Lesson of the Week: Sounding Good Online – Exploring Your Mic Options

In a previous lesson, I explored how to optimize quality on a webcam; this lesson tackles the audio side. Rather than simply discuss the various options I recorded multiple segments using the mics shown below so you can hear the difference. I shot all segments under the same conditions, in my office with fluorescent lights running, which caused the faint hum you hear with the professional microphone but wasn’t picked up by the other mics.

I captured the segments in Camtasia and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. I normalized all audio to 0 db in Premiere Pro to deliver uniform volume, but otherwise didn’t process the audio at all, so no noise reduction or compression.

At the end of the roughly 6-minute video, I choose the mics I liked best and make some general recommendations.

You’ll be asked for your name and email address about four minutes into the video, but you can skip this if you don’t want to sign up for the Streaming Learning Center newsletter.

I hope you find this lesson useful.

 

About Jan Ozer

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I help companies train new technical hires in streaming media-related positions; I also help companies optimize their codec selections and encoding stacks and evaluate new encoders and codecs. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses. I currently work as www.netint.com as a Senior Director in Marketing.

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