Intro
In today's video I'm going to share with you the microphones that I use to record my videos, how I use them, and how I edit the sound to sound better in Premiere Pro. And special thanks to Musicbed for sponsoring today's video. You can use code PREMIERGAL to get one month free when you purchase an annual subscription. All right, let's go ahead and jump on it.
Audio Sources
When I was first learning about filmmaking, I was always told you should always have two sources of sound in case one. I just gave I just gave the finger. It's always recommended to have two audio sources, right? Because if one fails, you have a backup. Now, I've not always done this. I've always been like, well, I've used this microphone a lot. It's never failed. We'll just have one audio source and then the battery dies halfway through and I have to reshoot. So it's always good to have two. And it depends on your setup, right?
For my setup, I have my mirrorless Canon EOS R in front of me.
The Mics I use
And with this camera, I can record with what I have clipped on me here right now, a lavalier mic or a shotgun, for example, if you don't like the bulkiness of the lav here, you can always have a shotgun above or directly on the camera. And if you're not doing a screen recording, which is what I do here at my desk, I'm usually showing you how to do something right. So I have a USB microphone just below me that I record into my computer.
And no matter what screen recording software you use, there's always the ability to choose an external microphone. So the screen recorder that I use is called Capto, and it's just for Mac. And I'm allowed to select my external USB microphone as the source for it to capture. Now, what I also do is I go into my system preferences for sound, and I make sure that the microphone level is set so it's not peaking, right? That's the key here. You don't want it to go into the red or it's going to get all distorted.
So with my screen recording microphone and my on-camera microphone, I'm able to synchronize them inside of Premiere Pro, which I will show you later on. Now, in terms of setting this up, this is actually a really neat little lav mic because it comes pre-paired together with the transmitter. You don't have to, like, change the channels, like, on some of those other lavalier microphones. The only thing that some people might not like about this is that it's so visible, right? Some people would prefer to have a lapel mic because this is clip-on. It's more visible.
But in this case, I think it looks pretty cool. It doesn't bother me, and it's super, super lightweight. And the best part is that you can charge it by a USB-C in this little charging unit. So it also has the other lav mic here, and you can charge the receiver and the other lav mic in here. And what's also really cool is that you can record directly into a DSLR, a tablet, or the computer. It's pretty cool what you can do with it, but it doesn't come with the adapter when you purchase just the mic to actually record into a computer. The setup of this microphone is really easy, though. You just plug in the receiver into the mic input, turn it on, and then you turn on the lapel mic, and you can change to record in mono or stereo as well. And there's a volume input. There's just four levels. And right now, I'm recording at level four for my voice, and it sounds perfect. The other thing that it has is a noise reduction tool. Now, in this environment, I don't need to use it, right, because there's not a lot of noise. But let me show you what it sounds like. You can hear right now, it sounds a little bit distorted because it's actually taking away from my vocal frequencies. All right, I'm going to turn off the noise reduction. But would I actually use the noise reduction? Not in this environment. Maybe in a very super noisy conference environment where I'm pulling somebody to the side would it be useful. But the one thing that's difficult about it is that it's not like a slider that you can just reduce how much noise reduction you want, which is why I prefer to do it in post-production.
All right, so next, let's go ahead and sync these two audio sources and edit it in Premiere Pro to sound even better. But first, do me a favor right now.
Keyboard Waitlist
If this video is helping you out, be sure to give it a thumbs up as well as subscribe. And also, I'm working on a new Premiere Pro keyboard for editors that has all the shortcuts. It's backlit and wireless. Here's a preview of it. We have the first sample iteration right here. And it has custom colors on here, and it has the little gal logo down here.
So if you want to sign up to know when this will be ready for order, you can go to PremiereGal.com/keys to join the wait list. Also, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Musicbed.
Musicbed
So Musicbed is one of my favorite places to find music for my videos because they work with really talented artists like Utah, Canons, and Heartbreak Kid. So they have over 40,000 high quality songs. And of course, you can type in a keyword, but you can also just use these parameters here. For example, genre. Let's choose hip hop. And for mood, let's choose happy. And let's also choose chill because that's usually the vibe I'm going for. You can also, of course, go up here and exclude any moods that you don't want. And down here underneath advanced, you can also choose other parameters like BPM. So if you want it to be a little bit more upbeat, but not too much, we can choose medium. And if you're a musician and you know your keys, you can also choose songs by the exact major key or minor key. And one more thing, because I like to have music behind my voice, I don't like to have any vocals that will, you know, kind of disrupt what I'm saying. So let's choose instrumental and let's play back this one here.
