Recording: distance, level, room

Mic chosen, room prepared. Now the recording itself: one mistake no edit can fix, and a couple of habits that save hours.

Distance, once more

About 20 centimetres from the mouth, roughly a spread hand from thumb to little finger. That works for almost any mic, with a range of 15–30 centimetres. Closer, and you get breathing and puffs of air on "p" and "b". Further, and the room and noise creep in. There's a simple fix for the puffs: put the mic slightly to the side of or above your mouth, so the air goes past it.

The distance has to stay constant. If you lean back in your chair mid-sentence, the voice drops, then comes back. It's unpleasant to listen to and hard to even out afterwards. A lav handles this on its own. With a phone or a desktop mic, don't rock back and forth.

Clipping: the most common unfixable mistake

Every digital recording has a ceiling. If the sound is louder than the ceiling, it doesn't get louder, it gets cut off: instead of a wave you get flattened tops. That's clipping. It sounds like crackle and rasp on the loud words.

Clipping can't be fixed later: there's no information above the ceiling, nothing to restore. A quiet recording can be brought up, a noisy one cleaned, an echoey one lived with. A clipped one can only be re-recorded.

So the rule: record a little quieter than feels necessary, but not too quiet: the more you have to bring the voice up later, the more the noise comes up with it.

Setting the level

In the phone's standard camera app the recording level is set automatically; there's no knob. You control two things: distance to your mouth and how loudly you speak. The automation copes, as long as you're not shouting into the mic from five centimetres away.

A meter with green, yellow and red zones exists in camera apps with manual controls and on the receivers of wireless lavs. There, the rule is: say the loudest line in your script and watch. The bar should reach the yellow zone and never touch red. In numbers that's peaks somewhere between −12 and −6 dBFS, but "stay out of the red" is enough. If the receiver has a safety track, usually called a safety channel, which records a copy quieter (6–20 dB depending on the model), turn it on: clip the main track and the copy saves you.

Mistake. Setting the level on normal speech, then laughing or raising your voice. A laugh or a shout is usually a good deal louder than speech, by 6–10 dB. Set the level on the loudest thing that will happen in the video.

Where to attach a lav

Chest level, centred, a hand's width below the collarbone. Capsule pointing up at your mouth. Attach it to the edge of a T-shirt, a shirt placket, a collar. Don't hide it under your clothes: fabric muffles the voice and rustles.

Tuck the cable under your clothes and secure it so it doesn't knock the mic. Hair, a scarf, a necklace must not touch the capsule. If in doubt, record ten seconds and turn your head: you'll hear any rustling.

A separate track

If you don't have a lav, there's a trick that beats the built-in mic on a tripod: a second phone. Put it on the desk or attach it to your clothes 20 centimetres from your mouth, start the voice recorder, and it captures sound while the first phone films. In the edit you swap in the good track. Put the second phone in flight mode so notifications don't land in the recording, and don't cover its mic with a hand or clothing. How to line the tracks up is in the last lesson of this course.

The same goes for a desktop mic into a computer while the phone films.

The test take, the clap and the silence

Before the real take, do a short test one: ten seconds of speech, played back on headphones. Not the phone speaker, headphones: the speaker hides hum and hiss.

Then every take goes in this order: press record, clap, five seconds of silence, start talking. The clap is for lining up sound and video if you're recording on two devices. The silence is for noise reduction: the software uses that stretch to learn what the room's background noise sounds like and subtracts exactly that. The clap always comes before the silence; otherwise it lands in the noise sample and ruins it. Without a silence sample you're left with the automatic noise-reduction mode only, and that one is cruder.

Tip. Record silence at the end too: if someone slammed a door at the start, you'll have a spare sample.

Do this now

• Open an app with a level meter or your lav receiver, say the loudest line from your video and watch whether the bar hits red. If it does, move back.
• Attach a lav or earphones a hand's width below the collarbone and turn your head while recording. Listen for rustle.
• Record a take like this: press record, clap, five seconds of silence, say your lines, five seconds of silence. Check on headphones.