Overview

You may be coming to streaming media technology with a good understanding of how to record sound or shoot video with high-quality results. But the quirks of streaming media mean that some of the techniques you've learned may not work as well for the computer screen as they do for the television screen. This chapter reviews some of the fundamentals of audio and video production, and offers some tips for adapting video techniques you may already know to a streaming environment. This chapter also demonstrates how to capture audio and video to a hard disk, and we'll look at using Windows Movie Maker as a quick and dirty video production tool. By the end of the chapter, you'll understand:

• Best practices for recording audio

• Best practices for recording video

• Best practices for capturing audio and video

• How to capture with Windows Media 9 Capture free software

• How to edit with Windows Movie Maker

Best Practices for Recording Audio

Sound is an incredibly rich and rewarding medium, and most people associate audio production with music. But to put you on the right path immediately, we're going to focus on voice, because it's the simplest type of audio, and your first audio productions are likely to be voice only. You can build on these skills if you move on to music and other more complex types of recording.