Sound good before you look good

Video is primarily a visual medium, so why don’t I start by talking about the type of camera to get, lighting, or how to act in front of the camera?

The answer is simple, bad audio makes a bad video. Period. A really hollow room, a microphone that is rustling against a tie, overblown sound, they all pull your audience out of a ‘passive watching’ mode into a ‘where’s the &$*#@ pause button’ mode faster than anything else.

Turn that around. Give me very clean audio and a crappy picture. If the content is compelling, you’ll watch it. Even if it’s over-exposed, or black and white, shot on a really old video camera, what have you, people will continue to watch.

So, why is that? First, we blink. Our mind is always patching together discontinuous visual information. Whether we’re driving, looking at a painting or cooking a meal, our brain is so used to compiling visual information we are subconsciously more forgiving if there’s a quality issue.

Do you stop watching your kid playing at a park because it’s too bright outside? Nope, you blink more and squeeze your eyes until the image is tolerable. If, in that same example, loud construction was going on right next to you at that park, you would probably leave. You can’t blink your ears, folks.

A recent study that varied sound and audio quality found that, “…for the cases we examined, better quality sound improves the perceived similarity of a lower-quality visual approximation to the reference.” (click here to see the study)

That’s a fancy way of saying, “Get a decent mic if you want me to watch this.”