Hey guys. This is going to be a really quick video because I want to talk to you about getting
better quality audio in your talking head videos. I've seen a lot of talking head videos and they're
good but the quality of the audio doesn't sound great so I just want to help you out with that.
So if your audio tends to sound like this then there are a few things that you can do in order
to get better quality audio, and the first thing is actually investing in external microphones,
whether that's a shotgun microphone, a lav mic, or a wireless microphone system, whichever
external microphone you get is already going to improve the quality of your audio rather
than just using the audio directly from your camera, which is what I'm doing at the moment.
And the key to getting great audio with the external microphones that you get is
actually placing those microphones as close to your mouth as possible.
So with the shotgun mic, you can have the microphone on the camera and plugged in
directly to the camera but the thing that you have to remember the shotgun mic is that you want to be
as close to that microphone as possible because the further away you get the worse the audio
is going to sound. So you want to make sure that you're actually as close to this,
as close to the microphone as possible. If the way you frame yourself doesn't allow you to be
close to the microphone, close to the camera, because of the type of lens that you're using
or just because of how you're framing up your shot, then the only other way to have the shotgun
mic is on a boom pole or a tripod out of frame but still have it as close to your mouth as possible.
So I'm currently recording this audio on my Rode VideoMic Pro+ which is attached to my camera
and plugged directly into my camera but I'm also recording the audio on my Rode
NTG4+ which is plugged in to an audio interface, and I'll talk about that a little bit later on.
So the next type of microphone that you can use is a lav mic or a wireless microphone system
and the one that I'm using at the moment is the Rode Wireless GO II
and this is perfect if you can't be close to the camera or you don't have enough space
to set up a boom pole with a shotgun mic, and also if you want to step away from the camera
and still get audio because you're going to be doing something in your video
then your audio is still going to sound perfect because the microphone is attached to you.
Now I have a little tip for the ladies sorry guys but if
you didn't want to have this showing and you wanted to hide it out of sight,
which is something that I tend to do, is you can take it off
and just hide it in your bra and you'll still get clear audio. So that's something I do if I
know that I want to use this wireless system because I don't like it being in the shot,
which is why I tend to use shotgun mics. That's just a little tip.
So if you want to take things a little bit further and get even cleaner audio then one of the things
that you can do is use an audio interface and actually record your audio separately from
your camera, and as I mentioned before I'm using the Rode NTG4+ which is just here out of frame,
it's my shotgun mic and I have that plugged into my Zoom F6, which is just here in front of me
and that's connected via XLR. So this kind of setup gives you really clean audio
whereas if you record directly into your camera, unless you turn the record levels down,
which is something that you will need to do if you record directly into your camera,
you will pick up a lot of the noise from the camera preamps because they're not going to be
as decent as something like an external audio recorder.
I just wanted to give you an example of what it sounds like with the
microphone attached to the camera, but the preamps are boosted in the camera so my audio record
levels are set to 23 rather than putting them down as low as possible, and then boosting the
preamps on the microphone so this is just to give you an idea of what it sounds like.
So if you do record directly into your camera by plugging in your rode wireless GO II or your
shotgun mic into your camera make sure your record levels are as low as possible. I tend to have mine
set somewhere between one and five just depending on the microphone itself but you can increase the
audio levels on some microphones. So the Rode Pro, the Rode VideoMic Pro+ has a +20 decibel gain,
so with my camera, I tend to turn my record levels down to one and then just boost the preamps
on the microphone itself, and then with the Rode Wireless GO II you can also tune in the different,
tune in how loud you want the preamps to be on the Rode Wireless GO II. So again,
just keeping those record levels down on the camera.
So I hope that was useful I hope that's going to help you get some better quality audio. If
you found the video useful do give it a like. And this video kind of goes with the videos that I've
been creating in the series about talking heads and just creating better talking head videos so
do check out that series if you are trying to produce better talking head videos,
but yeah I'll catch you guys on the next video. Thanks for watching!