Unless you’re shooting a video production at a bustling cafe for the aesthetics, you likely don’t want to have a lot of ambient noise in your final product. It’s distracting, and can sometimes be annoying to the viewer if they are trying to solely focus on important dialogue in a video. To reduce ambient noise, the primary objective to keep in mind is, when possible, to naturalize environmental factors:

Wind

A wind sock (fuzzy, dead cat, etc.)  will help for most conditions, but only up to a certain wind speed that you will have to gauge for yourself on a case by case basis. During a recent Skillman Video shoot at the Boston harbor for Bunker Hill Community College, the wind speed was increasingly troublesome. To deal with this environmental factor, we found a protected pocket under a corner arch that blocked off the wind, but for other scenarios, a high wall will probably suffice.

Air Conditioning

For air conditioning, be sure to deal with this problem in a timely manner. Summertime Boston Video production company shoots can quickly become hot due to professional lighting and tightly packed people, so your production schedule may need to factor in breaks in which the AC is on or actors are allowed to step outside for fresh air and cooling down. Unless you want the constant humming of an air system in the background of your video, (which can make things hard for smooth edits) turn it off or down a few notches. This may require searching for the circuit breaker or complex wiring, so work closely with the video production company gaffer to be safe.

Crowd Noise

This issue gets a little tricky because there are several ways to solve it:

• Using the power of illusion, you can mess around with the z-axis of a production shoot to make it look like your main subjects are in a crowded area, when they are really a safe distance away (in terms of audio feedback).
• Another method is using lavalier (LAV) mics, which are great for interviews, and are thus ideal for corporate video. These kinds of mics are used all the time on TV talk shows, in order to avoid picking up too much noise from the live audience.
• Finally, if push come to shove and you only have a standard boom mic, try to angle your main subjects so that they are facing toward the crowd when they speak. This way, when the microphone is facing the subject, it is thus also facing away from the crowd and will pick up more noise from the subject rather than the crowd. This works with a boom/ shotgun mic, but not an omni-directional microphone, which picks up sound from all directions at once.

Skillman Videography Group LLC specializes in Boston video production. Call us anytime at 1-800-784-0140.