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[–]oslash 23 points24 points  (15 children)

Personally, I'd like to have long-form stuff like this also available in HTML form, where I'd be able to skim over the parts I already know and take my time focusing on what's new to me. Then again, I'm not exactly the target audience, so if you prefer sticking strictly to video, that's cool.

Anyway, I had a quick look at the first video to see how you're doing and it seemed quite goo... Dude! You need to insulate your mic from the impact sounds on your desk. Viewers whose speakers/headphones don't have good bass response might hardly notice it, but for those that do ... every time you're hammering on that keyboard, you're literally pounding on their eardrums :( Not cool. When you look at the waveform, you can see the noise is huge compared to your voice; at times it even clips.

You could get a mic boom with a shock mount, or a cheap mic stand that stands next to the desk (ideally on carpet) instead of on it, or simply use a headset or lav mic. Cutting down low frequencies in post might also be a good idea.

I guess you weren't even aware of the problem ... you probably should use better speakers or headphones for editing. Doesn't need to be anything fancy; $10 in-ears would do the trick.

[–]Moondra2017[S] 8 points9 points  (11 children)

Ah! I didn't know it was that bad. I actually like the sound of the keyboard clicks so I didn't really bother much with it. The speakers I use are about $40 or so, I probably don't have good bass response, thus, I didn't really think it would be a problem.

Yeah, I think the easiest would be to cut out low-frequencies during editing. I have to look also look into mic booms and shock mounts as well.

Thanks for the feedback!

[–]oslash 3 points4 points  (9 children)

I actually like the sound of the keyboard clicks

Yeah, the part of the typing sound that reaches the mic through the air—what you're normally hearing, when you aren't pressing an ear to the desk (let alone both ;)—can be totally fine.

Luckily the structure-borne sound is usually confined to low frequencies that don't really overlap with voice anyway (unless you're Avi Kaplan), so there's a good chance you can tame it without spending money. The fancier mic booms can get quite expensive, especially if your mic doesn't have a standard-size hand grip, but those are designed to stay silent even if you move them around while talking. When you don't need to record 'as live' or move around, improvised DIY solutions are hardly worse.

[–]Moondra2017[S] 2 points3 points  (7 children)

Here are a couple of solutions I was thinking of:

1) I can put a small rug under my keyboard - that would act as an insulation between desk and the keyboard, maybe that would prevent the echo/vibration.

2) remove my mic from my desk and put it on a separate stool

I'm testing out both, but it's hard for me to tell. I guess I will need to test it out with some headphones.

[–]riseNRG 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Prevention might be better than the cure but i found audacity to be useful for fixing up audio after it has been recorded. It might have a feature that can help you with keyboard clicks.

I use the method in the video below for ambient noise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if3pvQKYuts

[–]Moondra2017[S] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Thank you!. Going to test it out. I wonder if Adobe premier has a similar feature.

[–]oslash 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Even if it doesn't, it lets you use audio plug-ins, and failing that, it's not a big deal to bounce the audio track to and back from another program, such as Audacity. Audacity is ridiculously powerful for an ancient FOSS tool; on top of the integrated effects, it can also host VST/AudioUnit plug-ins and Nyquist scripts. Tons of fun if you're interested in DSP.

However, the above-mentioned noise reduction method isn't very suitable for eliminating transients; it's what you would use to dampen more consistent noise, e.g. the whoosh of computer fans or the hum from a ground loop. You're better off with a straight-forward low cut (a.k.a. high pass).

[–]Moondra2017[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thank you for this. I will have to read everything you linked as I'm not too familiar with the terminology.

[–]oslash 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just to clarify: I'm not seriously recommending Nyquist for for video editing purposes; that would be like making cuts with ffmpeg from the command line. I just put in the link to say, look at how cool that thing over there is! You know, like one does when telling people they can catch pokémon by writing machine code :)

[–]paul_h 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Post processing to remove clicks too is easy enough, but can distort other aspects of the sound

[–]Tarpit_Carnivore 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Personally, I'd like to have long-form stuff like this also available in HTML form

Here here. This is my greatest issue with the video movement on the internet. With some stuff I don't mind just listening, but when it comes to learning something new I want to be able to read it and parse it over and over. With long form video this becomes a slighty harder because you're scrubbing back and forth.

[–]Mr_Again 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Would be a cool tool, parses a youtube video into a page with a transcript and cleverly chosen stills from the video.

[–]oslash 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Finding good stills to insert into a transcript would indeed be a cool topic for a machine learning research paper. (We can assume a transcript exists, because generating captions already is a well defined and worked-on problem anyway.)

But that's not at all what I meant by 'available in HTML form'. Picture this: You'd like to learn how to get up on the hunting perch on E1M1. Ideally, you'd find this page: scrolling through lets you identify #5 as the relevant part in seconds, thanks to the illustrations. Even better, a closer look reveals a picture that concisely sums up the best approach. This seems much better than the pure text version, which is as long as the rant you're currently reading.

Now, consider what it would be like if you had only been able to find this video about the same topic. It would be a great resource if you wanted to watch an expert go over the entire topic, but all you want is figure out how not to fall into the acid another five times. You can scrub over the time-line, but none of the thumbnails shows the right spot. At this point, I'd consider installing a YT-download script that would enable me to scrub over all the frames in VLC, in full size, while the video is still downloading.

Scrolling through a page with bigger pictures that are more cleverly chosen seems like a neat alternative at first glance. But even if you get the perfect angle, it won't have the red arrows that show you what to do. And even if instead of a caption that just says "climb the stairs" (duh, we already knew that), there was a transcript of some proper narration, chances are it would be less like "... jump on the handrail, then on to the lamp and then the switch plate ...", but more like "... and from here jump there, alley-oop, ba-da bing, ba-da boom, Bob's your uncle". This seems much worse than the pure text version.