We’ve been having quite a bit of fun recently putting together videos at the office. We’ve got some decent equipment, but one thing has been bugging me for quite some time… the quality of our audio.

Here’s an example shot with a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 webcam using the built-in microphone, standing roughly six feet away from the camera:

It’s OK, but not the greatest. Here’s the same Logitech webcam, but this time sitting in front of the camera, roughly two feet away, with the direction of speaking always toward the camera (and thus, the built-in microphone):

MUCH better! But we still want to be able to do recordings at the whiteboard, walking around, etc.

Here’s an example using the mic built-in with one of our camcorders (an Insignia HD Flash camcorder, which provides amazing video quality for the money):

What’s the ultimate solution? Well, a high-quality lavalier microphone, of course! And we have one… it’s the Audio-Technica ATR-35S.

So, why then, on our latest (and also most popular) videos, do we still have not the greatest sound in the world?

Insignia camcorder with built-in mic, but noisy environment in the middle of office, with lots of moving around by the speaker (relative to the mic):

Same Insignia camcorder and built-in mic, but quieter area with more control of what’s going on:

Same Insignia camcorder and built-in mic, but a better job of noise reduction in post-production:

So, I ask again, if we have the lavalier microphone, why haven’t we been using it? The answer is … we don’t have any place convenient to plug in the lavalier microphone when using our camcorders.

The camcorders themselves unfortunately do not have external microphone inputs.

We’ve tried using the microphone inputs for some laptops and desktops we had handy (and synching the audio and video in post-production), but the poor quality sound cards built-in clearly had some grounding issues, because a hefty hum could be heard (and often overheard) in the background. Plus, this often meant a long cable from the lavalier microphone to the computer, which was likely to be tripped over. No good.

But as of today, that changes. I just picked up a Sony ICD-UX70 digital voice recorder for the video production team, with built-in stereo microphones, an external microphone jack, and MP3 encoding of audio files. Now, we can throw this in the shirt pocket for whoever is speaking on video (when we’re in a rush), or for the best quality, just have the actress or actor hold it/put it in a pocket and wire up the lavalier microphone to walk around freely.

We’re shooting some video this week… I’ll let you know how it works out (hopefully you’ll be able to hear the difference for yourself!).

Here’s to good quality audio.