Tech Tips:
Audio for Live Events
By Bryan AlfordWhen video taping a performance or concert, it’s best to record audio using a mixer. Especially if you’re taking an audio feed from the house soundboard it can be very helpful. The quality of recorded audio coming from the soundboard is usually influenced by several factors, none of which are ideal for video recording.
House mixes have to compensate for acoustics, and venue size, when mixing a live show. The soundboard operator needs to always keep the live audience in mind when trying to control these factors. As a result, if the camera takes a direct feed from the soundboard the audio may not be clear or equally distributed. For instance, your recorded audio may not pick up the instruments, it may be heavy on vocals, too loud, and forget about bringing in any audio of the crowd.
These factors can be remedied with the addition of an audio mixer. This gives you greater control over the audio being recorded. The audio controls on a camera are limited. There’s no way to tone down, or bring up areas that need to be tweaked to balance levels. Mixers give you more equalizing capabilities.
A mixer can also add another dimension to the audio feed. With a mixer you have more than the two standard audio inputs of a camera. You have at least three or more inputs. This enables you to add microphones, and introduce audio that a house feed may not supply. Most importantly it takes the responsibility of recording audio away from the camera operator and lets them concentrate on composing a great shot. It puts it in the hands of someone who can concentrate solely on getting the audio you deserve.
