(bright upbeat music)
- Hey, how's it going?
Parker Walbeck here again joined
by our newest team member Nick Sales
and today we're gonna be giving you our top 10 tips
to getting clean professional audio
for your videos or films.
I always say the audio is half of the viewing experience
and one of the biggest mistakes
that we see beginning filmmakers make
is neglecting good audio.
So pay close attention to our mistakes
that we've made over the years
and mistakes we've seen others make as well.
Before we get started though, big thanks
to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video.
Storyblocks is a great service
when you're in need of a quick video clip for b-roll
or an After Effects template or a motion background.
The thing I personally love
and use most on Storyblocks video,
are their title animation After Effect presets
to quickly up the production value of one of my edits
I'll often use one of their title animation presets
like the one you saw at the beginning of this video.
That you can put together in less than two minutes
by downloading the preset, opening up in After Effects,
editing the text, exporting out as RGB plus alpha
and then dropping it into Premiere.
This quickly gives your edit a much more professional feel
with minimal time and effort.
So I highly recommend looking into Storyblocks video
to up the production value of your videos
and you can do so by clicking on the link in the
description below or go to storyblocks.com/parker
to learn more about Storyblocks video.
But let's now dive into our top 10 tips
to getting clean professional audio, Nick take it away.
- Tip number one is choosing your location wisely.
When shooting dialog outdoors, try to find a place
with limited background noise.
Next to busy streets, construction sites, airports,
crashing waves and large trees blowing in the wind
can make it difficult to capture clean audio.
When shooting indoors, try and find a place
with little to no reverb or echo.
Hardwood floors, bare walls and empty ceilings
are a good audios worst nightmare.
Do a clap test in the room that you're choosing to shoot in
and see if you hear a reverb or echo.
If you do and that location is your best
or only option for shooting, make sure
to dampen the sound as much as possible.
Things like carpet, big objects like couches,
materials on the walls and pretty much anything
that can break up the sound from easily traveling
from one flat wall to another will be your friend
if you're trying to record a good audio.
In the ideal situation, you would
have acoustic foam panels all around the room
to completely get rid of any reverb.
But we know that's not always possible,
so what you can do to help dampen the sound in a room
is to put up light stands with blankets over them
and then get those blankets as close to your subject
as possible while not getting them in the shot.
Here's an example of a scene without blankets
and then with blankets to help give you a feel
for how much they help.
So this is me talking without any blankets.
This is just the natural reverb of the room and--
(snaps fingers)
And here we are with the blanket setup.
As you can tell there's a lot less reverb
and these blankets have dampened the sound a little bit
so that my voice sounds a lot more clean and crisp.
- Tip number two, once you've picked a good location,
the next biggest mistake I see
is people not putting the microphone
close enough to the subject.
I always tell people that for most microphones,
an ideal distance to keep the mic from your subject
is between six and 14 inches.
Now sometimes you can't get mics quite that close
because they'll be in the shot
but get as close to that distance as possible
as that will make sure that the main thing
your mic is picking up is the voice
and not the ambient noise
or reverb bouncing around the room.
To help illustrate this, here's Nick talking
with the mic at different distances
so you can see how much of a difference
it makes to keep that mic nice and close.
- This is me talking with the mic
one foot away from my mouth.
This is me talking with a mic
three feet away from my mouth.
This is me talking with the mic
five feet away from my mouth
and this is me talking with a mic
10 feet away from my mouth.
- The volume of his voice was the same
throughout all of those clips
but you notice that the closer the mic was to his mouth,
the better and cleaner it sounded.
For sit-down interviews like this,
you can use a boom mic on a stationary stand
but for moving subjects, you'll either have to have
a lav mic on their shirt or a boom operator
to track the subject to keep the mic
as close as possible at all times.
- And going off of that is tip number three
which is lav mic placement.
If your subject isn't stationary
and you don't have access to a boom operator,
then your best bet is going to be to put
a wireless lav mic on your subject.
And we often get asked, where is the best place
to put the lav mic for the cleanest audio,
without getting any muffling noises.
I found that the best location for a lav mic
is about six inches from the mouth,
directly below the mouth,
on the outside of the subjects clothing.
You can either clip or tape the lav mic to the subject.
Either way you should do some test audio by having them
move around and talk and make sure that
no article of clothing ever rubs up against the mic.
If you're in a situation
where you need to hide the mic and can't
have it showing on camera then you may
have to put it under the clothes.
If it's going beneath clothing I recommend
taping rather than clipping so that you
can always ensure the mic won't move or become unclipped.
I've done this for many of my tutorials
where I tape the lav mic to the inside of my shirt.
The audio won't be quite as crisp as it would be
if it was on the outside of the clothes,
but it will still give you great audio.
- And speaking of hiding mics,
tip number four is to get creative
with where to place the mic so that it's not seen.
If you have two actors talking
to each other you could have one of them
hold up the mic or a cellphone and then
frame them in a way to where you can't
see the microphone.
