Sound setup advice. . .

C

cometsincaves

Member
Hi, I'm helping a friend do sound for a pilot episode of a cooking show. Somewhat typical as far as what you'd expect logistically, two cooks going back and forth collaborating on cooking meals in a kitchen and talking a lot.

My friend wants to use 2 lavs, recorded on an external recorder in addition to the natural sound of the 7ds, 2 of them, (which we know is terrible, just for the kitchen noises mostly).

I don't have a ton of experience doing onsite sound, is this in the ballpark of how most people would do this, or would using a boom mic be preferable to lavs do you think?

Thanks!
Adam
 
Lavs are the way to go with this. With the constant moving around and them looking downwards as they work it's going to be more consistent.
 
I think the lavs will pick up the dialogue as well as the cooking sound just fine. I think if you blend the sound from the camera you will also be picking up some voice in the camera, which may cause phase issues when blended with the lav mics recorded by another recorder. Does that make sense? The camera and the recorder will have some degree of drift in the sync, and the drift will cause phase issues. Double that with 2 7D cameras and ass the AGC of the 7D audio, I think you will be adding a layer of crap over your good sounding lav recording.

In this old cooking short I did there is a short part where she's cooling chicken, and you can hear the sizzling. See, with a mic on the cook you are micing the sounds where they happen, so I think you'll be OK just using the camera sound for alignment purposes. This particular video is with my old gear, so the sound was just a crappy ME-2 lav that comes free with the G2/G3 wireless. If you have a nicer lav you'll pick up even more of the action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQpqfeGsRuM
 
Thanks guys, yeah that makes sense about the lavs picking up cooking sounds and what not, that's what I was hoping would be true, but I don't have a lot of prior experience with them, so wasn't sure about that. That's great!

And yes, that's also good cause I wasn't really looking forward to trying to "make the best" of the AGC sound, if the lavs do everything then, well, like they say, if it aint broke. . .
 
I did sound design on Hell's Kitchen (they are still using my lower third sound design after all these years) for a little while, and all the dialogue was done with lavs. The production sound crew did set up mics to get production effects, and that's all they were for. It really helped me with all the crazy clanging of pots and pans. You may want to get some audio recordings of certain sounds separately (again, on Hell's Kitchen, the production guys did this for me) like boiling, sizzling, sounds of pots and pans being moved around, and other various sounds that you can possibly use later in sound editorial. If you don't use the sounds for this project, you'll at least have them for your SFX library. Of course, this is if the logistics of production permit you to do this.
 
hey Dave/everyone, this might sound like a dumb question, I'm more of a recording studio than live sound recording/mixing guy so this is relatively new territory for me. Where/how did you find was the best place to put the lavs on the cooks for your show, kinda typical upper chest kinda placement?
 
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I didn't do the production sound. I was the sound designer. They usually put the lavs somewhere in the upper chest area, if I remember correctly.
 
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