Does anyone here have an experience with video recording, and could recommend a quick and cheap (I imagine under $50 and within a week) solution that would make the sound quality better by an order of magnitude (not necessarily perfect)? Or is the problem other than hardware? For example the distance of the microphone, noisy room, bad audio card, bad settings… I don’t have experience with sound recording and processing.
Here is a review of a microphone that costs about $30, and the quality of the sound feels good enough.
Nice idea about a microphone in the interim while we’re fundraising for a nicer videocamera than just a smartphone with a tripod, which we’re using currently. I’ll float it past the Intentional Insights Board, thanks!
You could record the audio on a separate device at the same time placed much closer. I’d suggest recording the audio in a lossless format (I used wavpack but only because it was convenient), then converting to WAV format (lossless but no compression so large filesize). In WAV format the audio can be processed by CN Levelator to improve the quality. Then convert to whatever format you want (eg for podcast) or directly replace the video’s audio with your improved recording using any video editing software. It’s a annoying series of steps but may get you much better audio quality and is free.
Alternative is buying a better microphone. Probably almost any external microphone will get you much better quality, just consider whether you need a directional or omnidirectional microphone (one person talking vs multiple people plus background noise).
Any contemporary digital camera, even a cheap point-and-shoot, is capable of good video, especially when mounted on a tripod and filming a mostly static subject. Many people have digital photo cameras which they don’t think of as video cameras.
Does anyone here have an experience with video recording, and could recommend a quick and cheap (I imagine under $50 and within a week) solution that would make the sound quality better by an order of magnitude (not necessarily perfect)? Or is the problem other than hardware? For example the distance of the microphone, noisy room, bad audio card, bad settings… I don’t have experience with sound recording and processing.
Here is a review of a microphone that costs about $30, and the quality of the sound feels good enough.
Nice idea about a microphone in the interim while we’re fundraising for a nicer videocamera than just a smartphone with a tripod, which we’re using currently. I’ll float it past the Intentional Insights Board, thanks!
What you actually want is a Zoom recorder.
Yeah, we’re considering something like that once we fundraise the $400 it would cost.
You could record the audio on a separate device at the same time placed much closer. I’d suggest recording the audio in a lossless format (I used wavpack but only because it was convenient), then converting to WAV format (lossless but no compression so large filesize). In WAV format the audio can be processed by CN Levelator to improve the quality. Then convert to whatever format you want (eg for podcast) or directly replace the video’s audio with your improved recording using any video editing software. It’s a annoying series of steps but may get you much better audio quality and is free.
Alternative is buying a better microphone. Probably almost any external microphone will get you much better quality, just consider whether you need a directional or omnidirectional microphone (one person talking vs multiple people plus background noise).
Any contemporary digital camera, even a cheap point-and-shoot, is capable of good video, especially when mounted on a tripod and filming a mostly static subject. Many people have digital photo cameras which they don’t think of as video cameras.