Wedding audio question

Captain Pierce

Captain Pierce

Veteran
(AKA Dear God, not another wedding audio question! :) )

(And just for the record I did a search and didn't really find what I was looking for. :happy: )

So typically when I do weddings for friends, I'm either sticking a wireless lav on the groom or using a boundary mic on the altar to pick up the couple's vows, and I'm pretty happy with the way that works, but I'd like to get better audio of the priest and other people who speak. The church that I'm going to be in this coming weekend is old and small, so I figure the chances of getting a feed direct off their system is slim.

I'm using a GL2 with Beachtek DXA-4 audio adapter, and since I'm not going to be running the camera, I'd like to not have to deal with putting another mixer in the chain, so a 1-mic solution would be best. I've seen some mention of talking about mic'ing one of the church's speakers--is this a good way to go? What do you do if the speakers are mounted up near the ceiling or somewhere else inaccessible?

The other thing is that I'm limited to mics that my company has available. Wirelessly, I've got Shure UC series systems with either lav (and access to 183/184/185 cartridges) or handheld (with SM58 heads). For wired, there's more selection (Shure SM57/58, EV 357/457/757/635, Sennheiser ME80, just to name the ones on the top of my head), but I'm worried that wired won't work well since I have a feeling I'll be up in the balcony with a ridiculously long and difficult cable run.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer. :)
 
I actually just shot a wedding this last weekend for a friend of mine (I normally avoid weddings like the plague but I've done some for good friends). The setup I used works pretty well, 2 wireless systems one on the officiant (cardioid) and one on the groom (omni). The directional mic helps pick up the majority of the speech while the omni picks up the vows and great crowd reactions. Like I said, I'm not a wedding videographer but that has worked well for me for the couple that I've done.
 
I'm always hesitant to put a mic on the officiant, because A) they're usually already wearing one and B) around here, at least, they already look at the guy with the camera like he's just peed in the holy water. :engel017:
 
Try to get the phone number of the church from the couple. Call and ask about their audio system first thing (if it's not too far away drive out and check it even)
and try to patch in for clean audio of the officiant and readers. Put you WL lav on the groom. Generally speaking most churches have acoustics such that any applause will get picked up on the grooms lav mic. Or you could setup a boom wherever.
 
I've always had great experience with the officiant wearing my mic. If that's just not going to work a lav next to a speaker should be acceptable quality for a wedding video. I've also had just an omni on the groom and rode the gain to compensate.
 
Thanks to all for the advice. FYI, in the end, there was no audio output from the system, the speakers were hung from the very peak of the ceiling, and I was getting next to nothing from the Sennheiser ME80, so I went with just the omni on the groom. Never tried that with an omni before because I never had an omni--we always buy our wireless with the Shure WL184 cartridge because our primary application is live sound, but we recently got a couple of boundary mics that had the WL183 omni cartridge, and Shure makes all the cartridges interchangeable. :) All in all, it worked pretty well, but it would have been nice in places to bring his mic down and have another audio track to go to in places where we really didn't need to hear his mic. The couple will be fine with it (they'd better be, they're getting it free as their wedding gift :) ), but I was hoping to come up with a new method to expand my "A/V guy" repertoire and was disappointed not to...
 
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