Being equipped with the right tools is very important to us here at GoodSeed. After all, we are making evangelism and discipleship tools to equip people to reach others for Christ. We do our best to make these tools high quality, be it the quality of the paper or binding of a book or the production value of a video. We do this so that they will last and not be rejected out-of-hand as cheap junk by someone investigating Christianity. I have personally seen a number of videos that have good content, but you have to be really interested to bear watching it because it is so poorly done.
A couple weeks ago we started video production for the By This Name interactive book. The first day was really just testing our ideas and equipment.
We did a morning of filming and then I started to edit it together to see how it was working. After reviewing it, we decided to purchase a shotgun mic just to test and determine if it provided better sound than our (really good) Lavalier mic. It is a big investment, but if we didn’t like the new mic we could always send it back. Here are the results of our testing:
After doing these comparison tests we decided to go with the shotgun mic as it seems to provide clearer audio. This will mean more work for us as one of our crew members must now become a boom mic operator (Steve’s arms will be tired!), but we think it will give us clearer audio for the rest of of the project.
Now that we are equipped with the right tools, we are diving back into our production schedule and are going to be doing more shooting this week. Please pray for our crew as we set aside our regular jobs and pick up cameras, slates, mics and other equipment.
Just looked over the two test runs. For the first video by Goodseed, the shotgun mike is clearly better throughout.
I found one odd thing, and that is perhaps just a matter of the mix or of my computer’s audio system. However, in the shotgun and lav mike test with Troy, in the last three samplings, the best and most natural sound, and the easiest to listen to of the three, came from the TR50 sound test. Probably just an anomaly, but you may want to re-listen to it.
Like I said, it is possibly the speakers I have, but I thought I should mention it.
Love in Christ, John
I actually thought the same thing when listening to my own voice. I think a couple of factors might be that my voice is deeper and the mic may be a bit further away in the testing. It wasn’t as dramatic a difference as it was when shooting with John.
I would have to say my observations were similar to John’s. In the first production the difference was much more noticeable, and the shotgun was the better sound. In your check, even after a couple runs, I was having trouble deciding which one I thought was the better example. The second test approach probably would have benefited by reading something a bit longer and a range of expressions that would change the tone of your voice.