Life is a Prayer.com

If you've glanced over on my 'Articles' page lately, you'll no doubt notice my recent love affair (just kidding!) with the iPhone 4's audio and video recording capabilities. This blog post will offer a nice summary of all my blog posts and articles about A/V production on the iPhone (and, by extension, the new iPod Touch that was just announced today):

• iPhone 4 (+ iPad, iPod Touch) - External Microphones for Audio Input
  The article that started it all - explains many different techniques for using mics with the iPhone.
• iPhone and iPod Touch - Professional Digital Audio Recorders
  A new post reflecting my latest research and testing with my iPhone 4 and a Shure FP12 headphone amp.
• Portable, Professional HD Video Recording with the iPhone 4
  A simple post showing my go-anywhere recording rig for my iPhone 4.
• DIY $10 iPhone 4 & 3G/3Gs Tripod Adapter/Case
  This post not only lists many commercially-available iPhone 4 tripod mounts and adapters, it shows you how you can make your own using about $10 worth of hardware store parts.
• Microphone Impedance Matching - Using a Shure SM58 with the iPhone 4
  Article on microphone impedance and its implications for using dynamic mics with the iPhone 4.
• Is the iPod Touch another Nail in Flip's Coffin? (HD Video Recording)
  Post on how Apple's announcement of the new iPod Touch with a built-in HD video camera is a true game-changing step in the field of portable A/V recording.
• Using a Lav Mic with the iPhone 4 - HD Video/Audio Recording
  The post that kinda kicked off the rest of these posts.

I hope to continue using my iPhone 4 to produce audio recordings for the LOLSaints.com Podcast, video recordings for my newest Catholic Car Wash podcast, and more!

With Apple's introduction of the latest iPod Touch (which now includes an HD video camera on the back, and a VGA-resolution camera on the front), I believe that products like Flip's portable video recorders and Kodaks line of dedicated video recorders are going to decline in popularity to an even greater extent than they did after the iPhone 4's introduction.

Many of those who would want to use the Flip/other video recorder are also those who already have, or would like to have, an iPhone or iPod touch (at least, in my experience).

The newest iPod touch also allows editing of HD video directly on the device (not to mention in-device uploading to YouTube, Facebook, etc.). As if that weren't enough, the newest iPod Touch recordings can have high-quality sound via an external microphone input. The Flip's advantages are becoming fewer and fewer; the iPhone/iPod's camera isn't 'good enough'—in the right hands, it's actually quite amazing.

The iPod touch or iPhone 4, with an external sound source, produces excellent quality video as long as standard photographic principles are taken into account (mostly having to do with lighting and camera movement).

The only things a photographer needs to make the iPod Touch or iPhone 4 an excellent video camera system are:

1. A tripod mount (which is helpful in so many ways).
2. An external microphone or sound input (closer micing = better sound).

I'm on the lookout for some good sound mixing apps, but iMovie for iOS devices is already pretty awesome for video editing on-the-fly.

Hat tip: Laughing Squid / Boing Boing

Due almost exclusively to the Articles section of this website, it seems that Lifeisaprayer.com (this website) ranks at number 422,290 of approximately 180,000,000 websites on the Internet (according to Alexa).

The most popular content on the site, by a very large margin, are the following articles:

• My Mac is Running Really Slow - Help!
• DIY: Greenscreens and Backdrop or Background Stands
• iPhone 4 (and iPad) - External Mic for Audio in Camera App (etc.)

These articles alone count for about 70% of daily traffic, almost exclusively through Google.com search results. Since migrating this website from a custom HTML website (everything was posted through Dreamweaver and Thingamablog) to Drupal, with much better theme organization, my traffic has increased about 20%.

This post was prompted by some research for one of the other large websites I maintain, archstl.org - which is ranked a little over 800,000. I looked up lifeisaprayer.com on the NMAP Favicon graph, and found it (a tiny, but visible, icon :)