for the Windows version. (And if you don’t have either Mac or Windows, then presumably you’re out of luck.)
The Clapperboard
The Clapperboard is the traditional approach to this problem: a device which makes a noise which starts when the device is in a particular position that can be visually identified.
