From the course: 360 Video Production and Post

A look at ambisonic sound recording

From the course: 360 Video Production and Post

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A look at ambisonic sound recording

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- With 360 video comes the need to capture immersive sound. Sound that mimics how we perceive it in real life when we move around. The industry refers to this type of sound capture as ambisonic sound recording. In this movie, we're going to take a look at a few solutions currently available on the market. We're going to take a look at ambisonic sound recording in this movie, or just a nice fancy way of saying a way to record, playback, and mix 360 audio. With 360 spherical video, we also need a way of capturing 360 spherical audio. One cool thing is that it was actually invented in the 1970s, but it wasn't adopted then. It's actually been adopted now for several reasons, mostly being the fact of wanting to have sounds beyond the boundaries of being limited to, let's say, a speaker, or a series of speakers, whether that be six, or seven, or 16. Let's get beyond the speakers and let's get audio basically treated as though it's a 360 degree sphere of sound. So, with this, keep in mind that sound is always going to come from a center point. And then when you record 360 video, that center point is the camera. In ambisonic sound recording, if you're recording live on a set, if you're doing your ambisonics there, the ambisonic mic is going to be, more than likely, just below the camera in order to capture the experience. You really don't want that audio to be too far away from your camera, from that center point. Now, the most popular format is referred to as ambisonic B, but there is a ton of different ambisonic formats that you can choose from in that audio workflow. Ambisonics work in a speaker-free world. Many people compare it to working with stereo sound, and, again, all types of stereo, or surround sound stereo are limited to speakers, and ambisonics are not. They also take one very important thing besides spreading it evenly throughout the sphere. The idea is it takes height, or what we'll call elevation, into account. Ambisonics capture the horizontal, so we can have sounds coming from above us, and sounds captured from below us, and that's going to be a lot more realistic than that of surround sound or what we're limited to in that speaker environment. So, with that, let's just take a look at some different ambisonic sound recorders available on the market. First thing I'm going to mention is the TetraMic, a very popular mic. You can see here how the ambisonic sound mic looks. It actually has four different mics all attached together to capture the spatial audio. This is one professional sound recording mic that you can use to capture your sound. And you can head to this website to find more information about it. Sennheiser Ambeo also has a very similar type array. It's called the tetrahedral type of arrangement. The four matched arrangement for capturing this ambisonic sound as it makes sense it is an ambeo recorder. You can go check out this also for professional recording. Great mic for capturing these experiences. On the lower-end of things, we've got the Zoom H2n handy recorder, and it's set for recording spatial audio for VR, as it says here. It will give you some information on how it captures that, and it is at a very reasonable price point. Hopefully, that gives you some ideas of some of the various mics on the market, there are more, of course, and a little bit about what ambisonic recording is all about.

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