In this episode I'll show you how to great sounding audio for your video's.
AdoramaTV presents,
Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace.
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV, brought to you by the best camera store in the world its
Adorama, you can check them out Adorama.com. I'm Mark Wallace and I'm here in a
very, very busy and noisy street corner in Cartagena, Colombia.
I choose this street corner because it's really noisy
there are horns, and sirens, and buses, and motorcycles and breaks, and
all kinds of things going on here, and I wanted to show you how you can get clean audio
in your videos. I know a lot of you shoot videos on a DSLR or a normal videocamera
like I'm using right now, I'm using a Canon VIXIA
HF G20, and you've written to me and said 'hey,
how you get clean audio in your video's?' Well let me first let you hear what this
sounds like without my external microphone.
As you can hear, it is noisy
to get this right, what you need is an external mic. Ah, it sounds so much better when I have the external mic
turn on. Now in the past I've always recommended
wireless mic's, the Evolution G3's series of microphones, the problem with those
is that, well they're expensive, they're about $600, and if you're using an older
DSLR camera sometimes you need a little preamp and there are some things that go along with that,
and you have to know about setting channels and there can be radio frequency issues all
kinds of things,
and so there is an easier solution, it takes a little bit more work in
post-production,
but its a little trick that I picked up from my friend Gavin Hoey,
this is how he does it, or at least how he did it when I visited him in London
in 2013. I am using a Zoom
h1 external recorder right here. This guy is $99,
it's only $100 for this little recorder, and I'm using a
RØDE Lavalier mic, it's about $200 so this is about
$300
altogether and then I bought a little windscreen, this little soft right here, this little fuzzy guy,
that knocks out all the wind noise if you're in a really, really windy location. So I think that
was about $30, a very inexpensive solution. So the
way to do this is once you start your video you start your external recorder,
and then you just sync them in post-production. There is a couple things you
need to do on your external recorder to make sure this all works right. So what I
did was I needed to make sure I set this up to the right
file format and the right file recording
size, and so I've set this up to record in wave
file format, WAV using the little switches on the back, and I've set this to a
48 kHz, 24-bit recording format.
Now if you don't know that means it doesn't matter, just make sure you set up your audio
recording device to 48 bits,
I mean 48 kHz, 24 bits and that way it'll match the waveform
on your video camera. Now normally I would have this mic all hidden under my shirt,
but because
we're showing you how all this works, I'm just letting it all hang out. Now once you
have this all done,
what you need to do is to sync everything in post-production,
and to sync everything up, what you need to do is make sure you give yourself
some markers.
So what we're going to do here is we are going to have a little white flash, and then I'm going to walk you
through this, and you will see this real time
how this works. Alright so what I have done here is I have started my
external video recorder, it's going right now,
and now I will start my recorder here,
now this is recording, and now
I will clap three times, and that will allow me to sync
the audio, and now you can hear...ah, so much better, because I'm able to sync my external
recorder
to the video that's happening. That's the key, is to make sure you
clap three times because that will give you a marker, to match up those waveforms in
post-production.
Now if your using Adobe Premiere CC 2014
there is a feature that does all this for you automatically,
I'll show you that first and then all she had to do it manually,
if you're using something else besides the latest version of Premier,
maybe iMovie or something like that. It's really simple, so lets jump over to
post-production
and I'll show you how it works. This is Adobe Premiere Pro CC
2014, the latest version as of this video.
Let me know you how I have my project set up here. I got this video files
folder, I've got three video files opening and closing, and the demo,
this demo is what I just showed you, so I'll play that,
and you can see that's horrible
audio there, if you fast-forward you can see where I clap, there's the clap right there.
Okay thats going to come into play here in a second really, really important.
Now down here I have my audio files, and again I have closing and opening in demo,
I just
imported the WAV files from my zoom,
and then I renamed those based on the content.
So I know this is the demo because when I open it,
I can listen to this and it matches the demo. Now what I really want to do
here is show you
this little section right here, I'll zoom in you see on the waveform we have these three
spikes, those are the claps. So if I
zip back here you can hear it, those claps
are good because they give us a visual marker
on our waveform exactly where things should line up.
Right lets go back to our demo, this is our video file
if we change this from just the composite video to the waveform, so we will see the
audio waveform of the video, and if I
zoom in to that, look at there, we have one,
two, three spikes, just like we did before.
