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Videography Tips for Amateurs: Making Sure Your Audio Doesn’t Distract or Disinterest Your Audience

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Understanding videography can seem like a long and difficult process for any amateur that is just learning the basics of the video creation process. The first misconception of all inexperienced videographers is that the video footage itself is the most important part of the finished product. While all footage for your project is obviously extremely important, learning that the production of audio that accompanies your video can be just as crucial as video footage when creating a well-rounded final product.

Sound can make or break your entire video. If the audio quality is low, there is a good chance that potential viewers will shy away. If a TV commercial came on that had foul or sub-par audio you probably wouldn’t watch it, and you might end up thinking that particular company and the product it was advertising were shoddy. It’s hard enough to hold the attention of any potential viewer, so be sure to not drive them away with audio!

If you are directly recording something like an interview, make sure you use the proper microphone equipment, and/or use an extended shotgun mic.

Always make sure before you conduct the interview or whatever it is you are recording that the sound quality is appropriate and sounds okay. Otherwise, if you realize later that your sound quality is poor or perhaps it didn’t record for some reason (camera or human error), then you may end up recording the video project again. And if you were conducting an interview, it is pretty embarrassing to contact the person or people you interviewed and ask them to schedule the same interview for a later date.

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Sometimes the sound in the video you have created will not be directly recorded with the video, and creating a narrative separately can be a great way to build a strong overall mood, tone, and voice for the video. Using a free audio editing and recording program like Audacity can be effective, but the quality of the microphone used is a key factor in the best resulting audio quality.

If you don’t have the luxury of a high quality microphone you can use a smart phone to record your narrative, and then send that to your computer to be uploaded. Find a small quiet room and take some sample recordings of you talking. Make sure you are speaking into the correct part of the device, then listen to those clips until you develop the best result.

Preparing a script and identifying your rhetorical approach before you record may be the most crucial advice for amateur videographers. Even if your audio sounds great, potential viewers aren’t going to watch or be impressed if the narrative isn’t rhetorically appropriate and captivating. Make sure you know the intended audience and why you are making the video before you start the process.

Developing a key message or messages for your audience is equally important, and using a slogan to drive this message home to your audience is a common marketing and branding technique that is extremely effective. Making sure your audience remembers exactly what you want them to after they watch is going to be hard to achieve without developing a strong message for the video as a whole.

Video footage or images being used in the video need to correspond to the audio. Nothing is more distracting than having contradictory audio and video content. This can be extremely confusing and deter people from getting the message(s).

Another typical mistake of beginners can be creating text slides with overwhelming amounts of information. We’ve all seen an overloaded PowerPoint slide and perhaps you have created one. It can just be our first inclination to write as much as possible in one place. Video products can be a little more difficult to create text for because the viewer can only do so much. Make it easy for them to digest all of the information by not overwhelming them!

If you have any questions about producing strong audio content for your video project don’t hesitate to contact us today!

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