Mic a Press Conference?

Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 1:47 pm

I doubt this is the type of work that most of you do, but I was wondering if anyone has any tips on micing a press conference. It's easy enough to take care of the panel, but questions from the press have proven to be bit more difficult. I'm thinking about getting a couple of hanging mics (the kind that are used for choirs). The room is ours, so I can wire it however I want. Having someone run around with a boom is an option, but I can see that creating a lot of commotion, especially since we've got no one with much experience at this sort of thing. The audio quality doesn't have to be great, but I obviously don't want it to suck. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Will

Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 1:56 pm

you could set up a shotgun mic and point it at whoever is talking. Sennehiser makes some pretty cool ones that can be had used for under 700 dollars. If that's outside your price range (it's outside mine), you could try a condenser on a boom arm. Samson C02 pencil condensers are 110 USD for a pair including shipping and they don't suck.

Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 3:45 pm

I have done some sessions for a college I worked for and the BEST idea we could come up with is to have a couple of helpers with wireless microphones stand in the aisles and when the moderator recognized the questioner we got him or her the microphone. This seemed to work well and we had no problems. One of the mics was color coded BLUE and the other RED so the sound person could tell the difference and open the correct microphone. It was easy and relatively cheap since we already had the wireless microphones.

Best of Luck!

Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:06 pm

X on the choir mics. You will pick up too much ambient noise, and when it is super smash compressed for broadcast, you will hate yourself.

Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2007 12:48 pm

Tom has a right and sheet, isn't full of it.

When possible, pages/aisle runners with handheld and/or boom mounted wireless microphones are best.

When that's not an option, setting up numerous question microphones on stands and directions to the participants to please come forward, get in line to a microphone, to ask your questions is your other option.

Using hanging and/or wall and room boundary/pzm mounted microphones will usually yield extremely poor results since your moderators will generally be drowned out by having those rooms microphones open constantly.

Conversely, if you have an experienced audio mixer available that can ride levels, you can still have and adequate sound reproduction.

I've done lots of conference shows. Hate them.
Ms. Remy Ann David

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