“CAT EAR” WIND NOISE FILTERS FOR VIDEO CAMERAS

Cats are known to have excellent hearing. They are also known to be hunters of prey. When the Lord Jesus Christ created them He equipped them with ears designed to deal with wind. A cat’s ears have hair which helps break up and greatly diminish wind noise. Have you ever noticed how much wind noise there is as you ride your trike? Have you ever placed your hand up by your ear as you ride along and noticed that when you block the wind from going past your ear you can hear much better? If you have not done so give it a try.

BTW, they make devices to use on a helmet to block the wind from passing by your ears.

I made some which attach to my eye glass frame stems. They work pretty good but I don’t use them as they look goofy.

I have watched a lot of videos and one thing that absolutely ruins an otherwise good video is wind noise in the audio. Sometimes it is so bad that it blocks out whatever else was recorded. Just like with our ears wind passing by the microphone of a video camera is quite noticeable. Video cameras with built in microphones as well as external microphones need to have what I call a “cat ear filter” on them to act as a wind filter. You can buy these. Some work better than others. Here is one for a GoPro camera …

 

BTW, these filters are commonly called “dead cat filters” but I don’t like that name so I call them cat ear filters.

Years ago I decided to experiment with my video camera to see if I could come up with a good effective wind noise filter. I tried several different things. Some worked better than others.

After trying several different things I finally settled on something that has worked great. Even in strong winds it prevents most wind noise from occurring.

To start with I used a plastic eye drop medicine bottle cut to make sort of a funnel with the smaller diameter neck down over the microphone area on the camera. The bottom of the bottle is cut off to make it open. In the picture below I have drawn red lines to show where I cut the bottle. I used the section in between the red lines.

 

I used clear silicone to glue the bottle in place. Silicone works quite well and is fairly easy to remove if ever I want to. The bottle is filled with a man-made fiber material (pictured below) which is the stuffing from inside of a stuffed toy.

Over it at the cut off bottom of the bottle is a piece of black felt like material. Then the last piece is a tossle off of a hat. It and the black felt like piece are also siliconed onto the bottle to hold it all together.

As I stated earlier I experimented with various things including stopping with just using the black felt like piece. I was after near perfection and after adding the tossle I achieved it. Here is a video I made on a windy day. I am riding with a friend talking to him. You can hear a clicking sound coming from one of the chain tubes on my trike. I am telling my friend about it in the beginning of the video. Without the wind noise filter I doubt if you would even be able to hear what I am saying but as you can hear my voice comes thru quite well.

Here are some more homemade wind noise filter videos …

HERE are the Google search results for wind noise filters. And HERE is Amazon’s search results.

 

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