[Tristan Chaika]

The reason you have to crank it up high is because your mics are not sending a very strong signal.

Could just be the mic just doesnt send a strong signal – some mics are better than others. NTG 2 is notoriously weak, if that’s what you have.
Could be that the mics have a pad turned on (often -10db used to compensate for extremely loud noises)
You may be able to lessen the attenuation or boost the gain on the lavaliere if it is wireless. Check the manual.

If your mics are just weak, you could invest in new mics, at875r is a good strong budget level shotgun. Or you could invest in better preamps for your H4n. Look for a thing called a “FetHead”. They are about $100 each. There are a couple kinds. Both require phantom power, but the “phantom” FetHead will pass power to your mic, which is probably necessary for your boom mic unless it also has a battery. If your lav is wireless, it probably needs the regular FetHead, if it is XLR and requires phantom power, then obviously would need the phantom FetHead.

Or, you could invest in a better recorder with lower noise preamps (zoom f4 or sound devices mixpre series, even the newer Tascams like the DR701d would be hugely better) that allows you to crank the gain up without introducing a lot more noise.

[Tristan Chaika]

if you’re doing this for video, definitely use the new After Effects rotoscoping tool. I haven’t used it, but it looks like it can key just about anything.

If you’re doing this on a still image, don’t forget to try out the background eraser tool. It can give pretty good results depending on how much you want to finness it, and how high res your image is. I probably wouldn’t try it on SD video footage.

[Tristan Chaika]

We just finished a month and a half of shooting dance with the HM700. It held up really well, and the picture quality was fantastic, especially compared to our older HD100s which are a little flat in their colors, even with the color gain pumped up (not HM100 mentioned earlier). Still not super in low-light, though. The sony cameras should be better at that since they are CMOS chips instead of CCD. They also have a shallower dof because of their 1/2 inch chips, compared to 1/3 inch (that’s the word on the street, anyway, I haven’t run a personal comparison)

I really like the HM700, though. It’s a great tool. My ONLY caveat is the RET trigger right by the zoom rocker – very easy to hit.

One bit of advice, test the SD memory you will be using before going out on a shoot. The original batch of SD cards we received DID NOT work with this camera. I wish I could remember the brand. They were class 6, and everything. We have found SanDisk Extreme and the Transcend Class 6 cards (as mentioned above) work well and also the Class 6 Patriot SD cards.

-Tristan

[Tristan Chaika]

A slightly different way of accomplishing this, with a little more control over color…

1) have the green color selected as your foreground color
2) create a hue/saturation adjustment layer above the pencil layer (or just go to image>hue/saturation.
3) When you have the options window up, check the “colorize” box. This will colorize your b&w image using the color you have selected.
4) You can then make adjustments to saturation, lightness/darkness, etc, to get it right.

This method does not require a layer mask, or a layer of color with a blend mode.

If you need to keep drop the image on a different background, you’ll need to add a mask to the adjustment layer (or just do the hue/saturation adjustment straight on the pencil layer as stated above)

-Tristan

[Tristan Chaika]

Thanks for the post. I was just looking into this myself. I thought I was crazy for not being able to figure out how to edit individual tracks. I had a stereo recording with only one channel recorded to. I just wanted to copy it to the left channel for a stereo sound. That seems like one of the most basic features any audio editing system would have.

Exporting the tracks to mono tracks and then importing two of them wouldn’t have worked because I wanted to completely get rid of the left channel which had a slight line hum.

I ended up downloading Audacity for free and fiddling around with that until I got what I needed. Though that interface is pretty shabby, and it was more difficult than it should have been.

I usually use Sound Forge for that kind of stuff, but I don’t have it at home.