Is good audio quality for your screencasts worth $100?
I’ve never had a student complain that they couldn’t understand what I was saying in one of my screencasts, but the other day I was experiencing some techno-lust and wondered if D’Arcy’s fancy microphone would make a measurable improvement to the quality of the audio in a screencast. Right now I use a Labtec headset microphone to record the audio in my screencasts. So generic, there’s no model number to refer to. It was probably about $40-$50, and I’ve always thought it sounded just fine. I just borrowed D’Arcy’s Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone and ran a couple of quick tests. This thing sits in a mic stand and was about a foot away from my face, compared to the labtec mic, which was almost touching my lips.
I was worried that being so far away, the Samson wouldn’t be as loud as the Labtec, but that wasn’t the case at all. I did realize how important a quiet environment is when one is using a mic on a stand though – I had to re-record when a truck’s backup alarm sounded down in the parking lot and the Samson picked it up just as my ear heard it – that doesn’t happen with the headset mic…
I figured the Samson microphone would sound better, but wondered if, when compressed into a flash file using Camtasia Studio, it would still sound better. Let’s listen, shall we?
I recorded myself reading the same passage of text, first using the headset mic, then using the Samson mic. Each reading is about 20 seconds long, and the Samson follows immediately after the headset – you’ll know when it’s switched. For the first recording I chose to compress the audio using mp3 compression, 22.050 kHz, Mono, 32Kbits/second. I don’t know if this is the default for Camtasia Studio, but it’s what I have always used – I think it’s the highest quality mono compression in the list.
So my thoughts were that the headset mic sounded ok, until I got to the Samson, which sounded much better, to me.
But then I wondered what would happen if I re-encoded the screencast, but this time didn’t compress the audio at all, so I choose the uncompressed audio setting, 22.050 kHz, Mono, 16Bit, 43 Kbits/sec. (I honestly don’t know what most of that means either, but wanted to get it relatively close to the mp3 settings). So how’s that sound?
I think the headset mic sounds pretty good now, so yay, I don’t have to buy a new microphone! 🙂
Except of course there is a real cost to this approach. Filesize. There’s a reason mp3 is as big a thing as it is, and that’s because it does such a good job of compressing filesizes with minimal (some would argue that) loss in quality. So we have two 40-second flash files here. The one that uses mp3 compression weighs in at 202k in size, and the one that uses uncompressed audio is 1817k in size – 9 times as large!
Here’s an interesting screenshot of the audio signature of both mics – this is from within Camtasia Studio, and shows how dull the Labtec is on the left, compared to how clean and dynamic the recording from the Samson is, and that of course is why it sounds so much better, and so much less muffled.
So ok, the Samson sounds a lot better. Does it matter? Does it sound so much better that students will enjoy listening to screencasts more than they otherwise would? I know what I think, but what do you think?
Comments
3 Responses to “How important is audio quality in Screencasting?”
I also have tried numerous different microphone setups with some costing hundreds of dollars. I finally settled on the Samson microphone you mentioned.
I create or produce the showme videos that you see in Camtasia and on the TechSmith web site and for me audio quality is one issue in which I’ll stop production in order to clear it up.
Until last week I have never used a headset microphone but I was conducting an online class late at night and thought I’d give one a try. I picked up the Logitech USB 350. I was surprised how well I liked it and the results that I got from using it.
I still use the Samson for poduction recording but I now have two of the headsets (one for home and one for work) which duplicates my Samson setup.
I believe that the quality of the audio is important especially when you speaking about longer videos. Since audio is nothing more then a form of energy that has to be processed, even if there is some noise that can be put up with, over time I believe we do a diservice to our viewer with poor audio quality.
Over time the human ear will do a form of noise cancelling and it might not be apparent to the viewer until after they stop listening/viewing and move onto something else with higer fidelity.
I also try to match the quality of my audio to the quality of my video. Imagine watching HDTV with standard AM sound…or High Fidelity audio with a black and white TV….in either case something would just seem a miss.
Great post!
The bottom recording came through as static here, but in the top one, the Samson sounded waaaaay better than the headset. It was like you threw the stop-sucking switch and suddenly it sounded like a good recording 🙂
so, the “better” mic lets you compress to a smaller filesize/bandwidth with same or better audio quality… sounds like a good enough reason to spring for a higher end microphone…
Dan, I may try out the Logitech too, just for comparison’s sake. Nice site you have, and I’ve just installed the Sizer app you recommended. What you say about the unconscious energy it takes to listen to sub-par audio makes sense to me.
D’Arcy, not sure what’s wrong with your setup to only hear static – maybe you need a new machine? 😉 But yeah, the only thing holding me back from picking up the Samson now is the inconvenience of not having a local supplier.