I think that this matches the vibe that I want. So in this case, you can favorite it for later. You can add it to a project, or if you're like, I want to license it, you can click license it. And I'm going to use my subscription here. And then I would just put in my project details and then go ahead and download it. If you're still having trouble, you can always go to the playlist here and you can browse these playlists to see if you might be able to find the track that you're looking for. And if you still need help, you can reach out to the Musicbed team and tell them what you're looking for. And they can search for it for you free of charge. You can use code Premiere Gal to get one month free when you purchase an annual subscription. So thanks so much Musicbed for providing music for this video and sponsoring. And now let's jump back in. So here inside of Premiere Pro, we have the talking head shot right here that has the lav mic sync to it.
Synchronizing Audio
And then I have the screen recording shot that has the USB mic sync to it. To make a new sequence, I'm going to drag this clip into the timeline empty area. Then I'm going to take this screen recording and drag it into the timeline as well. And you can see it has some extra audio tracks here because it was recording the computer audio also, which in this case, we actually didn't need. So I'm going to actually press Command + L to de-link those tracks and then just delete them because they're empty and then select these again and press Command + L to link them back up again. Now I'm going to actually bring the screen recording underneath the video clip here.
So you can see that it's not synchronized. Of course, we could visually try to synchronize it based on the audio waveforms. And you can also see that it's not the same length. And that's okay because I started recording the screen recording later after I started recording the talking head. So let's go ahead and lasso and select all of them, right click and select synchronize. And from here, we can choose the audio and we can choose to synchronize it based on audio track one. That's fine and press OK.
And you can see it shifted over the screen recording and that's exactly what we wanted. So now I can roll in the talking head to meet the beginning of this clip and there's no more information at the end of this video clip. So we can just roll in the screen recording and let's see how it sounds. Well, I can use it to show you how I synchronize the USB microphone with the lav mic audio as well. But we don't need both of the audio tracks, right? So in this case, I'm going to disable the USB microphone and just use the lav mic.
Disabling an Audio Track
So in this case, I'm just going to press command L again to de-link these clips again. When I right click on this clip, I can select enable and it will gray it out so that way we don't hear it. And now we can just hear the lav mic. And so now this is just a sample recording so I can use it to show you how I synchronize the USB microphone with the lav mic audio as well. So it sounds good. I mean, it's acceptable audio. It's nice and clean because I was in a controlled environment.
But we can make it better using the essential sound panel.
Essential Sound
So select your dialogue clip, then go up to essential sound and select dialogue. And from here to make sure it's at the right level, you can go to loudness and select auto match. Now, if you have a little bit of background noise, this is what I was talking about earlier, rather than using the built in noise reduction on the microphone itself, we can actually go and reduce noise if there's any little fan noise behind. Now I like to use just a little bit here, just around 0.5. So this is what it sounds like right now. And so now this is just a sample recording so I can use it to show you how I synchronize if we do too much. So I can use it to show you how I synchronize the USB microphone. It sounds a little bit more tin canny, like it took away some of my vocal frequencies. So just a tad amount in this case just is fine. If you have like harsh S sounds, you can use these DS sliders. If you have any echo, you can use the reduced reverb and you can even go down here and add some creative reverbs as well. But what I like to do is actually go to the track level. So I go to the audio track mixer and open up the effects to show them.
Audio Track Mixer
Now this audio is on audio track one. So this is audio track one here. And what I like to do is add a special mastering effect. If I double click on this, we can change the preset to subtle clarity. And so now this is just a sample recording so I can a little bit too much reverb, right? So let's go ahead and reduce this down. It really depends on what you're going for. Let's try 4%. You know, sample recording. So I can use it to show you how I synchronize the USB microphone with the lav mic audio as well. And if you need to increase the amount of loudness, increase the gain, you can also use the slider. If you wanted to add like one decibel more, for example, to bring up the volume, this is how it sounded before. And so now this is just a sample recording so I can use it to show you how I synchronize. And so now this is just a sample recording so I can use it to show you how I synchronize. Yeah, so just more vocal presence and a little bit of noise reduction, not too much. And adding the reverb, it's really up to your personal preference. Some people really like more reverb. Some people just reduce this down to zero 'cause they don't like it at all. So just play around with it.
It really depends on your voice. So was this video helpful? I hope it was. If you're interested in using the exact gear that I use, the microphones that I use, I'll put a link right over here. And if you wanna learn how to put music behind your dialogue so it'll automatically duck, you can watch this tutorial right here. Thanks so much for watching. And as always, keep creating better video with Gal. See you next time, bye.