And in films pretty much anytime
you see a shot of two people
in a car they either have a lav mic on
or they have a boom mic hidden somewhere
in the car underneath the dashboard or
behind some other obstacle that makes it
so it's not seen in the shot but still
close to their mouths.
But getting creative and problem solving while on
set is so important as a filmmaker so
make sure to stretch your creative
muscles and try and figure out where to
hide microphones because putting the
microphone far away from your subject
just isn't a good option for capturing
quality audio and will ruin your films.
And here's an example of a scene with
two actors where the first shot will be
audio coming from the in-camera microphone,
the second shot will have one
of them holding a cell phone and in the
third shot they'll be holding a boom mic
so you can see the difference.
- A tarantula enjoys a fine chewing gum.
A tarantula enjoys a fine chewing gum.
A tarantula enjoys a fine chewing gum.
- Tip number five is to test your
recording levels before you start
filming and make sure you aren't peaking
or going into the red area.
If the gain level on your microphone is too high it
will cause distortion and if it's too low
it will cause fuzzy background noise.
Whether you're running your audio
through an external recorder or in your
camera you will see the loudness meter
measured in decibels or DB for short.
You want your audio levels to sit anywhere
between negative 18 DB at the lowest and
negative six DB at the loudest.
Also keep in mind that sometimes people will get
louder if they become excited when they
talk or if they laugh that can usually
be louder as well so make sure that you
watch those audio levels throughout a
take and if they begin to consistently
talk louder or quieter make sure to
adjust your gain levels accordingly.
- Moving on to tip number six is to use a
windscreen or deadcat to cut out the
wind while filming outside.
In my experience deadcats don't do a whole
lot but they can help a little
whereas wind screens are a game changer.
The one that I use is a rode blimp for my Rode NTG3,
and here's just a quick example
of what the audio sounds like
with and without a windscreen so that
you can see how important it is to have one of
these while filming outdoors.
- The skeleton ran out of shampoo in the shower.
The skeleton ran out of shampoo in the shower.
- Now if you're recording on a lav mic,
putting it under the shirt will
help as a windscreen and show a lot of
that wind or if you don't have any windscreens
or deadcats do whatever you can
to block the wind like choosing a
location where the wind is blocked by
buildings, or people, or any object.
Or if you have to shoot out in the open,
at least try and point the microphone in
the same direction the wind is blowing
so it can cut down on how much of that
wind noise is entering into the mic.
Now for studio mics like this there isn't
any wind in here to worry about but you
still have to worry about plosives or
the blowing air that your mouth
generates when you make a (blows into mic)
sound so make sure to use a pop filter to block the
air from blowing in the mic and make
sure to place it at least an inch or two
away from the mic because if it's right
up against the microphone it won't do his job very well.
Now some microphones like this one have
a built-in pop filter but most mics
don't so make sure to have a pop filter
to avoid hearing those plosives.
- Next up tip number seven is to do a sync clap
when using external recorders or multiple camera angles.
This will help you match up your external audio with
your in-camera audio.
Sometimes if there are multiple takes I'll clap the same
number of times as the take,
so that I can easily see which audio
matches up where.
This also helps the
synchronization software to sync up your
audio so where possible make sure to do
a sync clap as soon as you start recording.
As far as syncing up audio in post,
Premiere Pro has a tool built in
called synchronize.
All you have to do is
drag your files to the timeline,
stack them on top of one another,
highlight all of the ones that you want to sync,
right-click and then hit synchronize and
within seconds it will match up all your audio.
If you have dozens or hundreds of
takes this process could get tedious so
we highly recommend using PluralEyes
which is a red giant software that can
sync up large numbers of takes in a matter of minutes.
- Moving on now to tip number eight
is to have a redundant system.
Where possible, record with two
mics at the same time so you always have a backup.
Now this is a best-case
scenario and we know that many of you
beginning filmmakers won't have the
luxury of having two microphones.
But if possible and especially on shoots where
there's a big budget you need to have
two microphones recording at the same time.
Usually a boom mic and then a lav mic
incase one of them fails.
The TASCAM DR10-SG is a cool microphone option
because it has a feature where it
actually records two audio tracks at the same time.
One at normal audio levels and
one six DB lower that way if you ever
record a clip that distorts on the
normal recording you can always replace
it with the second track that recorded
that six DB's lower.
And tip number nine is once you've captured your audio
to use editing tools in post to adjust
audio levels and clean up any issues for
the cleanest possible audio quality.
The biggest problem that I hear in many
beginner films even if the audio is
captured well is that the audio levels
are constantly changing throughout the
video from super loud to super quiet,
or the overall audio level is just too
quiet or too loud.
And the two most common tools we use inside Premiere Pro
to help with these issues are EQ and compression.
For EQ we use a tool called
parametric equalizer which allows you to
take certain frequencies and make them
louder or softer.
Now using this tool can
get a bit complex as it depends on the voice,
the microphone is recorded on,
and the environment which it was recorded.
