Tag Archive for ‘computers’ at AudioShocker

Let’s get this straight: I’m talking about comic books. The sort of stories I’m looking for should be at least the length of a single issue, if not the length of an entire graphic novel. In terms of strips, one-pagers, and archives of the previous two formats, the Internet’s already got me covered. I want to read full length digital comic books.

So what am I to do for digital long-form comics? Let’s do a quick run-thru of the existing formats:

Torrents. I can illegally download comic books to my heart’s content. The organization of the content is weird though – things tend to be grouped in either massive decades-spanning archives, an entire year’s worth of comics from one publisher, or a single week’s worth of output from the entire industry.

DVD Archives. Marvel Comics pioneered this format back in the early 00s. They took about 40 years worth of scans from a single character’s catalog, plopped them onto a DVD set, and sold them for an extremely modest price. I’ve never used these before, but the marketing concept alone sounds solid.

Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited. Aside from the hilarious DCU name, there’s not much that appeals to me about Marvel’s current digital purchase option. The interface is essentially the same Flash reader they’ve been using for the past decade. It resizes the pages to a pixelated fit-to-screen window.

Blogs and Promotional Previews. Just about every comic book publisher has put up entire issues for free on the Internet. This is great to get the flavor of a series. But the purpose of putting an entire issue up on a blog is to drive sales of the printed product.

Now that we’ve outlined the primary ways to read long-form digital comics, let’s take a closer look at each format. First up, we’ve got torrents. Frankly, I strictly reserve this option for out-of-print collections and other impossible-to-find comics. I feel strongly about buying a comic if I enjoy it. Simply put, torrents are a great option but a bad solution.

The DVD archives are closest thing to a solution, but they still have their flaws. While the format gives the reader ownership of the material, their product selection is highly limited and it’s grouped by character. For example, if I wanted to pay $10 for the DVD equivalent of a recent 12-issue run, I simply don’t have that option. It’s either 40 years of classics or nothing at all.

Marvel’s DCU program is inventive – I’ll give it that. But it suffers from three problems: 1. Comics must be consumed over the Internet, 2. Their comics reader makes the art look bad and it’s hard to navigate, and 3. Marvel’s online catalog leaves much to be desired. I like their attempt to take digital comics to a direct consumer level. But their delivery method is far from perfect.

As for blogs and promos? Well, the answer is pretty easy: it’s a great marketing tool but not good if you want more online content than a single issue. While this method of distribution may slowly become the online standard in a modified way, as it exists right now, it only works for advertising.

And all this goes without even mentioning the biggest obstacle to reading and enjoying digital comics: there’s no satisfying portable product to read them on!

Yeah, you can carry around a regular laptop. But that comes with its own inherent hassles. There was a time when I flirted with the notion of buying a touch-screen tablet laptop for digital comics. The aspect ratio is perfect for the single-page size. But at the time, I was getting paid to review comic books on a weekly basis using the low-quality PDFs that Marvel, DC, and other publishers send out to online reviewers. When I stopped doing those weekly reviews, my need for the tablet computer ceased.

I’ve heard talk of reading comics on other portable digital devices. However, the one thing that seems to be lacking from all of these non-laptop solutions is size. They’re just too damn small. They might be great for webcomics and similar strips that can be read one panel at a time. But that just won’t cut it for a full-sized comic book page. Like I told Neal the other night, you can’t expect digital comics to have a decent distribution method until there’s a decent device to read them on.

It’s not like we don’t have the technology to make an awesome digital comics reader. We definitely do. And I know that selling images is difficult without massive piracy, but I’m sure it can be done effectively. I know it can. But, yet, here I am, desiring digital comic books but completely dissatisfied with all the available options.

Noise Removal. This is the most troublesome task I encouter every week while editing the audio for our podcasts.

Obviously, the easiest and most efficient way to decrease noise (static, hissing, movements, and shuffling sounds) is to record your audio with as little noise as possible in the background. Regular podcast listeners often listen to me harass Neal during the show when I can hear static on his end of the audio. That’s because I don’t like taking it out later!!!

Here are my current recording settings:

Recording Device: iMac G4 built-in microphone (in monitor)
Recording Level: the low side of 0.4 (on the Audacity mic input slider)

It’s inevitable that noise will end up on your recording. Otherwise, you’d have to be sitting in a sound booth with a high-end microphone and some extremely still participants. Basically, what I’m saying is that you WILL have noise, so you better learn how to get rid of it.

How do you eliminate noise? Even though I have my ProTools running again, I still record and edit my podcast audio in Audacity. It’s less of a strain on my iMac G4 (which is a bit outdated and slow). Audacity is great because it’s a lighter program and the editing tools are simple. But it’s also maddening because the built-in effects are different for Mac and Windows. The best of these filters are, unfortunately, incompatible with the opposite operating system.

Luckily, Audacity on the Mac has the best filter for noise removal. It’s listed as Apple: AUDynamicsProcessor and it saves my life week after week.

Here are my AUDynamicsProcessor filter settings:

Compression Threshold: 20 db
Head Room: 40 db
Expansion Ratio: 1.89
Expansion Threshold: -82 db
Attack Time: 0.005 Secs
Release Time: 0.510 Secs
Master Gain: 0.0 db

AUDynamicsProcessor effect in Audacity

The “Expansion Threshold” setting is the most important of all. For quiter audio, you want this to be in the low 80s, high 70s. For more robust audio (and great amounts of static), you’ll want to toggle this somewhere in the low 70s or 60s.

You know that you’ve just got a bad signal when you have to start messing around in the 50s to knock off the static. At that point, I would either rerecord or just cut your losses and leave in some of the noise.

These settings may not work for you, but they’ve become ingrained in my brain after a year and a half of weekly podcast editing (not to mention countless hours of editing vocals for music as well). If you’re running Audacity on a PC… I’m sorry. There simply isn’t a tool like this that comes default with the program. You’ll have to do trial and error with 3rd party plugins. The filter you want is most easily defined as a “gate,” but unfortunately, not all gates are created equal.

Once you’ve taken care of the noise, then you have to move onto volume levels (a.k.a. compression). But that’s a whole other bag, so it’ll have to wait for the next edition of Podcast Pointers!