Basic Training Basic Sound for Video
"I don't know why I spend all this time recording such beautiful sound," I once heard a television sound engineer lament. "They're just going to mix it down to one channel, and people are going to listen to it on a speaker the size of a walnut."
That was way back in the 1980s, when having the best sound system for video in the whole neighborhood meant you had two channels of audio on your VHS player. The world has changed a lot since then. Home theaters today have better audio than most movie houses had in the 80s. People today routinely watch video with sound coming from six or more speakers. New technologies have not only increased the sound quality, but drastically reduced both the size of the speakers and the amount of power needed to drive them.
What all this means is that videographers now must pay much more attention to recording audio with their productions, because people aren't necessarily watching in low-fidelity anymore. But what to do if you don't have six microphones, countless boom operators, Foley artists or the time to mix things into surround-sound channels? There are a few things you can do to drastically improve your sound quality, even if you're recording in…
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