Sound. Now I am a visual guy. A cinematographer. I’m all about writing with light. So you can imagine how hard this is to admit, but it’s true. I learned this early, through my mistakes, and it’s been confirmed to me over and over again (through others mistakes). Nothing will ruin your film or video faster than bad audio. People will suffer bad picture quality. In fact, much to my chagrin, people often don’t even notice what I think is bad cinematography. The image can be scratched, somewhat distorted, slightly over or underexposed, poorly lit, glaringly overlit, etc. But if the quality of the audio is bad, if it’s noisy or distorted. If there’s too much room noise or you can’t hear the actor over that airplane going overhead, your audience will notice it. And it won’t be easy for them to get past it. The lesson I’ve learned is don’t skimp on the audio. Do everything you can to get the best sound possible. Buy good mics. Always use headphones to monitor your audio. Keep a close eye on your levels. You can only fix it in Post if you got pretty good audio to begin with. Bad audio can’t be fixed. At best, if you really know what you’re doing, you can use tricks to distract from it or minimize it. But you can’t fix it.
(Stepping Off My Soapbox Now)
Why all this talk about audio? We got two new mics in yesterday and I’m really excited about them. I picked up a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic to mount on our camera and a Sennheiser Evolution Wireless G2 lav mic. I love getting gear. Waiting for the FedEx guy. It’s like Christmas. If anyone’s interested in hearing more about different kinds of mics, what’s a shotgun mic?, what’s a good lav mic?, things like that, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll post on it. In the meantime, mind the audio :).
Tags: audio, audio for video, making videos, microphones, tips, video equipment
March 15th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I completely agree that audio quality is really much more important that video quality. I’m a video guy and it hurts me to admit it. I’ve learned that I should even backup my backups of audio, sometimes recording audio from multiple sources even though I am only shooting video on 1 or 2 cameras. It’s also funny how a mediocre video with good nat sound and a great song can be so moving when amazing composition and framing can be overlooked when the audio is bad. Great post. It’s a good reminder for all video types.