How is it that I have shot video for quite a long time now, and it often feels like I still have no clue what I am doing? I’m thinking in particular of audio. Audio is a constant concern, and I wonder why that should be. Surely, there is a simple way to just record audio with one microphone and be done with it. But if there is such a simple method, I haven’t stumbled across it.
I’m thinking about this because I recently went to a night market in Kuala Lumpur with my friend Jamie, and while shooting video, I used my Rode Wireless Go II microphones. I had one microphone on me and I put the second one on Jamie. Simple, right? I should get clear audio of my voice AND his voice. But it’s not that simple.
For one thing, one of my Rode Wireless Go microphones is broken. The microphone capsule itself doesn’t work anymore. To get around that, I attached a lavalier microphone. So now, my Rode microphone has a lavalier mic plugged into it and Jamie’s does not. And this led to an unexpected problem – the audio quality is now completely different. My lav mic isolated my voice and implemented strong noise cancellation, so you don’t hear much of the background noise. Jamie’s microphone was just a regular Rode Wireless Go without a lav mic, and his microphone recorded his voice PLUS a LOT of the background noise. And now when I switched back and forth from Jamie’s mic to mine while editing, the audio changes drastically, and it sounds really strange in the video. You’ll hear just my voice, and then suddenly you get Jamie’s voice with a huge blast of background noise. Then it goes quiet again and back to my voice. It’s so bad that I couldn’t use Jamie’s audio most of the time.
Another problem is that in order to use two microphones feeding audio into the same camera, I have to split the audio into separate tracks. I set up the mics so that each microphone records audio onto a different audio track. This is necessary because quite often Jamie and I will be far apart. I will be talking on camera, and he will be twenty feet away talking to a market stall owner or food seller. But his microphone is still recording, and if I don’t split the audio, his voice will be recorded over top of my voice, and they can’t be separated and it’s a huge mess. So I split the audio so that when necessary, I can mute his voice. When we are together, I use both audio tracks. When we are separate, I use only mine or only his. It’s just how things have to work.
But now editing that video is far more complex. Before I can even start, I have to duplicate the audio track so that I have two copies on the timeline. And then I have to adjust the clip properties so that one track puts my audio on both the left and right channels and the other track puts Jamie’s audio on both the left and right channels. And then I have to constantly mute his audio track or mute mine or have both unmuted depending on the circumstances. It’s really time-consuming and complicated.
And even when both microphones are working and I have done all the work of setting up the audio track properties in DaVinci Resolve, I’m still ONLY getting Jamie’s voice and my voice. I’m NOT recording the audio of other people around me. The Rode Wireless Go microphones are designed to be worn on your body and record what is immediately around them. So I’m now recording my voice and Jamie’s voice, but you can barely hear the voice of anyone we are talking to. So how do you record that THIRD person’s voice?
Clearly, this dual-microphone setup is not ideal. It’s too complex and it STILL doesn’t record my environment properly despite doing so much work to implement it. But what is the solution? What do other YouTubers do if they want to record their own voice clearly PLUS the voices of all the people around them without getting blasted by background noise? I need a one-microphone solution that works in a noisy environment like a night market, but I don’t know what that could be.
And it feels like I’ve tested all of the alternatives at one time or another. I’ve tried to use the built-in microphones of the GoPro, and it sounded awful. I tried to use the GoPro Media Mod microphones, and that didn’t work. Long ago, I started off with a Boya shotgun mic because all the YouTubers were using shotgun mics back in those days. But that doesn’t work because the shotgun mic only records the audio from in front. When I am aiming the camera at me, it records my voice, but when I aim the camera at someone or something else, it records only their voice and not mine anymore. They’re directional mics. They only record what is in front of them. And even then, they are far too quiet. The audio levels are super low. I’ve tried using a shotgun microphone that has both a front capsule and a rear capsule. But that didn’t work out either. So, what is the solution?
Perhaps I should go back to the shotgun mic with the dual front-facing and rear-facing capsules and try that again. The audio won’t be as good or as clear or as strong as with a Rode Wireless Go, but perhaps it will be good enough. And good enough is really all you can ask for as long as it keeps things simple. My current system for recording audio with two separate Rode Wireless Go mics is way too complicated sometimes. It requires too much effort and time.
So, I’m in search of a simpler approach.