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Monday, June 17, 2013

Stand and Talk 1: Boost Your iPhone Audio



Getting good quality sound - or sound that is simply loud enough - on your iPhone or iPad videos is a real challenge. For anything farther away than your arm, the built-in mic just does not cut it. A good option in some circumstances is the RODE SmartLav mic. This basic lapel mic lets you isolate your voice from the ambient sound around you and substantially boosts the pick up on your voice.

My mistake in this video was to position it about 6 inches from my collar - the recommended distance. After I reviewed the video, I realized that was much too close. You can hear the sound running a bit hot and clipping after I plug the mic in. Because the SmartLav is so sensitive, a better distance would have been perhaps 10 inches down.

Still a good product, though - and one way to deal with the frustration of poor on-camera sound. In a future post I will tell you about the iRig mic - a real premium product, more flexible than this, and at the same price.

Happy recording.

1 comment:

  1. Sir, I am a novice at shooting my own video. I worked on TV for a lot of years and can't stand the youtube videos with people just sitting at a desk and doing talking heads. I need to move - take a few steps, use props, demo somethings. I want to record audio at the same time as video on my iphone. I dont want to have to learn how to do that synch thing. i ordered what I thought i should do it and it just turned out to be a mic to record my voice without video at the same time. Is the rode SmartLav what I need? does it plug into my iphone directly? will it work at the same time, so I wont have to synch the audio with the video in a separate step? Thanks much!! I'm a speaker and a speaker coach.

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