Stellar Sound for Your Next Corporate Video Production

It's the one thing that often gets overlooked, but yet is entirely crucial to your next corporate video production: sound. With the so much focus today on image, its easy to forget that audio is still 50% of your audience's experience of your corporate message.

We've put together an extensive sound kit for your next video production.

At the heart of the sound bag is the field mixer. Rather than relying on a camera's limited limiters or its weaker preamps, a dedicated field mixer has powerful preamps for microphones, as well as sensitive limiters that help prevent the incoming audio signal from peaking and distorting. It also has much better monitoring display, allowing the recordist to accurately gauge audio levels, and adjust the input levels on the fly, rather than relying on post-production to clean it up (and sparing extra expense for you). It has adjustable low-cut filters, which can help remove unwanted low frequency sounds (like the buzz from an office's fluorescent lights, for example), and more inputs and outputs than a typical camera. It also allows the recordist to check each of the production's microphones individually, rather than in the camera's mix. Most field mixers typically cost $2000 - $3000 alone, more than any individual microphone in use on the production.

Second to the sound recordist's arsenal are the microphones. If you're recording in a less than ideal space (one that has a fair bit of ambient background noise), lapel -- or lavalier - microphones tend to isolate vocal sounds nicely, as they are close to the body and are built to reject lower frequency sounds. Make sure your production company uses good quality lavs, as not all are created equal. Our Sanken COS lavs are renowned in the film and television industry for their sound quality!

Wireless transmitters are also not all equal; our Lectrosonics transmitter, for example, has nearly four times the range of our Sony transmitters, is much easier to configure for sound output, and is built like a tank. Despite the widespread use of lapel mics, however, nothing sounds more "present" and close-to-real-life than a boom-mounted short shotgun or hypercardioid microphone: they typically have a much flatter frequency response, and they pick up some of the tonal characteristics of the space in which they are being used. Hypercardioids like the Sennheiser MKH50 are great for indoor recording, while short shotguns like our Sennheiser MKH416 and ME66 tend to be more versatile in both indoor and outdoor locations.

The sound recordist will also have other accessories to help make the sound a standout attribute in your production: a zeppelin and windscreen for reducing wind noise, a shock mount for eliminating handling noise, a long boom pole, and lapel mounting clips and stickies to keep lapel mics invisible if wanted, or discretely attached if desired.

Many productions also use recorders to create a backup of the audio (in addition to what's recorded directly to camera); some of these, like the Sound Devices 788, have apps for the iPhone that allow you to wirelessly monitor sound levels that come in, as well as the ability to synch with a timecode generator or slate. The backup sound files captured by the recorder are kept by post-production in case anything happened to the audio that was recorded to camera.

At the end of the day, audio is one of the key elements that help create an effective, solid video production -- so make sure your production has great audio going for it!