Filming a concert...

T

th3digitalmind

New member
This saturday I am going to be shooting a live concert that is outdoors for a friends band. I wanted to know what the best way to do this for the audio... Should I just have the microphone on the camera record, or would it be better to wirelessly put a boom on a c-stand out in the audience and just aim it at the stage then film up close and personal?

any ideas?

I'm going to be using an HVX-200... probably shooting on tape though...
 
Depending on the mic, chances are if you put it out in the audience, you're going to get more crowd noise than clean music. It's hard to do a band justice with just a single mic.
 
well I would love to hear some good ideas... I don't see the crowd being to loud with this one... and to avoid the crowd noise you raise the mic up as high as it can go on the c-stand to put it up above the yelling etc...
 
The HVX mic is crap and you don't want to use a mic attached to the camera if the camera is moving. If you do a search you will find a ton of info on this
 
The only way to get even half decent audio is to record a board mix and use your camera mic for fill in ambience. In a perfect world you'd get a multitrack master from the sound board with every instrument and vocal on a separate track. You would then remix. The reason? The live mixer (and audience) are also hearing what sounds are happening that the mics and direct boxes are not hearing; bleed from guitar amps, drums, etc. Without all of that, your mix will sound like it's missing something...because it is.

The Q&D way to do it is to try to get a split mix from the house guy to a separate recorder; instruments to one track, vocals to the oher and then combine that with some of your camera mic. The problem is he doesn't have time to do two rally good mixes at the same time.

If you got to my online archive, there are two mp4 clips from a recent Karyn Oliver shoot. The shorter St. Mary's clip is just the camerra mic. The Rain is a postproduction mix of two channels from the board plus the camera mic.

The online archive is at: http://tinyurl.com/d738j

Or by navigating from the www.tyford.com main page.

Regards,

Ty Ford
 
The best quality sound would usually come from an audio feed off the FOH desk but in most cases when playing back the sound feed from the desk after the gig it usually sounds quite shite compared to what was heard through the speakers. THis is a known fact that the audio when reproduced at loud volumes with big speakers and room ambience sounds completely different to having that same audio played on a set of near field monitors or headphones. To get a great live sound aka Music DVD's the live audio is recorded multitrack and later re-mixed in a studio to suit.
If you were to place a good microphone on a stand above head height in a center position at a distance best suited to listening and recorded the music with live ambience and crowd noises this will give you the best overall sound possible with a single mic. I've found the main problems in quality with this method to be a muddy, boomy bottom end and lacking in crisp clear top end. This would be varied depending on the mic used, a condenser would give better clarity but more than likely the high SPL would overwhelm its capsule and cause distortion. A dynamic Shure SM58 actually works pretty well and will handle anything the PA will through at it.
Now, if you record a feed from the FOH desk and also record a live feed from a mic setup as above and then in post do a basic mix of the two you will hopefully end up with a sound that truly captures the overall essence that would be heard by a punter in the crowd watching the gig and also have a better body and clarity especially in the tops and for important vocal parts etc..

So, this sounds like a whopping speal and a half but it's really pretty simple to do and gives a really good final product.
Record both audio feeds to a DAT, CD or some other form of digital recorder and sync it up in post. If you record audio on the HVX mic to the cam it will give you easy sync reference. Otherwise if you have a 2 ch wireless audio system go right ahead and send the feeds directly to the cam as you record and then just adjust the levels in post..
Hope this is of some benefit for you.. :)
 
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