"There's roosters shrieking or kids in the pool": how do you record a video with clear sound in Bali?

There are quite a lot of people in Bali who record not only storizas and tic-tocs, but also regularly create serious "selling" formats: courses, webinars, video lessons. Baliforum together with the experts of Hype Hunters Production have prepared a series of materials on what problems video makers face and how to make their content high-quality and, most importantly, sellable. Today we will talk about shooting video with quality sound recording, which can be difficult in Bali.

Alex, co-founder of "Hype Hunters Production": I think everyone who has tried to record anything more serious than insta-stories on the island understands the pain. If we're talking about video formats, Bali seems to be the perfect place at first glance - there's a million backgrounds everywhere you look. But that's until the first roosters. Bali's fighting roosters. Wherever you are in Bali, you'll have roosters in your neighbourhood, bikes with obscenely large silencers. When you need quiet for at least a couple of hours you'll suddenly notice that religious ceremonies can start completely unexpectedly at any time of the day or night. Noisy warungs, noisy partying in the neighbouring villa, kids in the pool who don't get out of it at all ever. I went through this myself when I was trying to record a video in the villa - you suddenly realise that it's very, very noisy all around. Although when you live there all the time, you don't notice it.

🔴 What's the speciality of Bali? Isn't there such noise in big cities?

In big cities, you close the double-glazed window and if you don't have a neighbour drilling into your wall with a jackhammer, you've already got silence. In Bali, because of the heat, the villas are not soundproofed. The villas are practically open plan.

This is especially keenly felt by those who want to record their course when you need to record for 6-8 hours. Yes even those who film rilsas have encountered this! And it really messes things up a lot. Imagine, you conduct webinars or broadcast, you need to keep the audience in suspense, to sell, and you have cicadas ultrasound destroy the microphone, destroy the air and naturally normal selling content in such circumstances becomes impossible. That's why all those who make videos for business, experts are trying to find a solution to this problem.

Among other things, yes. Many people try to escape by recording under a blanket or hiding in a cupboard, holding the microphone close to their mouth. Some people make a hut out of pillows and crawl into it. All for the sake of somehow softening and eliminating parasitic sounds. But all this does not guarantee the result. For example, such tricks are unlikely to protect from jackhammers from the construction site. Again - if you just need to record a sound - it is one thing, here you can still invent something, conjure up and get more or less pure hex. But if you need a video with good sound, you have to be beautiful, well dressed, sitting with the right background. And to cover yourself with pillows in this case is simply unrealistic.

🔴  As the founder of professional video production, what advice do you have?

The tips are pretty simple. Firstly, use good looping microphones, Rode or Sennheiser. They cut off unnecessary noise as much as possible.

If you're recording outdoors, by the ocean, use a "wind shield" to remove weather interference from the recording.

Buy a pop filter. This is a very useful thing that protects the microphone from microdroplets of saliva. It adds clarity to the sound.

Very important: record the sound separately from the video. Then you had the opportunity to clean it with special programmes or neural networks. But it can help with homogeneous noises. Such as the hum of an air conditioner or refrigerator. If it is chaotic extraneous sounds, of different volume and nature, it is still an impossible task for artificial intelligence.

Yes, you can't always win the lottery and if nothing works out in the end, you'll have to look for a professional studio. I won't be modest and say that we recently opened a studio in Kuta with high-tech isolation, echo absorption. We put sound-repelling windows there - we brought them from Surabaya because you can't find them in Bali. And all to make it as pure a sound space as possible. Our studio is probably the quietest place in Bali.

A speaker can record for many hours, with top of the line lights and all modern equipment and there will be no sudden roosters or bikes. Another plus of the studio is a huge choice of backgrounds, backdrops. For each course, for each client we build setup. The recording equipment is Netflix approved Sony and Blackmagic. Sound - Rode and Sennheiser. All this costs quite a lot of money and absolutely only a professional studio can afford it. None of those who record 1 course or webinar even once a month simply will not spend such funds on equipment.

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