it doesn't matter if you're filming YouTube videos social media content commercials for your brand or just trying to capture that perfect moment on your family vacation one Surefire way to kill your video has ironically nothing to do with your video it's your audio and today we're going to cover everything you need to know about getting set up recording audio on your smartphone and editing it to sound perfect let's dive [Music] in all right like I just hinted at this video will be broken into three categories and by the end you'll know literally everything to get Crystal Clear audio every time and make sure you stick around to the editing portion honestly this is the area that most people forget to consider and they're missing out on so much extra quality that they could be squeezing out of all of their videos I'll even show you a free tool that can save audio that might sound terrible trust me it is a GameChanger okay diving into part one here we're going to start with the lowest priced options and slowly work our way up into more professional Solutions right now I'm using the built-in microphone on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and it's not bad most modern smartphones actually have decent built-in mics but they all come with one major catch you absolutely need to be within just a few feet of your phone to get good audio as I start moving back the microphone's going to struggle it's going to just pick up all of this ambient noise and really kill the quality even if you're filming in a quiet space indoors the audio will sound rough at anything more than about an arms length away but like I said earlier I've actually got a free tool that can really clean up audio that sounds like this we'll touch on that later the next best affordable option I recommend would be a lav mic that you can plug directly into your phone like this pop voice Pro microphone here it has a long enough cord to where you can actually get a decent amount of space to move around and the audio quality is extremely good for the price just make sure to get the proper microphone adapter depending on your phone and by the way I'll have all of this stuff linked below including the small things like the USBC adapter that I use for my iPhone now you've probably seen microphones like this before they're called shotgun microphones and they're directional meaning they pick up sound more precisely in the direction they are pointing compared to omnidirectional mics that pick up sound in all directions around the mic that's what most lav mics are at the professional level shotgun microphones are honestly the industry standard the road ntg3 is what I use in my main YouTube and Commercial interview setup the issue with much smaller shotgun microphones like this that are sold specifically for smartphones is that they're not really much better than the built-in microphone size matters when it comes to shotgun mics and at this size they really just don't cut it you're also still limited by being forced to stay really close to the microphone in order to get decent audio now if you're trying to record ambient noises for sound effects in your videos or voiceovers for different projects shotgun mics work well because you can literally hold it right next to the subject but again that bump in quality isn't terribly noticeable as far as my ear can tell rather than spend the money on a smartphone shotgun mic I'd instead save it and opt for our next category of mic which is in my eyes the most versatile and highquality option for most content creators Bluetooth wireless microphones it's pretty straightforward a wireless mic is much simpler with less cords and nowadays there are great options for relatively low prices my number one recommendation for smartphone content creators is this mic right here the hollyland Lark M2 the kit comes with two microphones each with a 10-hour battery life a receiver which is perfect for those who also use larger DSLR or mirrorless cameras a charging case which by itself can fully charge each microphone twice before itself needing to be recharged and then we have my absolute favorite feature this guy right here the smallest and most reliable smartphone receiver I've ever used and don't worry because they include a USBC version and a lightning version depending on your phone these are so small they literally don't even need an internal battery like most microphone receivers it draws all the power it needs directly from your phone meaning you have one less thing that you need to remember to charge it turns on in connects immediately when you plug it into your phone and now the audio you record during your videos will automatically use that wireless mic personally I love using the Black Magic app for more control over my videos and you can see here in the audio menu I can easily switch back and forth between the microphones unlike most wireless microphones that are big and bulky weighing down your shirt or just being outright distracting the lar M2 microphones are the size of a quarter weighing in at just 9 G they even have a button on them that you can click to enable Smart AI noise cancellation if you're recording in a loud environment if you double click this button it will also start and stop recording on your phone which is super nice for those times when you're recording solo and you don't want to have to run to your camera hit record then run back into position and then actually start talking I got my hands on these a few months back and ever since they have been my absolute go-to whenever I'm using my smartphone