Recording your videos

Headphones

I can't stress enough the importance of using some sort of headphones when making your video recordings. You will be hearing your listening track through the headphones, while you capture each of the individual videos. Without headphones, what you record won't be a pure sound for that particular part, but will also include your backing track, and it will be replicated in each of your recorded tracks, thus creating a kind of echo.

The headphones may just be small earpieces, or large ones that cover the entire ear, it doesn't matter, it depends on what you have available and what sort of look you want to create.

For what its worth, the ones I use are just a very basic set of plastic earpieces:

More important info on headphones (updated)

Since I first created this blog I have treated myself to some better headphones, I thought to replace those ones pictured above. And the new ones are great for listening to music - excellent sound. But I came across a problem when I first tried to use the new headphones for Acapella maker ... it doesn't isolate the listening track, so that this track ends up on your recordings. This is not what you want, so I have gone back to using the old basic ones for this app only. The important difference between the two types seems to be the number of rings around the end bit  (is that called the jack?) that goes into the headphone socket. My old ones, (which work well with this app), have two rings, while the new ones have three:-

Use headphones like the red ones, that have two rings not three

Planning

Before you start to record, you need to have a bit of a plan as to what to record in each tile. If you want to rearrange the tiles afterwards that is possible. Each tile will have its own soundtrack so you need to work out how to achieve your planned result. This may involve singing individual parts from printed sheet music, ad libbing harmonies on the fly, or singing the same melody several times but with a delay (ie singing a round) .... I have done all of these in the week that I have been using the app so far! Even when ad libbing though, its good to have an approximate idea, like this track will be the melody, that one will be a descant higher than the melody, and that other one with be a lower part.

Now you are ready to start recording.

Recording

The tile that you originally clicked on before you recorded the listening track, is going to be the one you record first. The screen now shows a camera window at the top half (using the front camera) and a videocam icon in the bottom half. There is also a 'reverse' symbol at the top should you wish to use the camera on the back of your phone to shoot footage other than a selfie.

When you press the videocam icon, if you haven't plugged in your headphones, it will remind you, by asking if you want to use them. For some reason it doesn't let me take a screenshot of that particular message: it says:

 'No headphones detected! Do you want to play audio while recording?'  with YES and NO options. You can make this box go away by touching the screen elsewhere, and then insert your headphones.

So you press the videocam icon, and you see a countdown appear across the camera window. Once the countdown has completed you are now recording. First you will hear your spoken voice counting you in (assuming you followed my suggestion on the previous page), then you can start to sing or play your first track. Press the stop button when you get to the end. Then the screen will look something like this:

You can see a new option at the top of the screen - PRE-LISTEN. You can select this at any stage before your tracks are all complete, to hear what it all sounds like so far. After one tile recorded you will just hear the audio for that tile (ie not including the listening track).

If you click on the tile you have just recorded you can play it back, to check it looks OK. The screen looks like this:

There are two more options at the top of the screen this time  RE-RECORD and VOL-ADJUST which are fairly self explanatory - you can start afresh with this track, or adjust its volume (I must admit I haven't actually tried the second option in my recordings so far - only just noticed it!)

Use the back button to get back to the grid when you are happy with the track you have just recorded.

Then its time to repeat the process with your next tile in the grid!

HANDY HINT

From the grid screen you can switch video tiles around by dragging them to a new position. You can even select a completely different arrangement of tiles, from the array at the bottom of the screen, should you decide mid project that you actually need more or less tiles than you originally selected, or you want then arranged in a different pattern.

Coming up next Creating your Finished Video