Chapter 2. Capturing High-Quality Audio

It generally takes a couple of video shoots before you realize that the weakest link on your camcorder is the microphone. Don’t worry; it’s not you, or your camcorder for that matter. It’s just a simple fact of life that all onboard microphones are lousy.

This leaves you with two alternatives for capturing higher-quality audio: Get really close to your subject, or use an external microphone. Assuming that close proximity is not always an option, we’ll look at a variety of microphone options that should provide a significant improvement over what you get with your camcorder.

We’ll start with a brief inventory of your camcorder, which will tell us the type of microphones you can connect to and the equipment ...

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