It’s just looks really amateur, especially the zooming and panning. I mean, it might be fine for selling the band locally and booking some shows, but you could get something much better for the same price.

I did a video recently. I don’t own a camera, so I put an ad on craigslist for a DP. I offered 100 bucks and found four or five people interested. Narrowed it down to one guy and set a date. I moved some stuff around and we shot in at my house. For the shoot I picked up two 600 watt halogen work lights from home depot and some two halogen flood lights for $60. I went to a camera store and got a fisheye and wide-angle lens for the DP (he was using a canon hf10) for another $60. The shoot took three hours. We played the song about 15 times. We knew we were gonna sync it up with the studio recording so didn’t bother with the sound.

Edited in imovie hd and gave it an old 60′s type film look in adobe premiere. It took most of a day to edit.

After the shoot I paid the camera man and gave him one of the lenses for putting in a extra hour. Returned the lights and everything to the store the next day.

I uploaded to youtube in HD too. Not sure why you had trouble there. I rendered in 1080p.

Total cost $130

Syncing to camcorder audio is the way to go.

I am not sure, maybe, iMovie doesnt allow multiple audio tracks at once.

Thanks for all the good suggestions… esp. re: the use of Sonar to Sync up more cleanly in post production, and the tip to record the audio at 48K on the Zoom. I think sharing tips to make the DIY experience as smooth as possible and as professional as possible, with regard to the final product, is one of the coolest things about the blog format.

Final audio-for-video is 16bit/48K and that will help your sync as the NTSC drops frames two per minute except for the 10th minute (hey, I didn’t make this crazy standard up but its what we’ve got to work with….)

If you do 30fps non-drop frame, then you don’t have to bother.

What I often do is edit the length of the video first. Then I export the camcorder audio track as a guide that I can use to synchronize the Zoom recording in my audio program—for me, Cakewalk Sonar. (I put them on separate tracks, synchronize them and mute the camcorder one.) Then when I export the edited Zoom track from Sonar and import it into the video editor, it’s perfectly synchronized with the video—just like the original camcorder audio was.

Den

I recently finished up my new album, doing everything myself, and put together a “making of” video of the recording, mixing, mastering, designing and printing process. I just used my Canon Powershot SD400 to shoot the video, and iMovie to throw it all together. Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjxdrTDRqy8