Where’s My White Shirt And Cigarette?

I’ve been getting into presentation recording and screencasting a bit recently. It’s been an interesting experience. My first pass at it used a small mike I scraped up from my musician wife, and it was a pain trying to get it sound just right. (This is besides all the logistics of trying to make a quiet recording in a home office for the amount time necessary to record an hourlong presentation – stuff the dogs in a room, generally alone in the house, not a time of day with school buses roaring past, etc. etc.)

On the recommendation of my friend Dan Holme I bought a Samson Podcasting Kit, which comes with a prosumer (professional / consumer) quality cardioid USB microphone, a professional-looking vibration eliminating suspension mount (below), a stand to put ‘em in, and a shiny silver carrying case that makes me feel like I should be handcuffed to it.

Get Camtasia set up, get the mike level right, start up a VM and run the preso from it so you can run Slide Show in a contained size, capture that screen, put on your headphones so you can review the recording, open your printed notes if you’re a perfectionist like me…and be damned if I don’t feel like Edward R. Murrow or something! (With dogs barking in the background instead of bombs dropping.)

I found I even ended up holding up the notes exactly like radio announcers do, because there’s a very narrow sweet spot where your mouth is positioned at the mike correctly and you can still see the notes. The only thing Ed didn’t have is the copy of 64-bit Windows 7 in front of him :).

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