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Audio Mixing-2 camera shoot w/ lav and boom mic?
We’ve recently had a 2 camera shoot where the subjects spoke a little softly. We used a Lav mic on ch. 1 and a boom mic ch 2. Normally I would pretty much always use the boom mic, as it sounds cleaner. But since the audio is soft, does it make sense to use both the lav and boom?
I could just boost the levels up from the boom, but I’m just worried that we’ll hear too much background noise. And I could just use the Lav mic and boost that, but to me, they always sound a little more muffled because of the whole placement on collar thing.
I thinking of just using the boom mic, boosting the levels and filling in the gaps with room tone. Or is it acceptable to use both lav and boom at the same time?
Any thoughts?
OS 10.6.3, Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 ghz quad-core intel xenon, 16 gb ram, with BM Intensity Pro card
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2 Replies
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Appreciate it. I think I might be ok, the hum I was hearing was actually on ch. 4, the camera mic. The boom does give me a little bit but with a music bed, that’ll drown out any nat sound or room tone issues. Can always count on you for good info. thx again Dave.
OS 10.6.3, Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 ghz quad-core intel xenon, 16 gb ram, with BM Intensity Pro card
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[Dave LaRonde] “Don’t mix ’em: it’ll just sound worse. You’ll want to choose one or the other, and you’ll only know which is better when you boost both and then check out the results on a test clip.”
To expand on that, the reason not to mix multiple mics on a single source is phase cancellation, which occurs when two mics at two different locations are used to record the same subject. The effect is a hollow sound. There are some pretty good threads on the subject if you search here in the Cow.
I have on occasion mixed in only the extreme high frequencies from a boom mic with a lavalier in order to improve vocal presence. The mics were recorded to separate tracks. The sound on the lavalier track was a bit too muffled, so I applied a high pass filter to the boom mic channel (allowing only frequencies above 4-6kHz to be audible) and added it to the mix. In those cases, it worked well.
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