Sound Advice: A Listening Ear (page 2)

With your shiny new headphones around your neck, it's time to shoot some video. A good pair of headphones will help you with microphone positioning by allowing you to listen to your setup before you roll tape. Headphones can even help with microphone selection. After listening to the sound of your first microphone choice under actual shoot conditions, you may decide to go with Plan B instead. And here headphones are telling you about the subjective quality of the sound, which is something simple level meters cannot do. Of course, headphones are an excellent way to check for dead mike batteries, noisy connections and nasty hums and buzzes. All these help to improve the quality of your video sound.

And don't forget, there are other practical uses for your new headphones. During narration recording, you or your vocal talent may want to use headphones to monitor as you record. This helps the talent by allowing them to hear the effects of microphone position on their voice. You can also spot noisy paper shuffling, background and other noises more easily with headphones.

Although you may have excellent speakers on your video editing system, headphones are like a microscope and can help you during audio editing. Listening with tiny speakers on your ears is an exaggerated perspective on your sound and can help identify breaths and other odd noises in your audio track, things you might easily miss on speakers. (Note: Headphones are not recommended for tweaking the final mix, however.) Headphones are also great for privacy and isolation if you're editing in a noisy environment. If you're the brave sort who edits video on a laptop, headphones are an essential part of your production environment.

Regardless of whether you need them for confidence monitoring, narration recording or just to kick back with some tunes after a long day of editing video, headphones are an important part of any videographers kit. Find a pair that best fits your specific situation and make friends with them. They will save you grief and pain on a regular basis.

For the longest time, I carried a pair of lightweight cheapie headphones in my camera bag. They came bundled with a portable MP3 player and I hated the way they sounded, but they were free and I had to have something to monitor video sound. Those horrible little 'phones traveled thousands of miles in my camera case--even overseas--and as much as I hated them, they did their job. So, am I a headphone hypocrite? No, I finally upgraded to very nice folding model from a major manufacturer, but the moral of the story is, virtually any pair of headphones are better than no 'phones at all.

Ever wonder what kind of headphones the pros use? Probably not, unless you're an audio geek, but it's pretty easy to find out these days. Stop at the local video rental store and find a couple of famous-name movies that contain making-of documentaries. Watch closely and you'll see the audio person and possibly the director wearing their headphones of choice. Manufacturers and models are all over the map, but Sony MDR-7506 headphones seem to be fairly common. This model is the darling of the professional sound industry for its durability, comfortable fit and excellent sound quality. Or, you can pretend to be Stephen Soderberg and use the headphones that came with your portable stereo.

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