I NEED a DEAD CAT!

I just spent an estimated 20 hours working around the fact that I did not have a DEAD CAT. I know it sounds awful of me to want or need a DEAD CAT, but I learned that a DEAD CAT was just thing I needed to not have wasted 20 hours of my time. A DEAD CAT is a wonderfully furry feeling thing, and something you want to put high up in the air for everyone to see. Most importantly, it has a long metallic thing stuck into the DEAD CAT hole.

Well, I love cats, and a living cat that has died is not what I am talking about.

As someone who loves photography and imaging, I know how important having the correct equipment is to a professional result. By extension, as I have begun documenting the human condition by interviewing random individuals, I have learned how important it is to have the correct equipment for digitizing audio.

So as I was capturing my first few videos, I relied on the microphone inside the camera. Surely that would be enough to capture the interview audio track. Well, I quickly learned that the quality of the audio coming from a waterproof action camera is not all that good. My first three videos required adjustments of the audio gain to at least make the sound understandable. 

So I got the brilliant beyond brilliant idea to get an external microphone. I was now stepping into the big league, with my camera rig (2 cameras) on a tripod, and now, an external microphone separately on the tripod as well. 

So, in the end, I captured videos with a naked microphone and along with the interview voices came a lot of wind noise.

Ah! That’s where I needed the DEAD CAT. The DEAD CAT is the fuzzy thing you put on a microphone to block the wind noise. Unfortunately, I had to spend a large amount of time researching how to post-process the audio files to make the wind noise as low as possible. 

Next time, I’ll use a DEAD CAT and save a lot of time.