- Hi, this is JP Morgan. Today on the Slanted Lens, we're going to show you five
options for getting good audio on your home studio. We've got a great series on
home studios from setting them up, to how to light in them, to now the audio you
need to really finish things off to be able to get great video and audio in your
home studio.
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You know, audio is one of the last things that people think about, but the first
thing people notice. We can do some really terrible video and no one seems to ever
say anything, but when we do terrible audio, it's the first thing people mention
on Slanted Lens. So, let's look at some options to give you good audio in
your home studio, from really inexpensive to a little more expensive. Let's get
started see what we can do.
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I said five solutions for great audio. I lied. The first solution is on your
camera. It's the camera audio that comes with your camera every time you turn it
on. It's terrible for a couple of reasons. For one, it's a long way away from the
subject. So, not being close enough, it picks up everything around the subject
matter. So, you can hear me now on that audio from the camera. It's really not
very good. If I get closer, and I talk up in here, all of a sudden now the audio's
not so bad. Of course, I'm extremely close to the camera, and it's pretty hard to
work like this. So, the number one rule of audio is: Don't ever use the audio that's
on your camera. Number two. We put a small Rode Video Pro
on the hot shoe of the camera and plug it into the mic side of the camera. Now, it's
taking the audio from that shotgun mic and putting it into the camera. Is the audio
better? At this distance, not amazing still. It's a long ways away. Is it better
if I get back up here again? Absolutely, because it's close to me again. So, this
little Rode Video Pro, is a nice solution to keep on your camera. Then, if something
goes wrong with your audio device, it's a great backup, at best. So, let's go to
number three and see what we've got. Okay, so there's one and two, both of them on
the camera. Both not good, not great. They have to be closer to the
subject if you really want them to work. So, let's look at number three. Number
three is a small recorder. This is an off-camera recorder that's going to
capture the audio at the source. You can get this very close to the person. You can
turn on the mic, so it's just running off these two mics on the top of it here, and
that gives you a much stronger audio source. It's close to the camera. I put it
underneath, or you could put it up on top, if you wanted to, just like a boom mic,
but just get in close, so the person is right here. You get the full volume of
their voice. This is a much easier way to catch audio, and it's also simple because
you just take it, turn it on, and put it on a stand, and you're ready to go. So a
little Zoom recorder, like the Zoom N4, is great, or the Zoom N1 is fine, or the N2.
One hundred dollars, one hundred fifty dollars, three hundred dollars. So,
there's three different options. So, we've gone to an external recording device. That
means we've got to somehow match that up to the audio on our video. The way we do
that is a program called Pearl Eyes. It basically takes the auddio you've been
recording with your internal mic and it matches those wave forms up and it says,
"Oh, this is where the audio goes," and it marries those two together, take those
clips into Premiere and you're ready to edit. So, number three, what are the
disadvantages of an external recorder capturing our audio? One is the mics
aren't great on these little external recorders, and you gotta get them in very
close for them to work, they're really not very directional.
They're just not a great source of
capturing audio. And some things are going to work, but they're really kind of
cumbersome, a big item you've gotta shove in there and follow the person
around with. It just doesn't work that great. So, there's some real disadvantages
to these little recorders. Not my first choice. It's probably not on my list of
choices at all. Now, for number four. The Lavalier. We've
probably gotten a little more expensive as we've gone along. Cameras
cheap because of the camera. A little mic on top of the camera, a little more
expensize. A Zoom recorder, or something external, a little more expensive. Now, a
lav, because you have to have the lav and the external recording device.
