External mic adapter
Also known as: mic adapter, audio adapter
A small accessory that gives a sealed action camera a microphone input, which is the only real fix for its built-in audio.
Updated
What it means
An adapter adds an input a waterproof body cannot have. The camera microphone sits flush with the shell, which is excellent for sealing and hopeless for recording anything while moving, as any POV footage with sound on it demonstrates.
With an adapter a proper microphone can be placed where the sound is rather than where the camera is. That single change does more for the audio than any amount of processing afterwards.
It is the gateway to the useful accessories. A Lavalier microphone under a jacket or a shotgun out of the airflow both need somewhere to plug in, and the adapter is that somewhere.
How it works in practice
Position is the whole benefit. A microphone under clothing or behind a windbreak records a voice, while the same one on top of the camera records the same Wind noise the built-in capsule would have.
Checking levels before the session matters more than with internal audio, since an adapter introduces its own gain stage and a setting that suited one microphone will overload another.
Powered microphones need the adapter to supply power, and confirming that before relying on it avoids a silent track that looks correctly connected. A short test recording settles it in moments.
What to watch out for
The adapter breaks the seal, which means the camera is no longer waterproof while it is attached. That rules it out for exactly the activities where a sealed body was the reason for choosing it.
It also adds bulk at the connector, which is a snag risk on a mount and a lever that can damage the port if something catches it at speed.
Most importantly it does not solve wind on its own. Without a Windscreen (dead cat) and sensible placement an external microphone records the same rumble, just at a better level.
How RawClip handles it
Clips with usable speech are treated differently from clips that are mostly wind: cut points avoid words and the music steps back under them. Footage recorded through a proper microphone therefore ends up contributing considerably more to the finished video than built-in camera audio normally manages to.