Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

A multimedia project this week finally had me digging through the G9’s menu screens to get a better handle on audio recording (it’s only taken six months).

First up: mic location. You’ll find it on top of the camera, right next to the mode dial. The big thing on the left side of the camera is the speaker.

There are two recording modes with the G9:

This is the quickest way. Shoot a picture, switch to playback mode and hit the microphone button. This will allow you to record up to a minute of audio per picture. To record more you need to switch to a different image. I ran into trouble as I tried to capture multiple tracks of ambient sound — once I reached my minute the camera only gave me the option to play the selected sound memo, not record.

The record button is on the camera back, in the upper right corner. The screen shows the microphone settings. I’ve been using auto levels exclusively — I find there’s too much going on for me to set the levels manually. And auto seems to work pretty well.

Getting to this feature requires slightly more button pushing. In playback mode, hit menu then scroll to ‘Sound Recorder.’

The controls are about the same as they are for the sound memo, and you don’t have to worry about a time limit.

Be careful about bumping the sample rate when you’re on this screen!
I suspect I’ll continue to use the sound memo function when collecting ambient sound simply because it’s (slightly!) easier to use but will transition over to the sound recorder for voice overs.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 8:47 pm and is filed under audio, multimedia, online journalism, training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.