But a lav is great, because it's
on the person's body. They can move around, like it doesn't matter if I'm over
here doing my audio over here, or if I'm doing my audio over here, it's all going
to sound the same. I'm never going to sound any different when I'm using my lav,
regardless of where I go. Heaven forbid, I should go to the bathroom and leave my lav
on, because that would be very embarassing. So, the Lavalier is really
nice because you can move around and go do anything you need to. It's really nice
to stay on the person. It's a very full
audio, though. It's right there. It's on a person's body. Disadvantage of the lav,
you've got to have one for each person. So, the expense kind of goes up. You can't
get two people using the same lav. Also, it's a matter of, you're tying to the
person, and some people don't like it. You've got to tape something to their
body, you've got to put it in their pocket, they've got to carry it around
with them. It's not fast, like some other audio methods. So, that's one of the
disadvantages. Lars taught me a great way to hide your lav. You just take a piece of
gaff tape, and you make a triangle, bend it over, and then fold it over, and then
fold it, and then fold it, and fold it. You have a triangle. Now, we do it again.
A triangle, fold it, and stick it, and fold it, and stick it. Now, we have two
triangles. Now we have the lav line and we set it in the triangle just like that so
the mic is sticking up, and then we take this here and stick it on the other side.
Now, we have a little triangle, sticky on all sides, with a microphone right in the
middle. And you just take and stick it on the person. It just sticks to the top of
their clothes so they're not going to rustle to it. Disadvantage to it? It can
make your shirt look a little stuck sometimes.
Advantage? It hides under the clothing. You don't even know you have it on. So, a
nice little tip on how to rig a lav. Number five, the big burrito, the Big
Kahuna, the number one. This is the microphone and the solution that the movie
industry has been using forever. A senmeiser 416 microphone. It's a shotgun
mic, does not make any sense to me because a shotgun mic means spread to
me, but a shotgun mic is very narrow. It gives you a very narrow area of coverage.
So, it's going to be very zoomed in tight on the person, but what's nice about that
is that you don't get external sound. The disadvantage of that is if the person
moves over here on the shotgun mic, you're not going to hear very well, or over here,
you're not going to hear very well. So, if you're just sitting right here, and
talking like this, it's going to change. So, a shotgun mic in that way becomes a
little more difficult to work with. It's the solution most people use. They use it
overhead like you see here in front of me. A shotgun mic up pointed more at the
chest, not at the mouth, at the chest. Get that full volume of sound that comes out
becomes a very nice sound. There's also the MK50 which is a little broader
microphone, so you can get two people in a conversation, side by side with an MK50
and you'll be able to have that conversation and it won't drop out one or
the other. Shotgun mic is probably the number one used audio solution, but like
any audio solution, you gotta run a cable, you've got to run it back to your zoom
recorder, you've gotta have an external device to capture, and it's a $1000 for
one of them. The really good ones are $1000.
If you pay much less than that, you're
probably wasting your money. So, there's five solutions for your home audio. Now,
out of the five, there's only two that I really like, the lav mic, or the shotgun
mic. Those are the two standards in the industry. If you have the money and you
can step up to those, do that. Make that happen. If not, the zoom recorder is
probably going to be your next solution which really doesn't make any sense. The
other two? Not that great. So, with those solutions, it gives you a
way to solve your audio. Get great audio. It'll make it so that people appreciate
your videos better. They're going to not notice the audio, which is a good thing,
because it means it's good. So, keep those cameras rolling. Keep on clicking. You
haven't signed up yet? We've still got the two flex flash kits that we're giving away
on The Slanted Lens. Go to TheSlantedLens.com.
Two mild boxes, two soft
boxes, two stands and a case. Go to TheSlantedLens.com. Don't miss out. For
all of our Slanted Lens listeners, we're offering the first light kit, only
on The Slanted Lens website, where you get two lights, two stands, two umbrellas, and
we're throwing in a light disk, a 32-inch light disk for $264. We're offering that
entire kit as the perfect lighting setup. You have your key light, you have a great
fill light, and a great light for your background. It's really everything you
need to get started in your first studio. It's the perfect setup to get started at a
price point that makes excellent sense. Get your first studio lighting kit with a
light disk thrown in, that gives you everything you need to get started. So, go
to TheSlantedLens.com. It's a great deal.
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This is a dead cat. Who cares? What does
it do? That's an audio lesson for another time.