As to what exactly you'd want to do in here
but typically with the recording of a voice,
we'll click on HP which stands for
a high-pass filter which gets rid of any
low-frequency rumblings like breath pops
in the microphone and will usually boost
the mid to high frequencies to help
brighten the voice and make it cut
through so it doesn't a sound flat or muffled.
Think of it like adding contrast
or saturation to an image.
Just makes it pop off the screen a bit more and to
give you an idea of the different
effects you can achieve using EQ,
here's a few different sentences using
different EQ patterns.
This is what my voice sounds like boosting the low end
and reducing the high end.
This is an effect that is usually used to make
it sound like a voice is coming from the next room over.
If you were listening to a conversation
through a wall or as often
times applied to a music track during a part
of the film where the subject goes underwater.
(upbeat music)
(jumps underwater)
Woo.
And this is what my voice sounds like
with just the mid tones boosts that are
in everything else cut.
This is a cool effect to use if you want to make it
sound like you're talking through a phone.
There's so much you can do with EQ
to tweak and play with different frequencies.
As for compression this is a
tool that basically closes the gap
between the loud and the quiet parts of
an audio track by making the loud parts
quieter and the quiet parts louder.
It basically evens out your whole audio
track so that it's all playing at a consistent volume
level so that your viewer doesn't have to constantly be
turning the volume up and down.
And the compression tool we use inside Premiere
Pro is called dynamics.
We simply drag it on to our clip, hit edit and often we
just use the preset called soft
compression and then adjust the make up
until our loudest parts are hitting
around negative three to negative six DB.
You can play around with other settings in
here as well but just be careful not to
get too out of hand or else your audio
will start to sound too compressed
and begin to lose a lot of quality.
We've found that the optimal settings for the
makeup tends to be around three to 10
decibels depending on how loud the audio recording was.
And as one final safeguard
to make sure there aren't any parts of
your audio that are clipping,
we'll check on the limiter which will then limit the
audio from ever going above one decibel.
So if there's one really loud part in
your audio like a clap or a burst of
laughter it will keep that from clipping or distorting.
Now realize that these are
really basic tools for some basic audio
editing and you can always go more in
depth by bringing your audio into
Audition and buying plugins and using
more advanced tools to reduce background noise,
sweeten the voice, both just EQ and compression
within Premiere you should be able
to get by for most scenarios.
- And finally tip number 10
is to listen to your audio through
different headphones and speakers when
mixing in the editing room.
Different speakers like studio monitors or nice
car speakers will have a lot more low
ends than cheap laptop and phone speakers.
So this can affect how your
final mix sounds depending on what
speakers your viewers are listening on.
This becomes important when mixing
dialog with music or other sound effects.
Typically if your voice track is peaking
at around negative six DB,
then your backup music should be peaking at around
negative 15 to negative 30 DB depending
on the loudness of the song.
But this is a case by case scenario so make sure to
listen to your audio through different
speakers checking that the audio mix
sounds good no matter what speakers your
viewers are watching on.
And on our Kit page and the link in the description you
can see a list of different speakers and headphones that
we recommend for editing audio.
And speaking of gear recommendations here's
a few recommendations for audio equipment that we use.
The most common type of microphone for film is a shotgun
mic and we recommend the TASCAM DR-10SG.
If you have a lower budget,
or if you have a bigger budget
I would recommend buying the Rode NTG-3,
or a Sennheiser 416, along with a Zoom H4N,
or a Zoom H6 to record in to.
The second most common type of
microphone for film is a lavalier mic or
a lav mic for short.
You can get a relatively inexpensive lav mic
that plugs right into your phone for around
65 bucks if you go with the Rode smartLav+.
A mid-range lav mic would be a TASCAM DR-10L.
And then a high-end lav mic
would be a Sennheiser ew 112P G4.
For on-camera mics we love and use the Rode VideoMic Pro
for the higher end, and for being on a budget
the TASCAM shotgun mic is a decent option as well.
And for voiceovers, podcasts, or audio like what
you're hearing right now,
on the cheap end we recommend getting the Blue Yeti,
mid-range would be the Rode NT1,
and on the high end what you're hearing right
now is the Shure SM7B with a Cloudlifter.
And this is probably the most
popular and most widely used mic for
this type of audio and again,
links to all this gear is in our Kit page
in the description.
- But there you have it guys
those are our top 10 tips to getting
clean professional audio.
I promise if you follow these tips and practice
applying them your production value will
go way up which should help you attract
higher paying clients.
And if you'd like to learn more filmmaking tips and tricks
just like this you can join our
Ultimate Online Film School at fulltimefilemaker.com,
where we have over 300 tutorials just like this,
and a community of over 10,000 students from around
the world to connect with and learn from and
you can check out our free one hour
filmmaking training by clicking over
here to get a preview of what the course is like.
Well that's it folks thanks for
tuning in hopefully this was helpful,
don't forget to subscribe
and if you have any further questions please let me know.
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