Sound advice

Since your cur­rent assign­ment will no doubt have you out in the world record­ing audio along with your video, I thought it was a good time to rehash some of the tips for record­ing usable audio. These come straight from the “text­book” that I handed you dur­ing our first meeting.

• Rooms are sel­dom as quiet as they seem. Even things like a run­ning com­puter, the air vents and flu­o­res­cent lights can turn what you thought was good audio into unus­able trash.
• Wear head­phones hooked into your cam­era to make sure every­thing is work­ing OK with the audio. It would be a bad day indeed if you got back to the office only to learn that you had two hours of video with no usable audio.
• Make small talk with your inter­view sub­ject while you set up the cam­era and micro­phones. Not only does it help put the sub­ject at ease, but it also helps you check the sound levels.
• Be aware of the sounds you make.
• If you’re using a clip on micro­phone, ask your inter­view sub­ject not to move around too much. The sound of a micro­phone mov­ing against cloth­ing can ruin an oth­er­wise per­fectly good soundtrack.
• Be aware of the dif­fer­ent abil­i­ties of the micro­phones you’ll be using. Experiment with them to learn what they’re capa­ble of.

I want to add one thing to this list (for now). Rooms with hard walls, like most of the cinderblock-built rooms on cam­pus, tend to cre­ate an echo when peo­ple speak loudly and clearly. We kind of tune it out when we’re sit­ting there hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a per­son, but a micro­phone is not so for­giv­ing — even a poor qual­ity one like the one built-in to the Flip cameras.

If pos­si­ble, sit­u­ate your inter­view sub­jects in a room with some­thing on the walls, cur­tains or fab­ric or even wood. Just some­thing that won’t echo as much.

And remem­ber, always check the qual­ity of your sound on scene, prefer­ably before you even begin or even while record­ing. That way, you don’t shoot great video with awful sound — with­out even know­ing it.