Wedding tips

Weddings or not, I'm with Run&Gun.

I doesn't matter whether I'm the A-1 on the broadcast of college football game, or shooting a wedding for the sister of an A list actor. In critical situations where there are no do overs, prep work pays off. Remember your 7 P's.... Piss Poor Prior Planning Prevents Positive Productions! Nobody shoots a wedding with only an hours notice. So do your legwork. Check your local frequency charts, make calls to near venues using wireless frequencies for their info and time of use, check the location in advance for dead spots or interference. I also use a handheld frequency scanner/monitor at the location to verify my clear channels, or find viable alternatives. Sure it's easier to just stuff an unmonitored pocket recorder on folks and hope for the best. And if that's you, I'm OK with that. But that's not who I am. Let me close by saying I own a few little Sennheiser G3 wireless units, but I would never use a 30mW transmitter in a critical situation where there are no do-overs.

Yes call me anal if you will, as I also check the hatch before I go fly fishing on a river. :evil:

All the best!

Dave
 
combatentropy said:
I guess you could put the Tascams on the officiant and the groom, with a wired lav running into each. It's weird, but you said you have no money.

If the lav is omnidirectional and high quality, then you could get away with miking one or the other. I used to do this, but I used very good gear: a Tram lav and Lectrosonics wireless. Then you could use the other to mic something else: the reader, the musicians, etc. But you also have your shotgun mics to help cover things, so that's good.

You could try patching into the board, as mentioned, but I never got the hang of it. Not only are there myriad jacks but also different power levels, and it seemed I needed pads and ground lifts and transformers and . . . I made A's and B's in school but I was always overwhelmed every time I tried to go down that path.




That sounds awful.

How do you get them to say them in sync? And even if you do, it will sound fake. Fake is not a style that fits well with wedding vows.

I, and all the wedding videographers I knew, used wireless lavs.
Click to expand...

Adobe Audtion has a new auto sync feature. You re record anything you want and it syncs it up by time stretch. I tried it and it sounds real
 
Late to this thread, but I still have to chime in.

I'm mostly a wedding guy at this point, although I'm mentally done and looking for an exit.

I used wireless at first. Until I realized it was pointless. Sennheiser G3. Worked until it didn't, which was 5% of the time. 5% is way too much. Monitor your audio? What's the point? Can't really stop any critical moments unless you want to look like a buffoon. Once you realized it's messing up, it's already too late.

So wireless gets used as a secondary, non critical audio device.

I ended up using the Sony ICD-UX523. Probably my single favourite piece of gear ever. I might actually make love to it if I could, because it reduced my chances of a stroke/heart attack 100-fold. Never, ever messed up. Has a lock. Sounds great either with a lav or with the built in mics. Battery lasts for several days. Can record many hours in .wav or many, many hours in .mp3. Good riddance wireless.

I mean, I do understand the idea of being prepared. When I started, I used to obsess. But then I realized, it's all gonna change at the last minute anyway. And I'm lucky sometimes if I have 5 minutes to figure it out since the bride was late putting on her dress as usual, traffic was the worst, and every parking spot was full. Standard stuff.

Having a plan is pointless. Having enough crap to shift plans at a moments notice, depending what cards you're given, that's wedding videography in a nutshell.

Once I figured that out, they became (slightly) less annoying.
 
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