Why three? Well sometimes you've got noise in there, so you can see here
I'm talking, so there's a little bit of noise, and over here a truck drove by
and so if I only had one clap, I might not have a good
clean spike. So you can listen to that, yeah, so that end one there
finally had that one spike, it might not be good enough.
Alright, let's do this the easy way, now when we do this manually, we're going to manually
line up the spikes here using markers
but we don't have to do that in a new version of Adobe Premiere Pro,
what we can do is we can click on the demo audio
file, and then commad, or control click
on the demo wave file, the audio file there so, video,
audio, right click and then I'm going to choose
'Merge Clips', this is the beautiful thing,
I'll just click 'Merge Clips' I get this all merge clips
dialog box that shows up here, I'm going to call this
'Mark's Merged Clip' just so we have something there that make sense.
Now its going to ask us what do we use to synchronise this.
Now in the olden times, back before this latest version, you have to actually put
markers in here and say hey,
use an in point or an out point, or some kind of marker here,
but now we can just use the audio, so we are using channel one,
the video file, and then we are using the audio,
the demo wave and it's going to automatically analyze these waveforms
and match everything up for us, then I also remove this
audio from the AV clip, in other words I don't want to audio
from the video file because it's rubbish, we want the clean audio from the
h1 so remove this bad audio, and just used the good video
and the good audio all synced up. Now all I have to do is hit
OK, and this, BAM, just like that. 'Mark's Merged Clip' shows up,
I'll open that, and a fast forward over here to where I'm clapping,
and look, you can hear clean audio all lined up correctly.
That's the easiest way to do it, when you have that done, and then you just drag it onto your
timeline,
and everything is good to go. Now you might see something like this where we
have
a little overhang here, well that's when I was recording
on my video camera but not yet on my audio device.
So there's no audio to sync there because it didn't exist yet,
until I pressed record on my h1,
so you might have to trim that up using the razor blade, and get into that
extra little rubbish there at the beginning and maybe trim that up and get rid of the little
extra rubbish at the and as well, just something to know.
Alright so how do we do this manually? Maybe you don't have the latest version of
Premiere Pro, or maybe you're using
a different application. Well its quite
easy to do this. So I'm going to open up my
video file, and remember here I've change this to look,
instead looking at the video part of this, I've change this to look
at the audio portion, and I've got three
little spikes here. So what I'm going to do, is I'm going to go back,
I'm going to use my left and right arrow
to go one frame at a time, I'm going to find that first little spike there,
and I'm going to hit 'M' for 'Mark', so I'm going to add a marker, so we get this little
marker right there. Then I'm going to zip over here,
to the next marker, there it is,
to that one. So I've got three markers, one,
two, three. Then I'm going to go over here to my demo wave
and do the exact same thing. There is a marker,
alright so we've got three markers.
Then what I can do here, is I can
take my demo, and this is,
again my demo video, so I'll go back to video,
and what I could do, is I can go to the first marker and insert an
in point, that's easy. But we're going to do it the sort of long way here. So I'll throw this
on the timeline, then I'm going to zoom way in here,
and here are my three little markers,
and I've zoomed way in on this. So we've got three little markers, one, two, three.
Then I'm going to take my demo wave file
and I will drag that to a new
little track on the timeline,
and what I need to do is, I just need to line up those markers,
drag this around, tell those line
up, so I see these three markers down here, I'll zoom out just
a bit, trim this up just a bit, so we're a little bit better off here.
So I'm just going to drag this over to.
Now we see, if I zoom in, those three markers are
all lined up now. Now I will mute
the audio from my video file, so I've clicked this little 'M' here to mute it.
So you can see it's all lined up. that's all there is to it,
if I un-mute this, you can hear all of it together.
Super, super easy.
So either use the audio, the combined clips which is the easiest way, just
right click and say combine clips,
or set markers in and line everything manually, either way you're going to get
great sounding audio
to go with your videos. Alright using this technique you can really clean up your
audio, in fact here's a clip from last week's video
where I was on a mountain, it was super windy, and you can see here
what it sounds like without an external microphone.
I recorded it on my h1 and here is what it sounded like
with those two clips combined. 'The wind is blowing so hard,
I can't stay on my feet' What a difference that makes,
it is a huge, huge difference, and for only $300 why not do
this? This works for anything, and
because it's not a wireless system you can use this for weddings, you can put
this on a groom, or maybe the
preacher that's doing the ceremony. You can put this external
microphone anywhere you want, and then sync it later and things are going to sound
absolutely terrific. Well thank you so much for joining me for this episode of
Exploring Photography, don't forget that all of our videos are absolutely free
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