Recording Sound

As you start making movies, you’ll quickly discover that it’s more enjoyable to watch poor-quality video with great sound quality than high-quality video with terrible sound. You’ll also discover that most handheld video cameras use omnidirectional microphones. They record sounds from beside, behind, and in front of the camera, resulting in ambient noise that can be very distracting.

To create movies with better sound:

  1. When shooting landscapes and establishing shots, you may not need to record the audio associated with the video you’re capturing. In such cases, mute the audio track and replace it with music, sound effects, or dialog recorded separately.
  1. When videotaping someone speaking or when shooting a conversation between two or more people, zoom out completely so you can move the camera as close to your subjects as possible while still maintaining a medium shot — not a close-up.
  2. Consider getting either an external microphone you can have your subjects speak into or a unidirectional shotgun microphone you can attach to your video camera.