Whenever you work on a corporate video production project, one of the first tips that you may run into is the advice that you should invest in an external microphone to effectively pick up on the audio for your video footage. This is because the built-in microphone on your camera, regardless of its visual quality, is rarely good enough to get good enough audio to use for your corporate video.
However, you may find, in rare instances, that you might have to use your built-in microphone and make the most out of it. To help you out, here are some ways to improve the quality of your built-in microphone for your corporate video production project.
Get closer
The biggest problem with built-in microphones is that it doesn’t do a great job of picking up audio in general. This is because the best that built-in microphones can do is pick up on shallow audio, which makes it difficult to pick up on audio that is far away.
If you find yourself needing to use a built-in microphone to record your audio, one way to improve its quality is by getting closer to the subject. Ideally, you want to be as close as an arm’s length to the cameraman in order for the audio to be picked up sufficiently enough.
This setup is great for vlog style videos that are quite popular in the corporate video industry, so this is a good option to consider. It is easy enough to set up a tripod and your camera for a shoulder shot of the subject and still get good-quality audio to use for your corporate video.
Turn off automatic settings
It can be tempting to rely on automatic options for your audio recording, but this means leaving the recording at the mercy of the camera’s settings. The problem with this is that your built-in mic is more likely to pick up on background noise if you leave it to the automatic settings, so it’s best if this is something that you handle manually so that you have full control over the audio recording.
Don’t forget to play back any audio that you have recorded so that you are sure that you have what you need without having to backtrack during editing. The last thing that you want is to start putting your corporate video production project together, only to realize that you can’t use any of the audio that you have. A few minutes of review can make a huge difference later on down the line and make things easier for you.