Wedding Audio Nightmare, please help.

A

Airwolf

Active member
So I'm editing a Wedding a shot recently. And I've got huge problems. This is the first time I've had such a gigantic failure on a shoot like this and I don't know what to do without destroying my reputation and angering my customers.

During my last wedding, I was going to have several sources of Audio as I usually do. I plug my zoom h2 into the DJ sound board for good clean sound. I also have a rode videomic attached atop my HV30 for backup audio, and the onboard microphones on my 7D and T2I, which I never use unless as a last resort.

Here is what happened, despite testing the DJ equipment and when everything was working fine, they forgot to turn on the channel that sends the feed out to the recording jack on their system for the first 4 minutes of the wedding. So for the first 4 minutes I have no audio from the DJ booth. This includes the pastor asking them "do you take this person as your wife, yes, do you take this person to be your husband, yes." That was not recorded.

So my second issue, my second shooter forgot to turn on the rode videomic plugged into my HV30... So there is absolutely no audio coming from that Camera, no onboard mic, nothing.

So I resort to using the horrible sound from the T2i, which was my 3rd camera positioned on a tripod very close to the bride and groom. There is a waterfall behind them so it sounds even worse than usual but atleast i'd have sound.

Well as everyone knows this camera needs to be restarted every 12 minutes. The point where this one was stopped and started, my camera was off, the hv30 had no audio, I had no audio from the booth, and at this very moment, the bride said "I do" So the piece of audio where she says "I Do" does not exist.

What can I do? Not only do I have bad audio, but now i'm missing one of the most important pieces of the wedding. Never have a had such a strain of bad luck as I experienced on that day. After that is over and the DJ realized he didn't push the output button, everything was fine. But before that it's horrible, and I feel horrible for having to deliver such bad quality.

The ceremony itself runs about 15 minutes alone so it's quite long. Is it common practice now days to include the entire ceremony in a cinematic full wedding film, should I just cut pieces out of it? What do you think? Thanks.
 
Airwolf said:
Well as everyone knows this camera needs to be restarted every 12 minutes. The point where this one was stopped and started, my camera was off, the hv30 had no audio, I had no audio from the booth, and at this very moment, the bride said "I do" So the piece of audio where she says "I Do" does not exist.
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damn man, I totally feel for you.

Are you good with sound engineering? A good sound engineer may be able to save some audio from the T2i by putting it through some pass filters to reduce the sound of the waterfall and bring up the vocals of the ceremony. It sounds like the waterfall is something which would've gotten in your way from an audiological point of view anyway so it was probably something which you would've had to deal with in post.

Regarding the 'I do' moment, is it possible to do a dramatic build-up to the point where there is sound (albeit from your T2i) up until the point where just before the bride says 'I do', everything goes silent, the music pauses, and the bride is seen to say the words 'I do', and the sound and music starts again after that, sort of in celebration of the moment. The idea behind that is, that we all know she's going to say it, that it doesn't need to be heard. It might just emphasize the moment more than if there was sound at that point.

I don't know man, with absolutely no audio for that particular moment, it's a difficult place to work from.
 
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One of my audio engineering professors from college told me that noises like the waterfall can easily be canceled. If you take your original audio track of the ceremony sound that has the waterfall, and layer that on top of your strictly t2i recorded waterfall sound, you can put these 2 tracks 180 degrees out of phase and produce phase cancellation. The waterfall noise will literally be gone. Check out this link for more details on phase cancellation: http://www.sweetwater.com/expert-center/glossary/t--PhaseCancellation
 
The waterfall cannot be easily canceled as it has no pattern. If your microphones were in the same place, had the same frequency response, etc, I'm pretty sure you would still not phase them out--you might reduce it enough. If this happened to me, I would book a really nice recording studio on my own dime (or use my own, whatever) and have the speaking participants do a voice over. I would explain to them that the final product would be perfect, and that the voice over is the way movies are done in Hollywood. I sympathize.
 
I've tried several noise reduction and "noise print" reduction techniques in soundbooth and audition but with little luck. The finished product ends up sounding horrible, at times worse than just using the source audio from the t2i. I had considered asking her to do a voice over but there's that weird factor of asking someone to voice over their wedding.
 
I'm not talking about noise reduction though. Assuming that waterfall sounds are mostly in the high to mid tones, you could use the soundwave or equalizer to lower these areas of the audio spectrum while boosting the low end to bring up the vocals. It's all speculation anyway, I haven't heard your footage.
 
ADR using your sister, wife, aunt, or possible the bride. It's only two words. The rest of it, that might be a bigger problem.

Grant
 
This is why I ALWAYS "monitor" any audio source with "head phones". There is a valuable lesson to be learned here for everyone...

What I would do if I were in your shoes? Just be up front. Tell the Bride and Groom that you wish to give them the best product that you can, and that the waterfall really competed with their voices. You aren't happy with it, and they won't be either. Just tell them that sometimes location sound just doesn't work out very well. It happens on occasion and the best thing to do is what is done in Hollywood movies... ADR. Short of this, neither of you will be happy with the doctored up attempt at the audio. Offer a discount or some bonus extras that they will love... Hopefully this will keep them happy and your reputation in tact.
 
It really pains me to read this! I've had bad things happen with the audio during a wedding, but not this bad, and not for paying customers anyway. I hope you get it sorted out some way. Still, there's a lesson to be learned here. Keep the headphones on at all times. Do not trust anyone, check that the recording units are actually getting a signal. If I may ask, why didn't the sound technician just press the "output-button" before the ceremony started?

Like Tommy suggests, you should give them a nice discount if you don't manage to fix the audio or work around it.
 
How about explaining the situation openly and honestly and tell them you can record the bride's "I Do" after the fact and use it to replace the screwed up original. Combine it with a clip of the waterfall and lay it in over the gap of silence. ADR is not just for features. Then sit down and figure out what you need to do to insure it never happens again. Personally I'd hate to rely on someone such as the DJ who I don't control, who doesn't report to me, and who isn't beholding to me for their paycheque to get such a mission critical job done correctly. You also need to have a very stern talk with the second shooter about checklists.
 
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Oh man I feel so bad for you man. I may be able to help though as I have really decent software that can even reduce water. It's not 100% but better than Adobe Audition noise reduction. Send me a PM of a small clip (:30) of your ceremony audio if you're interested.

For future reference, like Steve said, don't rely on someone outside of your "crew" to get critical audio. Buy yourself a wireless lav system and mic up the officiant and/or groom.

And use headphones ;-)
 
In your vows both the bride and groom repeat the same line after the pastor. So instead of her speaking for 20 seconds then him for 20, let them alternate "In sickness and in health" "from this day forward" etc. That way he says the "I do" line and nobody is the wiser that she was never recorded.
 
I pretty much destroyed my reputation with the people I was working with after an audio failure so I feel for you.
 
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