Hi,

Can anyone please suggest a method for making guitar videos of my playing using DAW and inbuilt Laptop Camera?
There are 2 scenarios:

1> i don't require professional high quality vids for uploading into youtube & all. I just want to record any new ideas that i have while noodling and want to keep it as reference for a future composition.
i am using reaper & my laptop cam. when i use the default recording application CyberCam or Youcam that was preinstalled, i get a passable video but the audio output from reaper into the recording app leads to the sound being really choppy.
So what is the easiest method for this.

2> if i want to make proper quality videos for uploading, do i necessarily have to use an external cam and then video editing software and then try to synchronize audio? is there an easier way to eschew this steep learning curve?

thanks a lot folks

 

I think your laptop maybe the problem, video takes up quite a lot of processing, and trying to use that and reaper (at the same time?) maybe causing you the choppy sound (packet/data latency loss?). You have not quoted your laptop specifications or whether your guitar is plugged into reaper or using an external amp, or recording yourself using an acoustic. I have reaper on my old Dell D610 laptop and it works brilliantly alongside Amplitube.

If you are just "doodling" ideas for later reference why do you need to video it?

I don't think a built in camera is really good enough for producing videos for youtube they are really just designed for videochat, so I would suggest getting a higher quality one and Microsoft's movie maker is not too bad as well as being free for producing videos.

"ESCHEW" Word of the Day Award

 

if you want good quality videos you have to get a proper video camera *yes*

you can use Sony Vegas Pro 11, and record your video from built in Laptop Camera, turn down resolution if you get choppy video, and especially if you are recording a fast guitar solo

with vegas you can record directly the audio from your guitar, so you will have one program to record both video and audio.

How To Record Your Webcam In Sony Vegas


i dont know if this works for you, give it a try

 

A smartphone would work better than a laptop built in camera. Not to mention built-in laptop video camera's are crap. Horrible resolution, horrible framerate. I'd suggest if you can, splitting the work. Record the audio on the computer, record the video on a smart phone use a program like vegas pro / adobe premiere or whatever you can get or use and combine them. It's probably your best solution without spending several hundreds.

And while I would agree with Me2audio your laptop camera is still 98% chance crap and will look horrible. You may have the ultra-laptop rich man's laptop but I doubt it. So yeah I'd dual record the audio/video separate and spend the 5-10 minutes aligning it in a video editing program.

 

record your video and at the same time record your track on your daw,then export your audio tranck and use some software to synch the audio with the video

 

not really a tip or suggestion ... if you have a smartphone then you also have a nice "camcorder". That's what I do ... recording the audio properly through sweet mic/audio-interface to a computer ... and the iPhone captures the video. For my guitar-practicing/controlling I extended this system and adjusted the built-laptop-webcam to capture the fret-hand and the iPhone captured my right hand picking - very useful, as it turned out!

so ... if you have a smartphone, you most likely also have a dedicated "camcorder" that outperforms webcams in terms of picture quality by orders of magnitude. The smartphone also makes a nice audio-imprint that makes it easy to "sync" the video-feed with the audio-track that has been recorded via interface/computer in the video-editor (Vegas here). For me as a guitarist this turned out to be a quite hassle-free and acceptable setup.