John Cleese has long been one of my favorite people in the world. Many people don’t know that he has long had a business of producing training and presentation videos for businesses.
Here’s a great video of a lecture on creativity. I only wish the lemmings of Hollywood and the advertising community would take in some of this. I think this was filmed in Belgium and funny how some of the jokes don’t go over.
I’ve recently started using a free audio converter program called Audio Switch and it’s really great. I’ve used it in a pinch to quickly convert sound files from MP3 to AIFF, from WAV to MP3 and even extracted audio out of MP4 movies. This has been useful not only for just getting scratch audio out of a movie file, but also I’ve used it for putting video presentation audio onto my ipod. And it’s fast and free!
And a nice little icon too!
It works on the most common file formats and more including wav, mp3, wma, mp2, m4a, ogg, avi, mid, flac, mov, amr, aac, mpga, dct, au, aif/aiff, raw, dvf, vox, cda, gsm, dss, sri, shn, dss, msv, wmv.
I’m using the Mac Intel version and even though we have our own proprietary conversion software custom made for us, sometimes you just need a quick little something done and that’s where Switch works brilliant.
If you’re developing a site in Flash or even just a banner or header, here’s some helpful free actionscripts to add background music to your site. As you probably already know, using music on the Flash timeline makes a very large Flash file. This method allows you to have an MP3 sitting on your server (not embedded into the Flash) and loads separately almost instantly as it is streaming.
And if you need some ambient music to try it out with, I’ll send you a free sample. I’ll also send you a link to a great example of ambient background sounds in Flash.
Just fill out your name and email here and I’ll send you a link. Don’t worry, we absolutely abhor SPAM and promise not to sell or share your name with anyone else. Ever!
Add these to the first frame of your Flash movie.
var ambience:Sound= new Sound();
ambience.loadSound(“trackname.mp3”, true);
ambience.start(0,10);
Hope this helps,
The Head Monk
Just posted an article giving a method for choosing production music, whether it’s a film or a webvideo, or a corporate presentation.
One of the most common things visual creators want to do with our music is to change the length, or fade in or out or cut out a section of a longer piece of music. It’s actually a very easy thing to do. There is a lot of free audio editing software available these days for every platform from Mac to Windows to Linux and beyond. I will be posting some tutorials on making simple music edits in the next few days, but meanwhile, here’s a list of some great audio editing tools. And best of all, they’re free. Well most of them.
And feel free to ask any questions. I’ll try to answer them as best I can.