Mar 11, 2021

Audio test

My mother's studio is the ideal setting for Creating Fashion with Laurel. The trouble is, it's a basement. And with that comes an audio challenge. Laurel's voice is reverberating off the walls as it reaches the camera's built-in microphone.

I've made mulitiple attempts to reduce the echo, but it has persisted through every episode. When we were shooting scenes this past weekend, I recorded the audio separately from the camera using two boom microphones and a Zoom H5 recorder.

Boom mics pick up sound that's directly in front of them, minimizing any incidental noise from their surroundings. In television productions, boom mics are held above the actors so that even though they're on a great big stage, all you hear is one actor's voice at a time.

I had one of the mics pointed at Laurel and the other at the table. The resulting audio files still required adjusting in Premiere Pro, but the reverb has definitely been reduced. The video below compares the audio we were getting with what we're getting now: