Lessons Learned

[sysyphus]

So I have been doing location sound recording for a little while now and like everyone I have run into weird thing that will cause sound problems. I was just wondering what kind of thing have people run into that caused weird problems and what they did to fix them. The other day I was getting a electronic interference on one of my lavs after changing out everything transmitters, receivers, and mics I was still getting the sound. The thing that fixed the problem was I found out the actress had the lav clipped to her bra which had a wire. So I had her tape it instead of clipping and that fixed the problem. I had never read or been told about that so it was fun to solve the problem. What other weird things have all of you run into?

Also what do you all of you do for clothing noise when under a shirt?

O and i know about the sticky but not many people have told their stories. But remove this is the post is useless. Also looking for more stuff like electronic interference fixes.

 

[PerroneFord]

I did a shoot last year in a large conference room in a building. On the first floor. There are pics of it in my gallery. I was shooting double system, and monitoring audio in the room while filming. It was about a 12 minute PSA.

When I got the recording back and synced up, I took a careful listen in the headphones, and there was a very low "drumming" sound. Common wisdom is to place the mic above the talent, pointed down to eliminate pops, reflections, etc. Only problem, was in the basement was a diesel generator! Even though it was faint, it could be heard during the gaps in speech. There was no music cover, and no real room ambiance to work with.

I had stupidly NOT recorded room tone, BUT I had left the audio recorder running between takes. So I had room tone to work with. I used a free audio utility that has a noise reduction program that can knock down that kind of noise if you have room tone. I tried it, it worked like a CHARM, and the noise floor came down below -60db on the audio meter. I could not have been happier. A little gate on the speech, some compression, and a little smidgen of reverb livened things up.

Client was very happy, as was the response from the audience as I understand.

Lesson:

SPEND A FEW MINUTES ACTUALLY LISTENING! This was made difficult with the talent in the room asking a dozen questions and I was busy being the lighting/prop/camera/sound guy.

What a day that was!