Sound and Audio

Enter your text here...

Why is good sound important in filming?

Good sound is important because the audience would focus on the film and understand what the characters in the film are saying which means that the audience will know what happens throughout the story. 

What do you have to do to achieve high quality sound?

Location

To achieve good quality sound when doing an interview.  For example, you have to choose a good location. if you were recording sound for an interview in a church, then it is not an ideal location as the church is a very reverberant room. The church has a big interior which is not good because the sound would be bouncing around the church which would cause lots of reverb on your recording. Another reason why churches are really reverberant is because the whole interior is made out of hard material. If it was made out of soft material the sound would be able to stop bouncing go through the soft materials.  

To find the best place to record sound you have to find a small room with lots of soft material (For example carpeted floors, acoustic foam) The reason for this is when you have a smaller room the sound wouldn't bounce around the room as much and  the soft materials in the room would absorb the sound and stop it moving around the room

Equipment

Having good quality equipment is also important. To record sound you can use any type of equipment but if you want to record interviews or documentaries then a sound record would suit you best. 

Zoom H1N

This is the Zoom H1N sound recorder. This sound recorder is a very portable handy device. It is very budget friendly for a beginner sound recorder. And it is really easy to use. The Zoom H1N takes micro SDs as storage so it is really versatile. 

How to use the Zoom H1N

To use the sound recorder you press record once and you are ready to go. Whenever you want to stop recording press the square button to stop the current recording. 

If you want to get clear audio from the Zoom H1N I recommend to buy a lavalier microphone. It is specially used for one to interviews and documentaries. 

Lavalier microphone

This is how a Lavalier mic looks like. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack.  

You clip the Lavalier microphone on your clothes. The closer to your mouth the better the quality of the sound recording. 

Zoom H4N

The Zoom H4N is a more expensive and upgraded version of the H1N. Although it works pretty similar to the H1N, the H4N takes a normal sized SD card to store your sound recordings. The H4N in my opinion is more durable than the H1N due to the fact the build is more stronger than the H1N. At the bottom the H4N has two connections. These connection can be used to connect a boom microphone to it.     

How to use the Zoom H4N

The H4N has the same controls as the H1N, so not much has changed.

Zoom H4

The Zoom H4 is an older model of the H4N. The menu layout is different on the H4. The H4 takes normal sized SD cards.

How to use Zoom H4

The H4 has a different button layout. On the left hand side you have the sound quality and format section. This where you can change the recording format (for example you can change it to .mp3, .wav file) the sound quality buttons on the H4 is buttons 1 to 3, on there you can change the quality of sound. The standard sound quality is 44.1khz. 

The H4 has a menu button on there you can change the settings on your recorder. The good thing about the H4 is that at the bottom there are the two connectors which, you can use to connect a boom microphone or a shotgun microphone 

Adobe audition editing 

This is a screenshot of interview recording that I was editing in Adobe audition. I had to lower the sound of the recording because it was too loud. When I was listening to the recording it sounded quiet in some parts. When the interviewer was asking the question you couldn't hear him properly. When I replying to the questions asked my part of the interview was too loud. There was an amount of background noise during the interview. 

The reason why the audio would've been too quiet or loud was probably because of bad microphone placement. The mic was too far away from the interviewer and the mic was too close to me when I was talking 

Voice over edit 

This video is the first class task that I did today. It is a simple voice over edit. I've used bensound for some music so I could put the music over the voice recording. 

During the task all I had to do is make the music louder before the voice recording starts. I also had to lower the music down a lot because it was very loud and it was going over the recommended sound levels

This is the second class task that I did. The task was to make a pool diving video. I learnt how to use a new effect on Premiere pro. 

In this image it shows how I added the new effect that I learnt. The effect is called FFT Filter and basically what it does it muffles the sound and it sounds like you're underwater. to add this sound effect you go on the audio track mixer and click the small arrow on the  top left hand side, after that it will show 4 white bars and that is where you can add the filter. You select the option Filter and EQ and then click on FFT filter. After a small window will pop out (the small window in the centre of the image) and on that small window you can change the audio levels of the sound recording. the lower you go the more muffled the sound will sound like. 

This image shows the clip that I used to add the FFT Filter effect