FreshDV just picked up a new sponsor, Hawaii-based RedHead windscreens. You can see their banner in our sponsor sidebar to the right.

A lot of us are shooting sync sound with the Zoom H4n recorders, and RedHead offers a variety of “dead cat” type windscreens to protect your critical audio from gusty breezes. Not convinced you need a windscreen for your recorder? Then you should check out the following quick video demo. My jaw dropped when I saw and heard this.

Zoom H4n + Redhead + Canon Mark II + 85mm + Windy Maui’s North Shore from iamkalaniprince on Vimeo.

RedHead is a great example of what I love about our sponsors…they are companies that build tools that we can respect and promote without any reservation, tools for professionals that simply work day in and day out.

A friend of mine just turned me on to the Zoom R16, an 8-input, 16-track recorder and portable mixer. It’s fully loaded with XLR inputs, phantom power, can be USB bus-powered or run on AA batteries, records to standard SDHC cards, and features REAL BUTTONS and sliders.

Price for one of these bad boys? $399. $399! Holy crap. I will own one of these. It really looks like an unbeatable system at this price point. Here’s a review at audiomidi. And for the non-B&H users, here’s an Amazon link at $379.

Thanks to the pros at Zacuto, here’s a video tutorial on capturing sync sound (or “double system sound”) when shooting with DSLR cameras like the Canon 5D MKII. The Zacuto crew shows how to use the relatively inexpensive Zoom H4n digital recorder to capture high-fidelity audio on your DSLR productions. Watch below.

Advanced Sound for DSLR’s from Steve Weiss, Zacuto USA on Vimeo.

This would also be a good time to note Zacuto’s brand spankin’ new website, launched just a few days ago. Check it out at www.zacuto.com.

An enterprising individual has managed to make the first hack to the 5D MK2 firmware, making a change that affects the audio chip. It’s more of a proof-of-concept announcement at this point, but shows that it’s entirely possible to change functions. He also noted that it’s possible to read audio levels live, so theoretically possible to enable audio meters onscreen. So now we wait to see what this guy (and/or others) come up with, and if they’ll beat Canon to the punch for full manual control of the DSLR with video.

(Via 5tu)

 Beachtek & Blackmagic NAB 2009 Video [8:13m]: Download

At B&H’s booth, Beachtek showed their DXA-5D audio adapter unit for the Canon 5D MarkII, a box that offers two XLR inputs, level controls with VU meters, headphone monitoring, and a AGC-Disable switch that can defeat the 5D’s audio auto gain control. Check out the video for the details on how they accomplished this. We also dropped by Blackmagic Design’s booth for an update on their latest I/O cards and a look at their new professional scopes product for editors. Watch the attached video below, subscribe to our podcast feed, or watch all of our current NAB 2009 videos in one playlist here.

The Canon 5D MKII camera is currently in-stock at B&H and ships free. Pricing currently $2,699.95 USD. Purchases made via this link help support FreshDV.

We mentioned the ASL Rip Kit recently. The Rip Kit is a complete A/V connection replacement for the Red One camera, including a matching breakout box that can be located up to 50′ away from the camera using a single DVI-I cable connection. It appeared to be a robust solution to a common set of issues and concerns with the Red One. Over at Final Cut User, I ran across a video review of the kit that really shows it’s strengths and explains the full featureset. If you are a Red One owner or shooter, I highly recommend you watch the two video segments below.

NoiseAddicts has a fun post up that provides an informal test to determine your range of hearing.

Here is a list of tones that go from 8Hz all the way up to 22,000Hz. It’s fairly common for people who are over 25 years of age to not be able to hear above 15Hz, so this will help you find out where your high frequency hearing cuts off.

Mine cuts out after 15kHz. Check it out here.

Here’s a quick beginner-level video tutorial that highlights the biggest problem amateur videographers face; no it’s not the quality of the mic, it is proximity to the source. Watch below.

Microphones: The Proximity Effect from Videopia on Vimeo.

Andrew Kramer is a busy fellow over at VideoCopilot. Their latest tool for video editors is a sub-$100 collection of soundtrack and sound fx elements called Pro Scores.

“…Pro Scores includes over 50 full length musical tracks approximately 1-2 minutes with various styles. In addition to these tracks you also get access to hundreds of music design elements such as tension building fx and atmospherics. One example would be television dramas use intense backgrounds and ambiance to set the mood and Pro Scores offers a vast library of elements to choose from.”

“Pro Scores is NOT short loops but rather the primary Music Tracks are fully composed production music with the more complex tracks available with separated key tracks such as, Percussion, Orchestra and Choirs, etc. This allows users to customize and even extract tracks such as percussion and mix with other atmosphere elements but maintain the climactic builds like you hear at the end of movie trailers and promos.”

Pro Scores looks like a great addition to the toolkit, and very reasonably priced for those that buy production music on a regular basis. Stay tuned at Andrew’s site for a video demonstration.

HDFilmtools.com has posted a multi-part interview with Matthew Wood, Supervising Sound Editor of WALL-E and The Clone Wars. These filmmaker profiles that Larry Jordan is posting have been a favorite of mine for a while now. Check it out.

It seems that since sometime in June 2008 Youtube has been applying what sounds like an aggressive single-band compressor to the audio track of all video uploads by users. This is probably intended as a quick fix for clips that have poorly mixed or severely low audio levels, but it has an adverse effect on those that have mixed their upload audio levels with care…breathing and subtle ambient noises become overly loud, and music instruments distort oddly as the compressor attacks and decays. Listen to a Before and After compression example here.

Users have been talking this issue over, and the fix appears to be to mix in a high frequency 19kHz to 20kHz sine wave into the audio, thus tricking the Youtube compression tools into thinking that the audio is set at a uniform level. Of course, this workaround could be avoided if Youtube would just allow users the option to untick a “Enhance Audio Levels” option upon upload.

When Holophone announced the H4 SuperMINI some time ago, I was very intrigued by this unique product offering. The SuperMINI is a on-camera microphone system that captures six discrete channels of audio and mixes it down into two channels on your camcorder. Holophone also offers true multi-channel surround recording products, but those of course require some method of recording all the channels discretely…this solution puts relatively affordable surround sound recording in the hands of a single videographer in the field with a minimum of hassle. There was a review by Carl Mrozek in DV recently, you can read it online. Looks like a very interesting niche product.

Editor Harry Miller has shared two audio editing/mixing tutorials for Avid NLE users. It’s great to see more and more user-generated instructional material for the Avid platform as of late.

(Via Norman Hollyn)

Techthoughts has pointed out a handy little audio tool that can help save 3.5mm audio ports from death by cord snaggage. Whether it’s a laptop, camera headphone jack, or the front of your Mac tower, 1/8″ mini jacks can be particularly susceptible to damage when cords are accidentally yanked. We’ve all done it. The Replug device is a $18 break-way inline adapter that might just save your ports. Looks like a great solution to a common problem.

Snapper is a unique application for Mac users that allows you to do a number of useful things with audio files on the fly. By simply selecting audio files in Finder, you can quickly pull out snippets of audio, export files to various formats, split stereo channels, drop a selection into Pro Tools, and much more. It’ll convert files on the fly to AIFF, WAV, BWF, mp3, or m4a (hello, Wedding and Event iRiver users!). The best way to understand is to watch Snapper in action, check out the 100-second demonstration video.

(Via MultimediaShooter)