Thanks to the patience and phenomenal work that Brent Schlenker has been doing for the elearning Guild, their first video podcast is up on GuildCasts! And I am humbled to be the first one, albeit there were some technical difficulties. Brent was very patient and it was a new exercise for me. I never use audio in Second Life mainly for selfish reasons.
With the ability to IM anyone anywehere in Second Life, it is not uncommon to have several IMs going on while chatting to one or two people working together. I can not imagine doing that with voice! I also find that text chat is more cocise and to the point. Imagine how much I would ramble if talking!
So we started off great guns and then I lost his audio. Well, not so much lost as it went from clear and an equal level to mine to being what sounded like a fly! We bothe relogged but to no avail.
Fortunately, Brent was quick on his feet (and that was after he had done a full day of online forums!) and recored himself and sent me the file. The final video is clearly edited (as in obvious) and a combination of his audio track, the original audio track pulled out from the video to remove the failed audio noise. This then resulted in some whacked out lip synching (but SL is not the best on that front yet).
It did reinforce the approach I have to using audio in Second Life when being fiolmed for elearning material. In the time it took to piece (butcher?) the vodpod for the Guild together, I could have filmed enough material for a lesson!
Well it was fun and frustratiting, but a great learning experience as well. And done mainly with free tools which is a big part of my session. It’s great if you have Avid and Adobe Premiere like we do and certainly makes editing go far faster, but the reality of corporate eLearning departments is that they have very tight budgets. And that is important for me to get accross and also opens this up to the person doing this as a one person shop.
Thanks Brent!
