Record Audio

[Soumendra Jena]

Hi, Im using 5D Mark III for my wedding videos.

For my highlight videos, I want to keep my voice notes of the bride and groom speaking about each other or their friends.

I shot one yesterday, but I see , with their voice, there is a large part of air sound, background sounds, etc.

But I remember, the place was quite quiet.

I feel like, I need something, where I can filter the audio channels, so I can delete all the sound channels and only keep their voice, so I can use it then.

What do you use guys use for such filtering ?

[Adrian Tan]

I think an answer to this question would have three parts: there's gear, there's recording technique, and then there's post production.

Recording technique (probably matters more than gear): pick a quiet location in the first place (very important); and get the microphone as close to sound source as possible, preferably less than 30cm. Just get those two things right, and that will solve most of your sound problems.

Gear: for the sort of thing you're talking about, the most practical solutions might be to use a lapel microphone if you can; otherwise, use a shotgun microphone with a dead cat; and also flick the switch to cut out low frequency sounds (if you're using a Rode VMP, say). If you're desperate (eg, interviewing a bridal party at a windy photoshoot), maybe you can erect some sort of shield to shelter your mic from the wind.

Cleaning up in post: lots of things you can do. You can attenuate different frequencies, or ranges of frequency. You can remove specific noises. Etc. I imagine you do know about all this stuff already. I'm a terrible sound editor personally, so will leave it to others to talk about software, filters/effects, techniques...

Of course, the ideal scenario is not to do any editing at all, or minimal editing... You want the original recording to be as loud as possible without peaking; then, when you reduce sound in post, you automatically cut out a lot of the background noise.

[Roger Gunkel]

Adrian has made some very good points that I would completely agree with. The main one being that the most important thing is to get the sound right at source. With voice recording of any sort, the closer to the voice the better, even in a quiet room, in order to cut out room reflections. When ambient sounds are present, close miking is absolutely essential for good quality, although a low frequency filter can help to minimise wind roar, vehicle sounds etc. Even a very high quality mic will be seriously compromised by poor placement.

The main problem with post production sound editing is that the human voice contains a very wide range of frequencies and cutting out frequencies of other intrusive sounds may indeed make the voice more audible, but can also heavily affect the sound of the voice making it sound thin and tinny in extreme cases.

Roger

[Soumendra Jena]

Okay, this was my first time with voice, so next time, I will get a wireless voice recorder on the shirt of the speaker.

For now, for the current voice videos, is there a way I can simply edit some frequencies and get rid of the surrounding sounds and just keep the human voice part ?

[Paul R Johnson]

It depends at what frequencies the noise is - speech is mainly between 300 and 3KHz - if the noise is below or above this then you may be able to filter it off - although it leaves the speech sounding rather thin. I the noise is within this area, then if you try to filter it, you will remove the important areas that allow the listener to understand what is being said.

[Alen Koebel]

Another idea is to try the noise filter in Audacity (which is a free program). Import the audio track and find a couple of seconds where all you hear is background noises. You use that portion of the track to train the filter what to take out of the entire track (or just an isolated portion). I find that if I choose the training portion well I can get at least 6dB of noise reduction without voices sounding phase-y. If you can accept a little phase distortion (and sometimes it's either that or not hear anything intelligible at all) you can go even higher.

[Robert Benda]

Came here to say the exact same thing as Alen. Audacity gives you access to some respectable software for free. You'll have to play around with the noise reduction to see what works best for you. It's a balancing act since anytime you remove noise, SOME of the frequencies in the material you want to keep will often go.

For the future, consider a matchstick microphone you can hide over the larger styles typical of lapel microphones. We bought one for $125 (MM Series Matchstick Matchstick Lapel Style Microphone) to pair with our pocket recorder, the Olympus DM-620 which is noticeable smaller and lighter than our Tascams.

That microphone can be hidden BEHIND a shirt (use fabric tape to hold in place) and, if the situation warrants, COULD be used to mic a bride with the recorder in the small of her back or on her leg.

[Soumendra Jena]

What Im looking for is a wireless mic to be attached to the shirt of my clients, something like this,
http://classrooms.ucr.edu/aimages/ne..._on_collar.jpg

And there should be a receiver to that wireless mic which can be fitted to the camera hot shoes and camera xlri input or whatever, so that the video's audio is recorded by that wireless mic is gets recorded to my camera video directly.

Which product would you suggest ?

[Don Bloom]

That would be just about any lav mic you chose. Of course the clip you use will determine it as well. I have and used vampire clips when needed but my go to lav clip is the Sennheiser MZQ22 clip using one mic and keeping the other clip as a spare. It is also the mic clip of choice for many if not most TV stations in the mid-west US if not the country.

As for which brand of wireless???? Many discussions about that in the audio forum but the list generally looks like this; Sennhesier, Audio Technica, Lectrosonics if the budget allows...Pretty much and portable wireless system will work.

search around thru the audio forum, I think you'll get a bunch of info and answers there.

[Soumendra Jena]

Which one do you use ?

[Soumendra Jena]

Is this something which would do the job for me ?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/740231-REG/Audio_Technica_PRO_88W_R35_Pro_88W_Camera_Mountable.html

[Soumendra Jena]

After reading a lot of reviews, I feel like I should go for wired, as wired has less issues and cheap too.

How about this ?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/944398-REG/polsen_olm_10_omni_directional_lav.html
Can this do the job ?

So, the lava mic fits to the user dress and the wire comes from him to the DSLR input point and thats all ?