Why your video sounds echoey
Echo is usually a distance problem first, not a fault in your microphone, and distance costs nothing.
You play the take back and you are further away than you were. The words are all there and something is smeared behind them, as though you had recorded at the end of a corridor. Turning the volume up makes it worse, which is the first clue.
The fix, before the explanation: get closer to the microphone. Rooms that sound echoey on camera are usually rooms with a microphone too far from a mouth, and moving it in costs nothing. The rest is why that works.
What is actually happening in the room?
Your voice leaves your mouth in every direction at once rather than in a beam. A small part of it travels straight to the microphone. The rest hits a wall, the ceiling, the floor, the window, the desk, and comes back.
Sound covers about a third of a kilometre every second, so the copy that bounced off the wall behind you arrives a few thousandths of a second after the one that went direct. Your ear reads that as a smear on the first rather than as a second sound, and they keep arriving, each quieter and later than the one before. That is what you are calling echo. The proper word is reverberation: your own voice turning up again after a detour.
Which tells you what it is not. Noise is something else making a sound: a fridge, a fan, a buzz in the mains. Reverberation is you. There is nothing in that recording which is not your voice, which is exactly why software finds it so hard to take out.
Why does a better microphone not fix it?
Because a microphone does not choose. It turns whatever arrives into a signal, and both copies of your voice arrive. A more expensive one does not fix it, because a microphone's sensitivity is only how much signal it makes for a given sound, not how well it ignores a room; keep the same distance and the same reflections arrive in the same proportion whatever you spend, and an omnidirectional microphone, which listens in every direction, brings back more of the room rather than less. A directional microphone, meaning one that favours what is in front of it, helps a little, and nowhere near as much as halving the distance.
What decides whether a recording sounds close or distant is not the level. It is the ratio between the direct sound and the reflected sound. Raising the level lifts both by the same amount, so the ratio does not move and neither does the problem. Moving closer lifts mainly the direct half: halve the distance and the direct sound arrives far stronger, while the reflections, having bounced off the same walls in the same room, come back at very nearly the strength they always did. That is physics rather than a product feature, and it is why the free fix beats the paid one.
What should you change first?
In order of effect. Stop when it sounds right.
1. Halve the distance between your mouth and the microphone. If it was across the desk, bring it to arm's length. If it was at arm's length, bring it to a hand's width below your chin, out of the path of your breath, and turn the recording level down as you go. 2. Get away from the largest bare surface in the room, particularly if that surface is directly behind the microphone. 3. Put soft things in. A drawn curtain, a rug, a sofa, an open wardrobe, a full clothes rail. Anything soft and thick stops a reflection returning, and a duvet hung behind the camera does more than most objects sold for the purpose. 4. Change rooms. Kitchens and bathrooms are the worst in the house, because tile, glass and gloss send back nearly everything. A cluttered bedroom is usually the best room you own.
None of that costs anything, and none of it wants doing twice. Get it right once and mark where the stand goes.
Should you buy a de-reverb plugin?
Not first, and not as the whole answer.
De-reverb software works by finding the trailing part of a sound and pulling it down. The difficulty is what the trailing part is made of, which is your voice. Push it hard and the ends of words stop dead, breaths disappear, and the result takes on the watery quality listeners describe as underwater. You have swapped a problem nobody was going to mention for one they will.
Used gently on a recording that was already reasonably close, it is a real rescue. Used to save a voice recorded across a bare room, it removes part of the person along with the room, and a slightly live recording left alone is easier to listen to than a heavily dried one.
Is it echo, or is it hiss and hum?
Record ten seconds of silence at the top of every take, before you say anything, and listen back to those ten seconds on headphones with your eyes shut. It is the most useful ten seconds in home recording and almost nobody does it.
A steady tone, a wash of hiss or a low rumble while nobody is speaking is noise rather than echo, and it has a different and much easier fix, set out in Hum, fans and the fridge. If those ten seconds are properly quiet but your speech trails and blooms the moment you start talking, the room is what you are hearing.
Most people have both, and they want treating in that order: the noise first, because it is straightforward, and the room second, because it is a judgement.
Where this stops being about a plugin
There is a point at which the room stops being a technical problem and becomes a question about where you film. A voice recorded close in an ordinary living room, curtains shut and a rug down, needs almost nothing done to it afterwards. The same voice recorded two metres away in a hard room will absorb an hour of somebody's attention and still not sound as good.
So the decision is not which plugin to buy. It is whether the room you film in is the room you should be filming in.
Keep reading
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Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
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