Eric Coughlin
Veteran
Yeah, but, the thing is, if it's an out of town shoot and you have to rely on hiring an audio guy who you've never worked with before, there's an argument for using your own audio setup, doing it yourself, and having less chance of things going wrong than relying on someone you've never worked with before. In my interview demo reel right now, I did audio for about 80-90% of it, and the worst audio came from when I hired an audio professional who didn't notice a clicking sound from the interviewee's dried mouth. I don't always monitor audio as much when I've got a pro-audio guy, but that's a mistake I'm trying to avoid now.
If you're paying say $400 for an audio guy with gear, you're probably getting some newb showing up with an ME66 and his Zoom H6n; this is the dude who may not even know to place the boom mic as close as possible to talent, and just hangs it up lazily, if he's even using a boom mic because maybe he thinks his Sennheiser G3 is the bee's knees for this interview. I have better audio gear and experience recording audio than most guys charging $400 with gear. For shoots that need audio I record audio myself on about 80% of my jobs, and I've been doing this for 10 years. So, the logic is, my client will get better results with me doing my own audio then they would get if we hired an inexperienced audio person and paid them $400 with their gear. Now, at $800, the audio pro is going to have a better mixer than myself, their mics probably won't be better than mine because mine are about as good as they get, and they'll probably be more skilled than me at audio. But again, what skills do sit down interviews really take. Not much, but I've still seen inexperienced people mess them up.
When I hire a pro audio guy for an interview, what exactly is different than if I did it myself? They put it through a Sound Devices mixer, which gives a slightly better pre-amp than a C300, but the difference is negligible in most cases, plus I could do the same if I ever felt the need to buy a pro mixer. They may be better skilled at laving someone up without rustling noises, but boom mics sound better than lavs for sit down interviews 95% of the time anyway. And as for booming, it's just placing a mic on a pole, getting it as close as possible, and aiming it right; so simple. So, I really don't feel like a pro audio guy contributes much to a sit down interview. I only hire them when a client insists on or specifically requests them, and always quote without an audio guy for those types of shoots.
And as to my point with Rob, I feel there can actually be more risks associated with hiring an audio guy than by going with your own tried and true methods.
The audio guys I work with often own about $60k-$80k of audio gear, so you must own a lot of audio gear. I have around $10k of audio gear myself. I'd like to add some Lectros (or Zaxcom) and a Sound Devices Mixer at some point, but haven't had a pressing need thus far.
So, what are the networks doing when they come to Atlanta and everyone is charging $750 and upwards? I've had the problem before where clients from out of state expect me to find an audio guy for $600 (plus if I'm hiring I want to upcharge for my time, so I'd then only have $500 to pay them), and I'm typically not able to find pro audio guys working at that low of rates, so I just come back to the client quoting $800 to $900 with mixed results.
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