Enhance Camcorder Audio While Kayak Fishing
Disappointed with the voice audio quality of your camcorder? Here are some suggestions to greatly improve the quality of people speaking in your video presentation. Take a look at two typical scenarios that may sound familiar.
Scenario #1: Ten to forty feet from your kayak, your friend sets the hook on what appears to be a monster bass and asks you to record the action. His camcorder records all his movements. She screams and yells as she describes his emotion in detail.
When he plays the video, he discovers that while the video is very good, his friend sounds a million miles away and most of what he hears is waves crashing against the hull of his kayak and sounds of traffic on the nearby road. . Another valuable moment lost due to poor audio quality.
Scenario #2: Maybe you’ve been shooting videos of the kids and family, but now you want to move from the consumer category to the next step. He recently bought an iMac computer and would like to use iMovie09. What do you need to make this happen?
Most camcorders are equipped with a condenser microphone that is designed to pick up all sounds within a 360-degree radius of the camcorder. While this might be desirable in an outdoor baseball game; a fifth grade school play; a conversation in a quiet atmosphere or a birthday party with a bunch of kids running around Chuck E. Cheese. But if you want a high-quality voice in the midst of the action, I have two affordable recommendations for the up-and-coming kayak-based filmmaker!
In my case, I wanted to make a semi-TV quality video while kayak fishing. He also wanted to post some movies on YouTube. After researching various options, I found a shotgun mic, when attached to your video camera, it primarily captures sounds from whatever you’re aiming at. Shotgun microphones are designed to be very directional and do a good job of ignoring most other background noise. If you want to interview your child (and be able to clearly hear his voice) at a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese with a million other kids running around making a lot of noise, a shotgun microphone is the way to go. This is true for any noisy environment.
In fact, I now always use a Rode Videomic when I record and try not to use the condenser microphone. Sound quality is drastically improved with the Rode. http://www.rodemic.com/microphone.php?product=VideoMic
The second and most impressive addition to my growing collection of video equipment is the Azden WLX-PRO. VHF Wireless Lavalier Microphone System (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAR45nMyTs4). This little beauty allows you to connect a very small lavalier microphone with a cable that leads to a small receiver that clips to your belt. Another small receiver unit is attached to the camcorder and picks up sounds from the lapel microphone, rather than the camcorder’s condenser microphone. The Azden WLX-PRO produces high-quality voice audio and can be used at distances of 150-200 feet from the video camera! For my purposes, this is the single best investment ($150 via Amazon) in camera gear I’ve ever made.
However, for these two items to work properly, you must have a video camera that has a port for connecting a shotgun microphone or wireless tag microphone. (both microphones cannot be used at the same time). In my search for a new standard resolution camcorder, I discovered that Canon offers input jacks for an external shotgun or wireless microphones and another headphone port so you can hear what’s being recorded. I use a Canon FS11 with very good results and the video files transfer easily to Apple iMovie09.
If you’re looking for better audio quality in your videos, choose a wireless microphone from Azden and a shotgun microphone from Rode. Both of these additions are around $150 each, but they are well worth the expense.