Reducing wind noise...any tips?

[Nigehenry]

I have noticed that my new camera, although working well in most situations, does not handle wind noise well. When filming outside even very light wind will produce quite loud wind noise in the recording. The only way to overcome this is to turn your back to the wind, thus shielding the mic somewhat, but obviously this is inconvinient and not always possible.
My camera does not have a connection for an external mic, nor does it have an option in its setup to reduce wind noise (previous camera did, really miss that option now).
So I guess I'm asking do any of you have some tips for reducing wind noise either during recording or at the editing stage? I have tried placing a piece of felt over the mic's on the camera, but this only improved things slightly. Any other ideas, your suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Nige

[Steve Grisetti]

The quick-and-dirty fix would be to get your hands on some of that foam rubber-like microphone windscreen material and just electrical tape it over your microphones.

The trick would be to do it such that your tape doesn't block the microphones or muffle the sound.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Nige

What make and model camcorder do you have?
Maybe someone else has the same model and has come up with a solution.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Picking up on Steve's suggestion, if you can find any fluffy material in a local shop (like the stuff that they make dead cat wind mufflers from) that will also help.

[Don Whitten]

I actually wanted to tape the wind the other day. |o| But for those times when I am outside and taping I have a wind muf on my mic. You can check out B&H Photo as they have several available.

[Nigehenry]

Chuck, my camera is a Sony DCR HC-27E (a good wee camera for a budget price).
Thanks for the other suggestions, I'll experiment a bit and see if I can improve things.

Nige

[GerryB]

Nige,

A 'lump' of foam that you can salvage from your camera case (you do have one!) and place over the microphone, as Steve suggested, would be my route. One solution that some people in the UK may recognise is that RED NOSE produced a few years ago. Nice large piece of red foam cut in a ball with a cut in it to allow you to secure it on the nose.

I placed one on a radio mic, secured it with a cable tie and clipped it on a referee on a very, very windy day, hey presto, no wind noise!! But the referee did get "some stick" for having such a "horrible thing" on show.

We had a laugh when we reviewed the tape.

Gerry

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

The reason I suggested 'fur' was that my HVR-A1 came with a foam windshield and it really didn't do the job, but fitting a furry 'deadcat' showed a huge improvement.