for their high quality recordings ease of use and small size it's also what I've been using to record this entire YouTube video I also use them as backups on our podcast recording just for extra redundancy I reached out to hollyland and they actually offered to sponsor this video so in the description below we've got a link that you can use along with a code to get an even better deal on this microphone the only other Wireless setup worth talking about would be something like this the DJI mic 2kit it's an even more professional setup which of course means it comes at a higher price tag but with it you also get the ability to plug in highquality lav mics directly into the transmitters allowing you to completely hide the mic while you're recording so to wrap up our microphone recommendation I'll play one final side by side of each mic while also throwing some additional options in there just for reference and as always the name and price of each mic will be listed on screen with links in the description as well what's going on creators it's Anthony and this is our audio test clip what's up creators it's Anthony and this is our audio test clip what's up creators it's Anthony and this is our audio test clip what's up creators it's Anthony and this is our audio test clip what's up creators Anthony here and this is our audio test test clip what's up creators it's Anthony and this is our audio test clip okay quickly before we dive into the editing section I want to touch on a few things that you should really do to improve your audio no matter what mic you're using and if you're finding this valuable make sure to hit that subscribe button it really helps our Channel and allows us to produce more content like this okay first is mic placement you really want the mic to be around 6 to 12 in away from your mouth too close and you'll capture poses which are the big pushes of air associated with certain letters like T K B P and so on too far away and you start picking up on the background noise and your audio quality just goes to crap now if you plan on using a LV mic I'd highly recommend picking up a few of these R coat stickies they allow you to stick the microphone underneath the collar or neck of your shirt essentially hiding the mic just make sure that when you do this you place the mic on the innermost layer of your clothing typically mic to skin contact doesn't cause any rustling noise which is why you want it on that innermost layer finally if you're recording in a dedicated space that you plan on recording a lot of content in I cannot recommend it enough you need to acoustically treat your space the easiest way to make a great mic sound terrible is by recording in a space with bare walls hardwood floors and all of these other surfaces that are just going to reflect and reverberate your audio in every office or Studio I've ever worked in I always make sure to put down a large area rug I get these cheap acoustic panels from Amazon Bas traps for the corners of the room and then finally I really like these decorative acoustic panels from from gick acoustic they're a little pricey but what's great is they're extremely high quality they're basically pieces of art that you can hang in your office and they last forever so you can bring them with you wherever you move or if you switch offices anything like that now if all of that is a little too much no worries because the easiest solution in the world is to actually just hang a blanket right behind the camera while you're recording the bigger and thicker the better it's going to catch all the sound waves going towards the camera and keep them from bouncing all over the room I typically use a c or two lights stands to do this with some basic clamps okay so editing is crucial now before we actually dive into the editing programs I do want to touch on a free tool that can take terrible audio and make it sound a lot better and even take good audio and make it sound great it's actually a free tool from Adobe podcast it's called enhanced speech now I'm just as surprised as you are to hear that there's a free tool from Adobe but I'm not going to complain I'll have the tool link below but here you can see it on my screen now you do need to create an account to actually access the tool they have free options and premium options I have premium access here you don't need it the biggest benefit is it will allow you to upload full videos versus the free account which requires you to only upload the audio the only additional step that adds is it basically forces you to take the video with the bad audio and then just export the audio from your editing program which isn't hard then you can take it into enhanced speech here upload it and it will save your audio so for example here I just need to choose the file and I have a bad example example here which I'll upload and usually within a couple seconds it's going to enhance the audio and make it sound great all right so it's enhanced the audio and I can already tell you it sounds so much better typically I will bring the strength down to about like 60 or even lower sometimes it will give kind of like a processed sound to your audio in certain cases so just listen ask yourself what sounds good and natural and find tune it as you see fit from there you would download it and you can add it back into your video project to give you a reference of how good this tool is I'll play a before and after right now right now I'm using the built-in microphone on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and it's not bad most modern