Videomaker - Camera Audio Control

And in good time out of your cam recorder is one of the easier things to do in the world of video? Once you know where few basic things are located. That is what we intent to cover in this week’s Tips and Tricks. [Intro Music Playing] The first tip is actually to not use the internal microphone on the cam recorders. There are convenient but the problem is they will pick up all kinds of noise that you do not want them to, such as the sound of the drum motor, if it is a tape based cam recorder, or operator noise. Anytime you plush the zim control or adjust the lens focus, is kind of be picking to that at. So if you connect and external microphone with the XLR connectors here, or this one happens to use a 8 inch connection, then, you will have better sound out of that microphone that you can actually aim at something other than what the internal cam recorder microphone is picking up. [Music Playing] And important thing to know is that microphone level signals are a bit lower than line level signals. That is an important thing to know if you are dealing with mixing the audio later or if there is a switch on a cam recorder that says mic or line. It is important to get the best audio from your device. Some cam recorders, there is a control for phantom power. Sometime, this has to be turned on to get the sound you add on the microphone because there is a little bit of power that it needs in order to operate correctly. Some microphones can just use phantom power provided by the cam recorder. Not all cam recorders can provide phantom power though. Other microphones require you to use batteries. Make sure you know what your microphone needs before you go out on the shoot. [Music Playing] For all the virtues of digital audio, all it is good sound how, it is easy to edit. The problem is that if you have a level that it is too high, I will just turn into a bunch of pops on the tape or however you are capturing audio. So be sure to set you audio level control to somewhere between minus 12 and minus 6 for your best audio. [Music Playing] If your cam recorder supports it, a good strategy to use is to record audio at the normal level on channel 1 or the left channel, and then, drop down the level a little bit on channel 2 or the right channel. This one almost guaranteed that you will have some usable audio when you get back to the edit bay. [Music Playing] For years, we have been recommending that our readers and viewers use headphones. There is a really good reason for this. Your ears can tell you stuff that the V-meters would not be able to. So if something does not sound right, it is not right. This will give you a chance to hear that and make appropriate corrections. [Music Playing] So if you cam recorder has manual level controls, audio is going to be a lot easier to edit when you get to the edit bay. However, if you do not have manual level controls, your cam recorder will set the levels for you automatically. This is called Automatic Gain Control. If you intend to edit, this means that you are going to have to do a little bit more work to get with the audio where you want it, because the cam recorder uses the loudest thing that ever records as the basis for setting the level. [Music Playing] One possible way around using Automatic Gain Control is to shoot in a less noisy environment. This is typically not easy to do, however, one good application for this is if you are shooting voice over in a quiet studio or I say a close closet will work too. So with this episode of Tips and Tricks, we hope we showed you how to make the most out of using Manual Level Controls or how to cope with your cam recorder that only has Automatic Gain Control. [Music Playing] [Extro Music Playing]