Speaker 1: Things sound pretty good right now, but this was not always the case. In this same spot, using the same recording equipment, and the same microphone, things did not sound so good. I remember it well. Okay, I'm ready to start shooting my video. Or am I? The sound is pretty bad. We'd better start fixing things if we want anyone to take us seriously. The sound is distorted. This is because the recording levels are set too high. Let's fix both these things by setting levels so my voice is bouncing around minus 18 dB. Green LEDs, no red ones. Better. Okay, maybe just a little bit better. Maybe it's because the mic is backed by the camera, and the power of my voice bouncing off the walls is almost as loud as my voice itself. Let's bring the mic in closer and see what happens. Wow, what a big difference that made. The room echo is much less, and I don't need subtitles anymore. Do we sound great yet? Not quite. The room echo is still out of control. Even though I'm not in an acoustically designed space, there's a lot of things I can do with just what I have lying around to improve things. But let's add some stuff back and see what happens. That made a difference, didn't it? It was not only visually boring in this room, it sounded terrible. Now I've returned all the furniture and knickknacks I had removed to make my point, but I added back other things as well, because even what sounds like a normal room to our ears still sounds kind of echoey to a microphone. I tried to cover everywhere there was a hard, flat surface with every soft, plush object I could find. Turns out there's an actual use for throw pillows. So we're done, right? Wait, what's all that noise? Have a listen. Oh, it's been getting stuffy in here. I turned on the ventilation system and I forgot to turn it off. Let's do that now. Now we sound good. Even very good. But we don't sound great yet. What you're hearing is just raw production sound. We're not talking about post-production today, but it's worth mentioning that the final sheen of great sound comes during editing. Let's see what that sounds like. Now my voice sounds full and clearer also, because I've used equalization and dynamic compression that complements my particular voice. I've applied some mild noise reduction to sound as professional as possible, and used limiting to achieve good loudness levels. Sounds like I'm ready to make my video.