smartphones actually have decent built-in mics but they all come with one major catch you absolutely need to be within just a few feet of your phone to get good audio okay so diving into the actual editing workflows here we're going to talk about two different editing programs the first is cap cut which is kind of my go-to free beginner video editor and then after that we're going to go through my workflow in Premiere Pro which is my go-to professional editing program in cap cut it's actually really straightforward they make things kind of like easy one click all you need to do is get your video down into your timeline with the clip selected you would come up to the top right select audio and now we have a ton of different audio controls in here that you could play around with like you could adjust the volume fade it in or faded out but typically what I would do is come and check the box for normalize loudness this is going to take the different segments of your clip that might be louder or softer and basically balance them out to give it a more kind of broadcast feel and then after that the other tool I check is reduce noise in a situation like this where I'm filming outside and there are kind of like cars and wind in the background that's going to help out a ton now these tools are both included in the free version of cap cut which for most people I think is all you need however if you did want almost like an adobe podcast uh enhanced speech built into cap cut you could upgrade we've got a link to cap cut Below in the description if you wanted to check that out and that will give you the ability to click this box here for enhanced voice and give you a very very professional feel so what I'll do right now is play the before and then the after without enhanced voice so that's just normalized loudness and then reduce background noise and then I'll play another after version that also has enhanced voice so you can get an idea of how much extra that helps right now I'm using the built-in microphone on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and it's not bad most modern smartphones actually have decent built-in mics but they all come with one major catch you absolutely need to be within just a few feet of your phone to get good audio all right now we are upgrading to Premiere Pro which obviously has a lot more Pro Tools now if you're editing in another editing program like Da Vinci resolve or Final Cut Pro I would still continue watching this because almost all the effects that I use in Premiere Pro the other editing programs the other professional editing programs they have the same exact exact effects they go by the same names so you can basically follow the same workflow now right off the bat if you do want an easy kind of oneclick solution you'll notice that if you come up to the entral sound tab within Premiere Pro which if you don't see it you can always come up to the window menu here and then just check to make sure entral sound is clicked on in that window we actually have the option to select the type of audio we're editing so we've got this clip here we can check dialogue and now look at this right here we have enhanced speech built into Premier Pro which is a really really nice tool it's obviously accessible for free to everyone on the Internet by just using the you know website plugin but having it built into Premiere Pro is a major timesaver so I could click that on here and we would get the same exact effect as before but instead I want to walk you through my typical workflow now with that we would come down to the effects panel you might have it at a different point in your screen or it's not open that's fine again just come up to window you can always make sure that you have this checked from there I'm going to look up single band compressor okay that's this effect right here we would drag that over to our audio now with the clip selected in our effect controls panel up here you will see for audio effects we just had single band compressor added I will click on edit here now you could fine-tune all these settings yourself but typically what I like to do is choose the presets and then choose voice leveler this is basically doing the same thing that cap cut did with the normaliz I loudness box it's taking all the differences as far as volume is concerned and trying to even them out as much as possible now from there because I usually record my audio a little bit on the quiet side I will actually increase the output gain to around 7.5 now what you're looking for is your audio to Peak around -6 DB so over here in the bottom right of my screen we have our audio meter and as I play through my audio notice we want the audio to Peak right around here the6 Mark so we'll check that right now right now I'm using the built-in microphone on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and it's not bad most modern smartphones actually so you can see we're peing a little bit above -6 nothing is going above zero which would cause like a red color to appear so it's not the end of the world but I will bring it down just a little bit to be safe we'll do 6.0 and check that out bad most modern smartphones actually have decent built-in mics but they all come with that looks pretty good uh I love that so our next effect is going to be parametric equalizer so I've just type that in you can see it down here we will again drag it and drop it with our clip selected it's now up here we can hit edit just like before premere pro has a really nice preset built in and that is vocal enhancer now this is a visual