Sound - Almost all computers come standard today with a sound card. You can record sound from any external audio device, tape player, stereo, DVD player, VCR, etc, by connecting the audio output of the external device to the input jack of the computer. You can also record/rip sound directly off of an audio CD that is inserted in the computer's CD-Drive.

Video - The simplest way to capture video is to do so through the firewire port by attaching either a digital video camera or an analog-to-digital converter which can be attached to a VCR or other analog device. Some video cards also allow you to capture video from analog sources, even directly from a TV. All of these options require special software for capturing and editing.

Video files consume large amounts of disk space, and can therefore be difficult to store, manipulate, and distribute. One minute of digital video, captured directly off of a DV camera, occupies approximately 220 MegaBytes of disk space.

Software

There are many different kinds of software to capture sound and video. We use Roxio's Easy Media Creator (PC) and Toast (Mac) which captures both sound and video. We also use Pinnacle Studio for video on the PC and iMovie or Final Cut Pro for video on the Mac.

Audacity is a freely available sound editing software that we use for recording our podcasts. It can be used for many sound editing purposes.

Formats

Sound Formats

• WAV (PC) and AIFF (MAC) are uncompressed music formats
• MP3, multi-platform compressed format
• WMV -- Windows media file
• RAM (streaming), RM -- Real Media Format
• OGG -- multi-platform compressed format

Most software allows you to produce some or all of these formats. You can also use a program like Cleaner to convert files to different formats.

Video Formats

• DV and AVI are uncompressed, high-quality formats. Captured, unedited video is usually saved in this format. File sizes are quite large.
• MPEG2 is a high-quality DVD format. This is the format created for burning onto DVDs.
• MPEG1 - medium quality, cross-platform format. Combines video and audio into one track which is hard to separate.
• MOV (Quicktime format)
• Real media format
• WMV - Windows Media File

For more information on creating and editing sound and video, see the iMovie tutorial, or the Basic Streaming tutorial.