Wedding audio issues

[HankCastello]

We just got back from this weekend's wedding video shoot.  Amazingly, we were recommended by another wedding videographer!   He'd been a little intimidated by the fact that it was a rather large, elaborate wedding with performers (singers) and other special audio demands.

Particular sticking points were that the singers would have wireless handheld mics tied into the sound system.  They (of course) did not want to each be holding two mics and they did not want to be tied down to a mic stand.

Also, the bride would be given away by a four-year-old little girl and capturing her tiny voice was important to the bride.

The videographer was a friend of the bride's family and only had a single camcorder and mic system.  He said he reviewed over a dozen wedding video demos before choosing ours.  (Wow! That made us feel good!)

My wife sewed a pouch for the transmitter out of white fabric, to match the little girl's dress.  She also made a long white sleeve to cover the black wire.  We had a white fur muff for a lav...oops!  I forgot they've asked me to refer to these as "windcutters" (www.thewindcutter.com), which covered the little black lav mic perfectly.

There wouldn't be much sense in miking the singers since music came from a CD played through the sound system, and they were adamant about not lending the CD to be copied.  

We tapped into the church's new soundsystem (even though their sound guy didn't know how to do this), with a Marantz 660 digital recorder, using 1/4 phonos to 3mm stereo mini plug.  We never rely on a single audio source - especially a sound board, so I had two backup plans..

I clipped a wireless lav mic to a speaker grill AND setup a shotgun mic on a stationary camera near the stage (last resort).

Of course, we miked the groom and pastor too.  This gave us a total of six audio capture sources in all.

We'd been assured that there would be no announcements, toasts or speeches at the reception, but in addition to each of us having a shotgun mic mounted, I also had a receiver and handheld wireless mic at the ready.  Yup, someone wanted to give a toast, then there were a couple of speeches, one by the bride herself.  My wireless handheld mic got passed around a good bit.

Ya just gotta be ready for anything!

[vismaster]

There wouldn't be much sense in miking the singers since music came from a CD played through the sound system, and they were adamant about not lending the CD to be copied.

So you didn't capture the singing?  sounds like a big goofup to me!

[HankCastello]

Yeah, that would have been!  But no, we got the singing just fine.  They used mics connected to the house sound system, which we'd tapped with a digital recorder AND, just in case, we clipped a lav to a speaker grill.

So we got great audio of the singing WITH the CD music, and all is well.

What I was referring to was using another mic, say, on a stand in front of the singers.  That wouldn't have done much good if we couldn't get the CD music to blend in, because the only source we had for the CD music was as it got blended through the sound system with the singers' voices already included.

[vismaster]

Why couldn't you just use a camera up close to get the singers either with the cameras mic or a shotgun mic?

[HankCastello]

OK, imagine a big room with a big speaker in each corner of one wall and the two singers in the middle.

Now the music is played on CD through the sound system and the singers are miked through the sound system.  That means the singing and music are coming from the speakers.  Even if you were standing pretty close to the singers, you'd hear singing through the speakers, not from their lips.  If you stuck a mic right in their faces, you'd get singing from their lips, but not the music and you'd have a big echoey sound from the speakers that had the singing and music.  It wouldn't sound so good.

What we did was tap into the sound system so we got it all crisp and clear.  If that hadn't worked out, the lav clipped into the speaker grill still had decent (if not quite as good) sound.

A shotgun or worse - a built-in mic, would have actually picked up sound from the speakers, not from the singers.  If you had it, say seven feet in front of the singers, you'd be twenty feet from the speakers.  The sound would have to travel pretty far, would be bouncing off of walls and other objects and would have lost all its crispness.

I know it's a natural tendency, to want to point that shotgun mic at the singers, but when they're hooked to house sound, it's those big speakers that are going to be blasting out the sound, not the singers' lips.

[vismaster]

Thanks.  That makes sense.  I'm going to try it that way next time.