From the course: Pro Video Tips

Plugging into a mixing board

From the course: Pro Video Tips

Plugging into a mixing board

- I think the easiest and best way to get quality audio is not to do a complicated setup of mics and testing-level everything out yourself, but, rather, to take advantage of a venue's pre-existing layout of carefully placed professional mics, Pro mixing board, and the experience of a professional audio engineer, by simply plugging into their sound mixing board. More often than not, the people who are already running the show, be it the venue or the performers themselves, already have every instrument and vocalist mic'd up, leveled out, and fed into a large professional mixing board that will be manned, or wo-manned, by an audio engineer or sound mixer whose fondest goal in life is to make live music sound good. These people are your very best friends on a shoot like this, and you definitely wanna stay on their good side because, in the best case scenarios, they can make your job twice as easy, and make your audio sound twice as good. How do they do this? By simply handing you the other end of an XLR cable, that is plugged into the output of their giant master mixing board. Whether it's a 30-piece Mariachi band, a 6-piece jazz ensemble, or a solo folk singer, the audio will be already mixed and equalized precisely for each instrument or vocalist, crisp and clean, and set at just the right level, before it even gets to your camera. All you would usually have to do in this case, is set your camera audio input at the proper level, mic or line, and adjust the volume to a healthy level. Generally, you'll be working with a line level signal as that's the stronger of the two types of audio signals, and if you pick the wrong signal level, it will sound like total garbage, way too low or way too high, so it's really not that hard to figure out, even if you don't already know. There can sometimes be slight variations in how different audio devices process and handle the given signal, so you may need to adjust things on your end for the best results. If you can listen to the sound from the house mixer on headphones, then compare it to the sound you get when plugged in, it may help you figure out what you might need to do on your end. If your camera has the trim or gain setting for the audio inputs, you may want to adjust it to find just the right level that sounds the cleanest and strongest on your particular equipment. Similarly, if you're using a mixer with a gain adjustment for audio inputs, you may need to tweak the gain level to decrease or increase the strength of the incoming signal until it sounds strong and crystal clear, with no distortion. One thing that you wanna find out from the audio engineer ahead of time is what type of mix you're sending out. This is really important because there's a difference between how an audio engineer will mix a sound feed meant to only play for a live audience, in that particular room, versus a full mix meant to recreate the full sound of the room for an archived audio or video recording. So a live room mix will be heavier on vocals and certain instruments that need amplification in order to sound best with that particular sound system and the acoustics in that particular room. Also, a live room mix will likely have little, if any, percussion because these instruments are naturally louder and will already easily be heard by the live audience in the room. Whereas a full mix, on the other hand, for recording purposes, will, likely, also include, individual mic feeds from the percussion and louder instruments, as well as mic feeds from the audience, to pick up the sound of cheers, applause, and any verbal audience interaction. For this particular live show, I wasn't able to actually get the full mix I normally prefer, so the only mixed version of the audio I got is a room mix. If I tried blending the room mix with the additional audio that I recorded on my shotgun mic, straight to camera, I imagine that I could probably still make the room mix work for me just fine and post with some tweaking, particularly since I only have a single vocalist and one guitar to worry about, however, in this particular case, the audio engineer gave me something even better to work with in post-production, and that's unmixed, individual recordings for each mic in a setup, plus, his Pro Tools files of the recording. At the end of this gig, I walked away with Pro Tools project files, plus separate wave files of Barbara's vocals, her guitar, and the audience, plus the room mix. Now, this is all gonna be more work to mix down in post-production, but it's also gonna be way more flexible because our editor is, pretty much, free to mix and level out every major audio element here, to whatever will work best for the sound that we want in the finished project. If he wants to boost a guitar track song, he can do that. If he wants to add some reverb to adjust her vocals or anything else like that, he can now do that as well because he will have individual audio files for each element, which is, pretty much, about as good as it gets for post-production in this type of situation. Now, I should definitely point out here that I was pretty fortunate, in that we were shooting at a major venue for serious recording artists like The Bitter End. This is a place with a long history of hosting world class recording artists like, Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, Lady Gaga, and Nora Jones, just to name a very small few, so they were already fully set up to offer high quality audio recordings for the various musicians who play there. However, you're probably much more likely to find that many venues you shoot at, especially the smaller ones, simply don't have a professional setup to record and deliver digital audio files. It's just a little bit beyond the scope of what they generally do. Typically, I think the best you can hope for in most scenarios, will be to get a full mix created just for your camera, that you can simply record and use, just as it is, with no extra fuss or muss in editing. Next up, I'll discuss what to do when the venue or location doesn't have a mixing board setup, and you need to mic the instruments yourself.

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