A few months ago I tried making a movie in Final Cut HD 3.5 of a recent trip around the world. During the editing process I needed to make lots of voice over's, to say stuff like "..and here I am in New York, oh, and look, there's the Statue of Liberty"... As well as having a terribly boring and unexpressive voice I was also let down a little by the microphones that I was using to record the voice overviews. Today I decided to get to the bottom of what the problem was and try and figure out exactly what the issue was with my sound input. To do this I tested 4 different microphones that I've somehow accumulated over the years. The first was a simple Philips SBC ME570 showgun Mic (as shown to the left). This Mic is self powered (it has a battery in it) and plugs into the computer thru the standard analog audio-in Port. When using this the sound levels were terrible. Even when I raise the input volume to maximum on my Mac I can still hardly hear anything. After doing some reading up on this problem it seems that you really need to buy a Griffin iMic and connect the microphone thru that in order to get decent sound levels. I next tried the USB microphone on my Steel sound gaming headset. The volume levels this time were excellent, although it only picks up sound close to the microphone. For voice-overs it seemed fine, and the Mac was able to detect the "C Media USD Headphone Set" immediately. I next tried an external iSight camera, connected via firewire. This couldn't directly feed into GarageBand but I was able to record a voiceover into iMovie. Again the sound was pretty good, but the camera itself was somewhat unwieldy to hold when making the voice over. Lastly I tried the internal microphone on my iMac. Input volume levels were pretty ordinary unless you stick your face up right next to the screen. It also picks up a fair amount of background noise and there is a faint echo and the hint of distance when listening to the playback.
I'll be using my USB headset next time I need to make a voiceover for a home movie. The sound levels are good and it let's me keep my hands free and doesn't pick up background noise.
