How Saramonic Transformed Our Sound

New Zealand Conservation Stories has always been about building the plane as we fly it.

I come from a marketing background, which means communication is my strength, and not necessarily post-production. While content creation is something I'm passionate about, there have been a number of gaps in both my budget and skill set along the way, largely because every cent that gets earned from New Zealand Conservation Stories gets put straight back into telling better stories and producing more of them.

But that also means there are always new areas to grow into.

Audio and post-production have been two of those areas for me. As New Zealand Conservation Stories has grown, I've increasingly wanted to better understand the audio side of storytelling and how we can continue improving what we're already producing, particularly as we start becoming more ambitious with platforms like YouTube.

One of the major moments in that learning process was working with Dylan Jones from Four Good Media on one of our projects this year, and Johnny McNee, who's done a lot of work for ABC, last year. Both of them brought a number of pieces of audio equipment, particularly microphones and equipment designed to significantly reduce wind noise.

They were game changers, not because they suddenly fixed something we had been doing wrong, but because they showed me how much further we could take that side of our production.

For me, I'd traditionally relied more heavily on post-production when working with audio. Working alongside Dylan and Johnny started to shift my thinking towards how much more deliberate we could be about audio from the moment we start recording, and how getting more out of that initial recording could give us even more options when we reach the edit.

So we had a conversation with the legends at Saramonic about whether they would come on board and help us take another step forward.

They provided us with three products that are now helping us develop very different parts of our workflow: the Saramonic Mix wireless microphones, the SR-BH700 headphones, and the SR-BV3 microphone for voiceovers and post-production work.

We really put the Saramonic Mix wireless microphones through their paces on our recent Otago trip while working with Abby Cameron, a wildlife vet who has worked with Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary and came along to assist with content creation.

One of the amazing moments came when I headed into the Rees Valley in Glenorchy. There were a huge number of local stories I wanted to tell, but the wind kept picking up.

In the past, conditions like that would have made the audio side of post-production considerably more challenging and limited some of the options we had in the edit.

We'd experienced that firsthand on our Stewart Island adventure, where we walked away with some beautiful content filmed around Kākāpō Arena Ridge that was unfortunately completely unusable because of the audio. That's always a risk when you're filming outdoors in some of the environments we work in.

This time, it was completely different.

I filmed more than 20 pieces of content, all of which were usable using the Saramonic Mix.

For me, that was incredible.

Pre-trip, I spent about half an hour watching a few YouTube videos and setting everything up. One of the things I really loved was firstly having the different connection options for different devices, and secondly the hard-shell charging case.

I'm perhaps one of the clumsier people when it comes to equipment, and I often find that I'm shoving gear into packs that are going to be travelling through some pretty rough country. Having a piece of equipment protected inside a hard shell while travelling through some truly rugged terrain, while also being easily charged from a power bank, was incredibly useful.

Having different connection options was also a real game changer. Abby and I had a couple of different types of phones with us during the trip, so being able to easily move between devices made the whole process considerably simpler.

Having two microphones was something else I ended up appreciating far more than I expected.

We interviewed the teams at the Royal Albatross Centre and the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital, and in both cases just having something we could pull out, hand to someone and start recording with was really useful.

Testing was also incredibly simple.

My favourite thing to do was to walk away from Abby, tell a funny story into the microphone, have her play it back and double-check that the audio was working. Hearing her giggling from down the road or across the room at the outrageous stories I was telling became a pretty entertaining way of making sure everything was working.

And, importantly for someone like me who is still learning the more technical side of audio, the Mix has a number of safeguards built into it that make capturing consistent sound considerably easier. Things like automatic gain control and limiting help manage changing sound levels while we're recording, giving us a stronger starting point when we get to the edit.

For me, that's been a huge part of continuing to develop our audio workflow. Rather than changing what we're trying to achieve, it's giving us more confidence and flexibility in how we capture stories in the kinds of unpredictable environments we regularly work in.

The SR-BV3 microphone has then become the third piece of that workflow, particularly when it comes to voiceovers and post-production.

I actually ended up producing my first YouTube video ever using this setup.

Having a dedicated microphone for recording voiceovers has allowed me to become much more deliberate about how I approach that side of production. Rather than relying as heavily on software during post-production, I'm able to capture higher-quality audio from the beginning and then focus more of my time on refining the finished product.

One of the immediate advantages is that it also saves me about $30 in software costs. I've previously subscribed to a program that helped with a lot of the audio processing I was doing in post-production. Having a microphone that allows me to get closer to the result I want from the outset means I'm becoming far less reliant on those additional tools.

For me, that's been a game changer.

I think one of the more daunting areas of growing New Zealand Conservation Stories has always been developing my skills on the audio side of production, particularly as we start expanding into YouTube and longer-form content.

Over the past week, we've edited our first four YouTube videos, and I'm finally starting to feel like I'm getting into the flow of it. Rather than feeling like we're fixing something that was wrong before, it feels like we're adding another layer to what we can produce and continuing to raise the standard of the stories we're able to tell.