Five Audio Options for Your Home or Office Studio

Being photographers we are accustomed to pay attention to composition, lighting, depth of field, colors, focal length and many other factors that comprise the final frame.

Photographers entering the world of video have the advantage of already mastering all these aspects, but one of the most important aspects in video gets ignored way too often – audio.

Audio recording is not something that automatically comes to mind for a stills photographer, in many cases leading to sloppy sound that ruins the video, but luckily Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens is here to help.

Watch the video for five options for recording audio in your home studio. Jay explains the advantages, disadvantages and price of these solutions, ranging from free to $1,000.

The optionss discussed in the video are:

1. Your camera’s internal mic
2. Shotgun Mic on Camera (Rode Videomic Pro)
3. External Recorder (Zoom H4N Handy Portable Digital Recorder)
4. Lavalier Microphone (Sennheiser Lavalier Mic)
5. Shotgun Boom Microphone (Sennheiser 416 Shotgun Mic)

Obviously anyone of the options will be better than your camera’s built-in mic, but Jay doesn’t only go into detail about why each method is better than the previous one, he also demonstrates it.

By the end of this video you will understand why the Zoom is better as a backup and why the Sennheiser 416 is the industry standard, even if you won’t be able to afford one.

While discussing the lavalier mic, Jay warns about forgetting to remove the mic when you go to the bathroom. True, that could be very embarrassing, but forgetting to take off your lav mic when you go to the bathroom AND confess to murder is even worse: