Getting Better Quality Sound on Video

Whenever I am faced with watching a video with poor sound quality I feel compelled to stop watching. Its strange that with a media as visual as video how important the sound aspect is. Poor sound makes watching a video really hard, try watching a film on TV where the sound is so low or muffled that you can’t hear the dialect properly – it does not matter how good the film is, without decent, clear sound you will just not enjoy it. As I started to make some video content for my blog I was getting frustrated with the quality of sound I was able to produce. Mostly I am in a room where there are a lot of hard surfaces so the audio ends up full of sound reflections, sounding hollow when using the camera’s built in microphone. There are a number of factors that drive sound quality, including dynamic range and frequency response and the ability to reject unwanted noise. Probably the biggest contributor to poor quality sound though are the reflections you get when you are recording in an enclosed space. To understand what this is, imagine getting one of those small bouncy rubber balls and throwing it hard at a wall, the path the ball will take will be unpredictable and the ball will bounce around the room uncontrollably – this is what happens with sound. The microphone not only picks up your voice, but also picks up some of the reflections which are slightly delayed, and the recoding ends up sounding hollow – like when you sing in the bathroom – sounds OK in the bathroom but this effect really sucks on video.

A good way to solve this is to get the microphone close to you, this way your voice is at a much higher level than the reflections in the room and you get better quality sound. However, being close to a microphone is not always practical or desirable. I want to get good quality sound for my video content but I don’t want to have to be near a microphone, or wear a head set and I also want to be able to move around freey – so no wires either. Getting good sound quality requires you to understand where the poor sound comes from, it takes some practice and most importantly some decent gear too.

I have put together a video comparing various microphone options using my Canon Legria HFS-21 camera and the following microphone combinations: –

• Canon Legria HF S21 Built In Camera
• RODE NTG2 Shotgun Mic (recording directly on the camera)
• ATL AUDIO UHF (non brand Chinese made) headset and lapel mic (recording directly on the camera)
• Gemini UF-2064 UHF headset mic (recoding onto PC and overlaid into video in editing)
• Sony UWP-V1 (recording directly on the camera)

Hope you find the comparison useful.

Catch you next time…

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