[Duncan Mckenzie]

I don’t have an answer, but I’m also interested in the question.

I already own an ME66 and the K6 power module, but, as has been discussed here, a shotgun is not a good choice for indoor recording because it can produce strange artifacts with reflected sound. I’ve been happy with most of my Sennheiser mics, so I am intrigued by the ME65.

The ME65 supercardioid capsule is a fairly cheap addition (about $200 – if you already own the K6, that’s less than half the price of the Audix SCX1/HC). It looks like it would make an attractive handheld mike, but, as a supercardioid, should be fairly well suited to indoor use on a boom.

But it seems to be the mic that time forgot. I can find no reviews of it. Nobody mentions owning it or using it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a store. If you look up this mic, you’ll mostly get redirected to reviews of the much more popular ME66 shotgun mic. Why is the ME65 so obscure? Is there some dark mystery surrounding it? Is it radioactive? Does it explode? Does it even exist?

Has any one actually had experience working with this mic?

[Duncan Mckenzie]

This is a followup to my previous question. I didn’t receive any suggestions of how to do it in Photoshop, so I assume it is difficult that way.

My eventual solution was to assemble the photos into a video file made from sequential images. This requires that all images be numbered sequentially. That’s easily done in Adobe Bridge, although I found that IrfanView did a faster job of it. The resulting “movie” can be imported into Adobe After Effects and stabilized using the stabilize feature. Again, though, a free third-party option was much faster – I used VirtualDub32 with the Deshaker plugin. Where After Effects too about four hours to analyze a 50-minute video file, and frequently crashed in the process, Deshaker could do the same job in about an hour. The interface is quirky – you must first run an analysis stage, which creates markers showing the amount of movement, then immediately run a second stage which uses the previous processing to smooth out the picture. This was easily tweaked to prevent movements that were crazy, or sent the film frame outside of the picture. The end result was a video file where the film frames mostly moved smoothly from one to the next, although over longer periods, the position of the frame moved around the larger screen area. I then imported this into Premiere, and used position keyframes to keep the part of the picture representing each movie frame in a fixed position, so that the smoothed images are kept in one area of the screen. (I created a yellow guideline overlay so I knew where to move it.) This adjustment took a few hours, but that’s far less than it would have taken to adjust the near random position of each frame. The final image was then cropped slightly into the frame, hiding the small movements.

I expect that some of this must be possible in Photoshop or using other forms of automation, but haven’t found a good way of doing it. Other methods I tried were to do motion stabilization on the sprocket holes of the film, but After Effects had a hard time keeping a hold on the edges – perhaps because they are actually different edges from film frame to film frame.