10 Tips for Capturing Great Audio in Your Videos

Audio is crucial in videos. Are you getting the best audio you can capture?

Famous director and screenwriter, Danny Boyle, is known for titans in the film industry; movies like Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, and so on. Back at the start of his career he observed that there was a gulf between British and American movies. It wasn't anything to do with the plot or the videography, he thought, but somehow the movies in America just seemed better. He then figured out that it's sound and that the American production companies were forking out large sums on it and the British, well, weren't.

This is a different way of expressing a similar sentiment that's perhaps more famous. David Lynch said "Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual." Either way, it's pretty much undisputed now: sound is crucial to a video. The problem is, it's the most alien concept to photographers who transition in to video. I can now confirm this as I work more and more in video.

A lot of video has overlap with photography; exposure, composition, color, and so on. But sound is a new beast; it's essentially a profession in and of itself. In this video, filmmaker Parker Walbeck walks you through ten important tips for getting the best audio in your productions. Some of the tips are fairly entry level, but some I hadn't been utilizing enough myself.

What's your best advice for capturing superb quality audio? Share in the comments below.