From the course: Creating an Online Video Ad: 1 Writing, Production, and Shooting

The importance of audio

From the course: Creating an Online Video Ad: 1 Writing, Production, and Shooting

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The importance of audio

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- Now, some of you might be wondering why we actually switched locations, and it's pretty simple, it has all to do with audio. What I can tell you is audio is sometimes overlooked. The last thing that's thought about when it comes to a video ad or any type of video production, and it happens to be equally important. What we did is we ran into a number of stumbling blocks in our location when we were planning to actually film these videos. One of them is there was a train in the back that was going back every single hour. We were met with the neighbor having a sandblaster pretty much for the entire time that we were there. Extremely noisy birds, as well as an HVAC going off that would've made the audio that I was going to record unusable. So one thing that I do recommend is, if you can spend some time in the locations that you're about to go to to check it for audio, I totally recommend that as you'll be able to get an idea for the environment. Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to audio is the idea of potentially capturing two separate audio sources. A common setup could be to have a wireless lavalier if you have a subject such as we did with Lindsey so that we can capture clean audio or the cleanest audio from what she's saying, along with a boom mike, which could either come from a camera to have a separate audio source. You could then take these two audio tracks and in post, use whichever one is better based on that particular day. While the lavalier in most cases will be your cleanest audio, ever so often what might happen is a subject could touch their chest and that would create the audio to spike, which would make that particular sentence unusable. Another thing that you might want to keep in mind is the frequency that you're using on a wireless lavalier. Sometimes you might choose a frequency that is conflicting with another frequency in use, which would create an unwanted hum on your audio source. While this is in some cases fixable in post, you would rather not want to have this. And if I were to say one audio rule that would rule them on, is you definitely want to make sure that the audio recorded does not breach the zero-decibel level. This would cause your audio to clip and become distorted. So my general recommendation is to have it somewhere between negative six and negative 12. Some people, especially in broadcast will tell you record at an even lower level. So keep these tips in mind for when you're dealing with audio during your video ad.

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