Filming a show for youtube with amateur equipment

Artreus

Okay so a friend of mine wants to do a cooking show on youtube.

I have a Canon Rebel T1i, which would be just fine but the onboard mic is nothing special and there is no mic input. It will be just fine for the video portion.

However we wanted to do something better with the audio. My friend apparently has a microphone and a one channel behringer mixer. (I can get more detailed specs on those if it is necessary.)

How hard would it be to film and record them at the same time, then strip the audio out of the video and sync in the audio from the microphone afterwards and what would I need to do to make this happen?

Angel_of_Bacon

It should be fairly simple if you've got a decent editing program (Premiere, Final Cut, etc.).

For the recorded video, all you have to do strip the audio from the video is unlink the video and audio tracks, and delete the audio track (should be easy to figure out how to do this searching the help files in your program of choice. Then you can import your separately recorded audio track and sync it up- a decent microphone hooked up to a laptop running a sound recording program like Audacity should be sufficient for recording the audio.

What you will need to sync things up is some kind of clapperboard or equivalent. (A sheet of paper and someone clapping their hands can do in a pinch.) I'm sure you've seen movies where someone says to the camera, "Scene 3 Take 5, Action" and claps the board. The reason for this is to give you reference in the audio track of what shot you're on, and you can match that up visually to what it says on the board.

The clapping is there to give you a distinct point at which you can match the sound and video- you find the frame where you can see the clapper close on the video, and the part where you hear the clap on the audio, match them up, and voila, synced audio. Once you get it synced most editors will let you link the audio and video. Now you just have to chop off the clapperboard part of the shot and you're good to go. (There's some more advanced stuff about separating every shot out into separate clips and setting in and out points that would probably be useful to know, but having not done any video editing in years I'm not really able to give you much in the way of specifics about that...again, help files in your editor of choice will be helpful.)

Artreus

Thanks for the help, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out from here.

MichaelLC

Good advice from Heavenly Pork.

I'd recommend testing the set up first. If you're filming in a kitchen, it can be pretty noisy just cooking, plus now there's a crew too. Just do a 5min thing with the video and audio, then listen to both; probably just playing the video back on-camera would be fine if you can listen to the audio.

useless4

Syncing from an external source can be very tricky.

I suggest two things:
1. Get a clapper board or do a makeshift one . You're going to need a strong visual/audio marker to line things up with.
2. If syncing becomes really really time consuming (i.e. you can't figure out what the offset is reliably) then shoot around it - avoid long shots of talking heads where audio drift would become distracting.

Also, the best way - though not entirely possible with the equipment you have I think - is to digitize audio and video straight to the computer as you shoot.

MichaelLC

useless4 wrote: »

Syncing from an external source can be very tricky.

I meant to add this to my post, but forgot.

Watch Good Eats as a good example of how to balance audio & video and cooking. Obviously has a team, though I think it's only like 6 people, but he does things like cutting away, closeups of the cooking, multiple angles, etc. I've only noticed a few times the audio suddenly sound slightly different, usually it's seamless.