Audio equipement for making educational chemistry videos? Any suggestions?

C

christian0710

Member
Hi,

I want to make some educational chemistry videos and need to record good audio. My camera will be at a distane so what could i do?

Could I buy a lavalier microphone and attach it to an external audio recorder? In that case what audio recorder and lavalier microphone would you recommend? A zoom H1?

Help is appreciated,

Kind regards
Christian
 
For a start...... shoot the segments with a VIDEO camera and not a stills camera, it will save you some much time in post production / editing.
 
I concur, hire professorial audio person(s). Even if your pictures are great. w/o good sound, your production will suffer and appear amateur / grade school like... which I am sure... you do not want, especially if YOUR credibility is at stake.
 
What camera? What distance?
As others have said, good sound (AND GOOD LIGHTING) make a huge difference between amateur stuff and productions that can be taken seriously.

We don't know any of the three factors here in your decision-making:
1) TIME - do you have lots of time to experiment with getting everything right before you can start producing videos?
2) MONEY - Do you have a budget to buy solutions (like hiring professionals for camera, lighting, sound, etc.)?
3) QUALITY - What kind of quality are you expecting to produce? Something posted for free on YouTube? Something you want to sell to schools?

While you can quickly achieve your desired quality by hiring professionals, you can also eventually arrive at it by spending enough time experimenting and learning.

These are all tradeoff decisions only you can make since we are not privy to any of the necessary details.

Since you didn't mention a camera we don't know whether you already have one, or whether you are going to select one soon. We also don't know what is your experience with video editing?
Recording audio on a separate recorder is made more necessary by either needing high-quality recording (which doesn't seem likely for instructional speech), or else by really low-quality audio performance of the camera. Recording audio separately requires you to sync the separate audio with the video during editing. Unless you have a really terrible camera without a microphone input, recording separate audio seems like significantly more trouble than its worth.

OTOH, using a decent microphone is an absolute necessity. There is NO camera-mounted microphone that will do the job adequately for what you are asking. The traditional way of picking up sound is to use a "shotgun mic" (outdoors) or a hyper-cardioid mic (indoors) on a boom-pole. More modern techniques include using a clip-on "lavaliere" mic or even a "headset" or earset which puts the mic right next to your mouth (for best isolation from lousy room acoustics).

If you are running around a lot, a wireless mic may be useful, but if you are simply lecturing and demonstrating conventional chemical experiments, it is not clear that you need the extra expense and complexity of a wireless kit.

Quite good-sounding videos have been made with a $30 clip-on mic plugged directly into a camera. Of course a camera with a proper mic input is a basic necessity. If the camera doesn't even have a microphone input, then it probably has low-quality video performance as well and would be poor selection for what you want to do.
 
If the OP is doing these video non-paid, as a hobby, for YouTube, etc...

...he's likely not going to go buy a "video" camera (with XLRs and good audio recording abilities).

On the low end, I'm only familiar with the Tascam DR-60D ($200 new, probably plenty used). This has XLR inputs, so you need a more pro-level mic, or some sort of transformer-based adapter if your mic has the consumer 1.8" mini plug (IE, iPhone headphone cable style).

If you don't have a sound guy, I'd say clip a lav on. You'll be looking up and down, moving around, even if it's just a tabletop presentation. If you're going to buy a mic, and a boom stand, and try to aim it, etc... just clip on a lav.

Look at stuff by Rhode; look at some of the less expensive lavs made for DSLRs and prosumer cameras; I once used a $30 AKG (or AT??) from Amazon. Sounded surprisingly good.

If you're using a DSLR, do a test with a cheap mini-plug mic plugged right into the thing. Try to work in a quiet place. Will it sound like a hollywood feature? No. Will it sound much cleaer and cleaner than an on-camera mic? Most likely it will be night and day.

I've - in a pinch - used a Tascam DR-03 pocket recorder to get audio from a sound board. It's got a mic in and costs like $40. If this isn't stuff you're billing 2 grand a day for, you can go a long way towards reasonably professional sounding audio without dropping a fortune. You might have to learn how to synchronize audio in your editor.

Or buy the DR-60D - it comes with PluralEyes. Find an affordable XLR lav solutin for it. Just remember to record a synch track in your camera... and allow time for testing and evaluating, followed by re-thinking levels or whatever, and re-testing. If you can teach chemistry, you can learn this stuff.
 
As others have said with out knowing what you want/ need to end up with and how much effort/ time you are willing to spend it's pretty impossible to give useful advice.

For instance I would probably go the opposite direction with cameras, but I'm assuming a very modest budget. Most recent DSLR's have video almost as much in mind as stills, there is no real difference in the editing but the sensor size and lens choices means you can get better images and use creative DOF than might really enhance your films.

But that is assuming comparable price points. If you have the budget for a real professional video camera then the formula changes a bit.

So tell us more and I'm sure you will get some very useful information.
 
Hey Christian, if you are looking at entry-level options...for about $50 there are some inexpensive wired lav microphones (e.g. Audio Technica ATR3350) that has a 20ft cable...so you might be able to go direct to your camera (if it has a 1/8" mic input). Next step up is that you can get decent results from using an android/iPhone smartphone, a RODE SmartLav+, and RODE's smartphone app (or other audio recording application). Lav mic on, smartphone in the pocket of your subject...SmartLav+ is under $100, and you can leverage a smartphone instead of having to purchase a digital recorder.

Of course, every step up the ladder gives additional benefits for quality of sound capture, operating options, etc...so a digital recorder paired up with the same SmartLav+ microphone (although need a RODE adapter to give TRS connection instead of the smartphone TRRS, connector) will give you some more recording options and flexibility...but at a higher cost.

Anyway, hope this helps with identifying options...
 
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