In the can

I've spent roughly every discretionary minute of the last two days editing our 1-hour Readercon panel on Tinderbox for Plotting down into a five-minute Web demo. It's not quite finished yet, but here are a few things I've learned along the way.

• At one of the first eNarratives, video curator George Fifield observed that there are lots of things you can do to fix bad video, but bad sound is just bad sound.
• That said, my little Olympus voice recorder, stuck arbitrarily on a table near the computer, did a perfectly adequate job of capturing all the speakers. Not ideal, but everything is comprehensible.
• Eastgate's microphone was kaput, a fact revealed only after an hour of futzing with the interface failed to fix things. The new microphone is much better, though we need a desktop stand. It's true; spending a little money on a microphone helps the sound a lot.
• I'm trying to edit the film the way I plan my talks, saying one thing but frequently showing something else. Why should the visuals merely repeat what you're hearing? My impression, though, is that this works better in talks than in short film.
• Audacity does a nice job as a sound editor (should I have tried GarageBand?), and iMovie seems fine for assembling the visuals. Tools that everyone has, and perhaps more of us should use.