SnapperTalk

My first multimedia slideshow produced using Soundslides has just been published. It concerns the mini-industry of street repairmen who fix broken consumer goods in Egypt.

The slideshow of my photos can be seen by clicking on the picture above… and the written story by AP reporter Anna Johnson, who also read the voiceover, can be read here. Multimedia editing/production was done by me.

All works are © Copyright 2007, The Associated Press.

——————————————————————————————————————

Some technical details on the production for those interested in multimedia editing:

1. Photos - taken with a Canon EOS 1D MkII, saved in AdobeRGB colour space for print use, and separately in sRGB for the multimedia slideshow. I’ve found that sRGB displays much better online where the majority of people don’t use colour-managed web browsers (only Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox 3 betas do proper colour-management) and therefore most machines assume images are sRGB. See more discussion on this here, here and here.

2. Audio - the natural sound was captured using an Olympus dictaphone, the voiceover recorded direct to a laptop with a Sennheiser ME66 microphone. The audio was then edited using the free, open-source & cross platform Audacity. Four audio clips were used - the sound of the telephone ringing, background street noise, a call to prayer from a nearby mosque and the voiceover - all joined with a few fade-ins and fade-outs and then mixed down to a single MP3 track.

3. Putting it together - The telephone sequence at the beginning is a sequence of stills shot on the camera’s 8fps motordrive. Nineteen of these images were then used with each having 0.3 secs duration and a 0.1 sec crossfade transition inbetween to give the flickering effect. The rest of the images were mostly equally spaced, trying to fit the audio as well as possible.

A few lessons learned from this first project:

Good quality audio capture is key - having a decent selection of clean clips to work with is essential. Therefore the audio really needs to be seriously thought-out as you are doing the story and in parallel with the picture-taking. This isn’t always easy. The Olympus dictaphone even on “extra high quality” mode records using the CELP+ADPCM codec and whilst this may be fine for dictation, it just doesn’t cut it for real audio recording. I’d like to use a real field recorder such as one of these next time.

Once all the photos and audio have been selected, you need to plan how it is going to fit it together - which is harder than it sounds. Soundslides does a great job of enabling you to fit the pictures to the audio by changing the sequence order and duration. BUT… you had better be 100% satisfied with your audio track before doing this, because if you need to re-edit and re-import the audio then most likely all your photo sequence work will be lost and you’ll have to start again from scratch (unless the new audio has identical length to the old one).

Multimedia is a somewhat chicken-and-egg scenario where each medium is interdependent with others, but I think the best workflow would be to start with a reasonable idea of which pictures are going to be used and in which order. Then edit the audio (and record the voiceover if one is being used) to roughly match this. Finally, arrange the pictures to accurately fit the edited audio track.

The audio editing wasn’t quite so complex as I thought it would be, although this project required only some pretty simple editing. Learning the basic audio terminology is key to understanding what is going on but once you’ve done that and understand the basics, I found many of the principles were remarkably similar to those used in digital photography.

The first time to do something like this was a bit of a steep learning curve but I’m sure it will be a lot easier and quicker the next time around. I do believe the stills and audio combination is a powerful one and I’m looking forward to trying it again soon.

Any comments welcome…