{"id":6,"date":"2014-06-13T21:51:05","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T21:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/?p=6"},"modified":"2014-06-14T07:37:35","modified_gmt":"2014-06-14T13:37:35","slug":"blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Audio: Both Lav & Boom, please."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"record<\/a>

record now, decide later.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"sankenlav\"Ever wonder why sound mixers record and interview with both a lavalier mic<\/strong> and a boom microphone<\/strong>? \u00a0The standard producer request, whenever an interview is recorded for television: Boom channel 1, lav channel 2, or visa-versa. Why 2 microphones for one sound source? The answer runs a little deeper than you may think. 20 or 30 years ago, 2 mics for a single interview was not done. The sound recordist chose his weapon, a lav or a boom, and recorded with that. The producer asked no questions. There was only one, recordable mono track anyway! Back in the news-film, documentary days, or anything that preceded video, the audio went to the mono Nagra track, or the single audio channel on whatever sound amplifier (Auricon, Cinema Products, etc) was driving a sound-on-film system. Not only were two mics unnecessary, there weren\u2019t two audio tracks for two mics. \u00a0Eventually,\u00a0 Two tracks of audio \u00a0became available when 3\/4\u201d u-matic, stereo Nagra, or 1\u201d field recording came into being. Yet two mics for a single-person interview was still hardly contemplated. Enter the days of Tabloid and Reality television<\/strong>. And, the need for low-cost programming to fill 80 channels of cable\/satellite TV. The small army of production mixers across the US, in their lofty, revered, hard-earned union positions, were no longer enough in number to meet the demand for the forthcoming tidal wave of cheap television. However, there were plenty of young, inexperienced crew people flooding into the production work force, many never having picked up a boom pole or lavalier mic. They worked for cheap, learned by trial and error, clipping lavs on collars, happily chasing around cameras with their little mixers. Recording interviews with whatever audio gear the cameraman owned, or was thrown in the back of the truck. You can imagine what came next. Horrible audio came flooding into the edit bays. Poorly cued booms, lavs placed too low or too high, or no mic at all- when the new guy forgot to switch from the camera mic! If a mic battery died, or a location was noisy, the editor got what he got- 1 channel of crappy audio from one mic, recorded by a beginner. It didn\u2019t take long for word to come down on high. Make those jobs idiot-proof, because we\u2019ve got an army of idiots recording our field audio! Thus came the new protocol- record lavalier on 1 channel, and boom on the other. In Post, now we can choose the less horrible of the two! The senior sound guys balked- they knew how to get good interview audio with one mic, and no memo from above was going to tell them how to do the job. Regardless, the protocol stuck, and is still with us today. I don\u2019t begrudge the method at all. Today, having both mics going makes sense in a fail-safe kind of way- most of the time. Also, for fun, we get to A\/B our boom and lavs during the interview. The on-set mentality is: Get it right, get it in spades, and if you can, postpone making a decision about anything. Works for me! All I ask is: Please, Mr Editor, pick one or the other, and don\u2019t mix the two down to mono! – by Pete Verrando \u00a0www.txsound.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever wonder why sound mixers record and interview with both a lavalier mic and a boom microphone? \u00a0The standard producer request, whenever an interview is recorded for television: Boom channel 1, lav channel 2, or visa-versa. Why 2 microphones for one sound source? The answer runs a little deeper than you may think. 20 or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[4,3,5],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/txsound.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}