This week Marsha and I met and mapped out the plan for the rest of the term. I will be focusing on finishing Alito’s story and cleaning up the audio for other stories. Marsha gave me about 10 stories to work on over the last few weeks. We will restart the index project next year and probably continue editing audio. I emailed Nancy and she is fine with the extended project timeline. She also complimented us on our index so far, so we are moving in the right direction! I recorded an intro to Alito’s story, but I still need to add music. Once I have done that, I will email KLCC about airing the story. At least we will have an example of an edited story to use for next year. I have sent Marsha the evaluation and she will be getting that to me when we have our last meeting next week.
The process of cleaning up the audio has really showed me what not to do when recording. For instance, it is really difficult to edit out loud sounds like coughs or interruptions. Some of these stories were recorded on a stereo mic with left/right speakers and some were on a mono mic. Not everyone who used the stereo mic used it correctly causing one side of the mic to be really quite while the other is very loud. This is what happened for Wilma Crow and Twila Souers story. You can hear Twila clearly (as well as her breathing) but you can barely hear Wilma. This made it difficult to boost Wilma’s sound because it made Twila’s sound even louder. So, if Twila breathed into the mic or made any noise, it would drown out Wilma. So, I tried my best to boost the sound and reduce the noise, though there are some areas that it is impossible to fix without cutting out important info. However, KLCC did use this interview for one of their Eugene 150 spotlights. I listened to their story and the audio sounds decent. I’m not sure what they did to fix it. Perhaps they used their fancy normalizer algorithms. This being said, many of the stories that involve fixing the volume end up taking longer to edit than I expect. I still plan to finish the 10 stories next week, but it’s good to know for future planning. It’s always easier to record good sound than to edit later.