representation of the frequencies in the actual sound that we're listening to so your base frequencies are going to be over here on the left your mid frequencies are going to be up here and then you have your high pitched frequencies up at the top and if I were to play through the audio here you'll actually see the frequencies are bouncing on screen right now I'm using the built-in microphone on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and so you can see right and now this graph this blue line is basically a representation of what's being increased or decreased as far as the frequencies are concerned so we've cut out all of these ultra low frequencies this just sounds Bassy and not good so we basically cut it all out using this filter right here it's called a high pass you don't even really need to know this cuz the preset does it all for you then we silence we kind of decrease this right here and then slowly we boost up into the ultra high frequencies now everyone's voice is different so you are going to want to play around with this and figure out what sounds best for your voice I found that I actually have siblings in my audio or in the way I speak which causes some of the higher pitched like s noises when you say that letter to be a little piercing on the ear so rather than boost all the way up to the top I will usually bring this back down and boost a little bit of a lower frequency right there uh still a high frequency All Things Considered but this is typically what my graph looks like uh so we'll leave that there and then finally we will come and put a hard limiter on when you add that to your audio and you edit it up here I usually set the maximum amplitude to -2 DB think of this basically like a track safety for the audio it's going to make sure that no matter what the audio won't increase past -2 DB just making sure it never clips and goes into the red and sounds terrible it's not like a perfect magical solution like if you really recorded your audio way too loud it's not going to do anything to save you but in a pinch it can make sure that your audio stays below the threshold that you want it to which for me I usually set as a safety to negative2 now as a pro tip for you something you can do in Premiere Pro once you've got these all dialed in and you use the same microp phone over and over and over you can actually save these as preset so if you were to come up to your effect controls here you could rightclick on this hit save preset and now name this whatever you want okay you would hit okay and now in your presets down here obviously I just called it uh where is it whatever you want right here okay so that would be your preset you would name it probably like single band compressor you could drag that onto all of your audio over and over and over every time you film and it will really save you a lot of time now that actually was my full audio processing workflow for a really long time but I started to use a few of the other kind of like oneclick tools within Premiere Pro so to continue you through that workflow with the clip selected we can also come up to the essential sound panel really all I'm going to do here is come to the repair Tab and then all of these boxes that you know reduce the background noise reduce the rumble DH hum DS and reduced Reverb I'm going to add just a little bit of all of those to my audio audio so we'll hit reduce noise reduce Rumble dhum DS and reduce Reverb and I'm really adding like almost nothing uh as far as you know the total strength of these is concerned but it it does add a lot to the audio now I'll export this play you a before and after and you might think to yourself why would I go through all that effort when I could just use enhanced speech it's built into Adobe Premiere Pro although that is a great tool I really try to use it as a last resort in the event of just really bad audio due to the fact that it can really make your audio sound heavily heavily processed I try to avoid that in Big Picture once you save all this stuff as a preset you can drag it drop it onto your audio just like that and you will make everything sound 10 times better right now I'm using the built-in microphone on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and it's not bad most modern smartphones actually have decent built-in mics but they all come with one major catch and that does it my friends the last piece of advice device I have for you is a selfish one and that would be to check out our full online course at contentcreator tocom called 14-day filmmaker it's the world's largest and most affordable online course and Community for creators that will literally teach you everything you need to know to shoot and edit professional cinematic content in under 14 days from the gear the right shooting settings beautiful composition Secrets cinematic movements professional lighting capturing audio and more training on captivating editing than you could ever imagine these courses will blow blow your socks off with how much freaking value you get for one/ 100th of the price of what a high-end camera will cost you not to mention you get lifetime access to our private Community where I personally host a live weekly Q&A call you get downloadable cheat sheets sound effects discounts on gear and software like the Adobe Creative Cloud there's so much more we could talk about about this course but I'll stop there the link to learn more and enroll is in the description beneath this video other than that thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next one [Music] I