[audio] Article on shockmounts and windscreens

[kandinsky]

Chanced upon this excellent primer on shockmounts and windscreens, with a bunch of useful tips. Found this while doing some reading sparked by the "How come there is a booming sound from Zoom H4n ?" thread. Learned some new things, like the two types of wind noise (excerpt below). Despite going thru single/multi camera production modules back in poly, I don't recall much emphasis on audio acquisition. Or maybe there was and I didn't pay attention because it was less 'sexy' compared to camera work. I remember a lot of our projects ended up fairly weak in this area. Nice to see the recent posts on audio. A good reminder to not get carried away with crafting visuals and end up neglecting audio.

Summary:

Reducing rumble, acoustic/contact wind noise with shockmounts and windscreens. Also: tips on using foam, rubber bands and other items for a clean production track.

Excerpt:

There are two types of wind noise that will affect your soundtrack: ACOUSTIC WIND NOISE and CONTACT WIND NOISE.

Acoustic wind noise is the howling that the wind makes blowing through trees and between buildings. It is a form of ambiance, just like traffic noise. Because it is background noise in our environment, it cannot be controlled by a windscreen.

Rolling off or filtering out the low frequencies will help somewhat, but howling wind is made up of a lot of higher frequencies as well, so eliminating the bass is only a partial help.

The best way to eliminate acoustic wind noise is to close mic the talent. Get the microphone in as close as you can get it, and then lower your mic gain (volume) so that dialogue dominates the soundtrack instead of background ambiance. That's really about all that you can do.

Contact wind noise, on the other hand, is that blast of distortion and audio breakup caused from wind physically striking the sensitive diaphragm of the microphone capsule. We've all heard that sound when someone blows directly into a microphone.

The distortion created by contact wind noise cannot be fixed in post-production. It can only be chopped out along with the accompanying dialogue; and a new piece of dialogue cut in to replace it.

But contact wind noise can be prevented. That's what a windscreen does.

Read the full article here:
http://www.filmunderground.com/51/article/NWFS/wind-screens.htm