Another short rant. About sound quality. My recent preoccupations have been HDR and anamorphic lenses. During the course of watching dozens and dozens of webinars, listening to podcasts and watching sample footage, I noticed that they all have one thing in common – horrible, clipped, distorted and at times unlistenable audio. Crackling sounds when they speak. Dropouts. And many of the videos I’m talking about are produced by directors and professionals in the AV industry. You’d think they’d know how to adjust levels. But you’d be dead wrong. So it was refreshing to actually be able to sit through a video by Luke Neumann that has beautiful sounding audio without any of that nonsense.
As an aside, as much as I’d also like to be the next David Mamet or Aaron Sorkin or whoever, writing brilliant screenplays and producing dazzling short films, I don’t get people who belittle those who enjoy vlogging. I grew up listening to talk radio, it was thought-provoking and engaging – and even though I don’t see a ton of content on YouTube that could be remotely characterized as provocative, I think that can be attributed as much to the audience as to the vloggers themselves.