The recent purchase of T-WRX 2 has rekindled my interest in motorsports. I’ve been keeping myself up to date at the relevant local websites, as well as at least one Subaru specific site.

The Vermont Sports Car Club pointed me at a hill climbing series that began this past weekend at Mt. Ascutney, which is about 45 minutes from my house. The thing about motorsports that don’t involve driving around in a circle is that they’re fairly difficult to spectate. I’m not about to go wandering around the multi-mile, 2,000ft elevation course to stake out the action. So you go for the cars, and for the conversation. I had a guy chat me up for well over an hour. Well, mostly I listened.

It was also a chance to take the camera and the new lens out for another spin. According to the site, it’s been 4 months since my last activity so it was well overdue. I also had with me my new H1 Recorder, which marked my first real outing with it.

You mount the recorder to the top of the camera, were the flash normally goes, and it records sound separately from the camera at a much higher quality. The camera has a built in microphone, but it’s small and not particularly good. It also tends to pick up body noise on the camera itself.

So it was certainly a learning experience for me. Since the sound and video is now independent of one another, starting and stopping recording was made trickier. I thought it was best to start sound first, then video, or the other way around. Either way, I figure you want consistent overlap so all video is captured with sound, or all sound has more than enough video to play with. I’m also going to have to come up with a good way of indexing which sound recording goes with which video recording once I get back to the computer. I had to play hide and seek to find the correct one this time. Once you do, it’s easy to work in sequence but I did take some video without the H1 running, and took some audio without video. So they were staggered in the end.

Also difficult is marrying the two once you’re back at the computer. In movies, they have a clapper that helps sync up the sound with the video.

The clapper not only has written on it where to find the corresponding audio, but it also provides a visual cue to help you match up the sound. When that thing claps together, it’s an unmistakable sound that helps your eye put the sound exactly where it needs to be. After that, everything is synced. Every time you start a new sound or video recording you really should have such an event. I need to get better about reaching my hand in front of the lens and snapping my fingers at the beginning. I’ll still have the issue of locating the matching audio files but maybe I can do that by calling out the subject matter by voice or some other way.

At some point it’s like, how much do I want to put up with to take some stupid video. But I kinda like learning the ropes, so for now I’m having fun playing around.

A few other things are clear. I need to get a wind screen for the mics. There are a number of times where I got the thud of even a light wind hitting the mics.

I also need to find a way to isolate the mic from the camera body noise a bit more. I’m a little bothered, but this new mic actually picks up more body noise than the built-in. When I changed my grip on the camera you can sometimes here it pop and thud. The light and plastic nature of this recorder makes it kinda prone to this type of thing. That seems to be the only major issue with this unit. But the price is right.

And finally, I need to work on getting my sound levels correct. Varying degrees of noise and proximity to the things making noise is tough to get your input volumes correct for. Add to that, I don’t really know what I’m doing, and you end up with pretty a pretty quiet finished product in this case. This is why sound recording pros always stand around with headphones so they can hear what the mics are picking up and continuously adjust them as needed. I might employ the headphone trick on occasion but I’m not really going to be able to tweak levels on the fly with this device. There are some auto settings, but I found that when things get quiet it really amps up the gain and you start getting noise, and then there’s some lag when a loud noise occurs and it needs to suddenly clamp down the gain. Manual control seems best if you can swing it maybe. I don’t know. Audio recording is an entirely separate beast, but I’m excited about it. Anyway, here’s a pretty basic video I jammed together. It’s not pretty but it’s an attempt to bring audio and video together at last.