Does such a thing exist?

[Ty Ford]

Hello April,

Yes there are, but……………..

The mix that you’ll get only has the sound that comes through the board. It doesn’t contain sounds from instrument amplifiers.

Not so much a problem if you don’t have amps and everything is miced, but that rarely happens. With singer/songwriters who sing and play guitar you’ll be OK, but with bands, you’re only capturing part of the mix.

If you have a good relationship with the person mixing, and their board allows, you might be able to get an alternate mix that includes some room mics that will fill in the missing parts, but then the job is adjusting both mixes during the shoot to make sure they are right. One mix is usually enough to keep a good mixer busy.

As a fall back position, you can take a board feed and add camera audio if the camera mic is in a good position to capture something usable. You’ll have to time align the mixer audio with the camera audio.

Even if you smpte locked the two audios (board and camera) the board audio with be ahead of the camera audio because the camera mic will be X feet from the stage. That means about 1 millisecond per foot. 10 feet = 10 milliseconds. This is not a problem if you are editing on a non-linear editing system.

If you want to see/hear what can be done by combining camera and board sound, go to my OnLine Archive. On the top level, there’s a “Karyn Live The Rain.mov” I recorded the board audio and camera audio and combined them in FCP as described above. Not a prefect mix, due to the lack of total control, but it works.

But I digress, any good recorder can be used provided it interfaces well with a board. I use a Sound Devices 744T. Pricey perhaps, but it gives me four discrete tracks so I can sometimes get vocals, instruments, effects and something else on separate tracks and mix them with the camera audio for even more control.

I suggest staying away from recorders that only record mp3 or windows compressed audio. Find one that records 16 bit 48 kHz audio if possible. The Sound Devices 702 is a 2 track recorder; little brother to the 744T. It’s highly reliable, sounds quite nice and you can use it to double record audio during other shoots. You will probably find that it’s audio surpasses the quality of your camera audio.

Regards,

Ty Ford

Ty Ford’s “Audio Bootcamp Field Guide” was written for video people who want better audio. More at: https://home.comcast.net/~tyreeford/AudioBootcamp.html
or https://www.tyford.com

[Saya Hillman]

Thanks so much Ty, very helpful — I will do some research and see what I can swing. Thanks again!

[Steve Wargo]

As far as walking around untethered, we use a Lectrosonics plug in transmitter, pligged into the board, and send to a Lectro receiver.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
Sony EX-1 on the way.