Getting decent audio in the shop without losing my mind
Last week I tried filming a short video of me cutting dovetails by hand, and the audio came out terrible. Between the saw strokes, the scraping of the chisel, and whatever hum my furnace was adding, the mic picked up everything except my voice.
I was using the built in mic on my phone propped up on the bench. Clearly that is not going to cut it. But I also do not want some elaborate setup that gets sawdust in it or takes twenty minutes to rig before I can start working.
Anybody here found a simple microphone setup that actually works in a small, noisy workshop? I am mostly trying to do short clips where I talk through a process, nothing fancy. What kind of mic, where do you place it, and do you do anything to reduce background noise on the recording side or just fix it after?
I paint outdoors so my audio problems are wind instead of saw noise, but the same principle has helped me. When I need to record a voiceover explaining a process, I just do the voice part separately in a room full of soft stuff. A bedroom works great because the bed and pillows soak up all that echo. I tried once in my kitchen and it sounded like I was narrating from inside a tin can. A closet packed with clothes turned out to be even better than the bedroom, honestly. The idea is just getting soft surfaces around you so sound doesn't bounce everywhere. Then you lay the clean audio over your workshop footage. Do you edit the two tracks together on your phone or on a computer?