Thread: Your worst location audio ever

I just got a cassette from a co- worker. It's a tutorial on religious chanting with a female presenter with what sounds like a fairly pleasant voice. The level is very low (almost in the cassette tape hiss noise floor) and also very "distant" sounding, with lots of natural room reverb (which is probably a church, from the sound of it) You can guess how pronounced the reverb must be, if you can barely hear the intended direct sound above the noise floor.

After citing an example of chanting, the choir demonstrates- probably miked with overhead hanging condensors which is typical. Loud and Clear! Then back to the presenter with the barely audible voice. My guess is the recordist neglected to turn on the presenter's mic, and she was mearly being picked up by the hanging choir mics. This goes on back and forth for about a half an hour.

I better get two free tickets to Heaven for fixing this one. (I may want to bring a friend) I'm certainly not going to pass "Go" and I won't collect $200.

Hey Jim,
I got 2 this week...
#1 CEO recorded for corp video in a very large marble surfaced room... client complains of echoes... out come the noisegates (ouch)...
#2 Public Radio field recording on small sony dat with stereo mic... levels are -4 and squashed bigtime... client says "it hurts to listen to this" (no sh*t!, it's about killin' me)... then the stereo mic is wavin' all around in this interview and going phase crazy (will make you vomit if wearing headphones!), it collapses okay in mono though the client has to be dragged screaming to allow me to do this 'cause "all our programs are in stereo.. that's how we do them"...

and it's only wednesday.

You guy's can take a licken!

OK, here's one. We have been lucky up to this point. The gig was a live to tape show involving an audience of about 75, 2 hosts, and 3 guests. A week prior we organized everything with the facility house engineer regarding setup, lights, sound, and cue's. Show time...The sound tech adjusted the mics on the fly in the open. Then, he could not determine who's mic was who's. So the level would distort like crazy while he was trying to find the right one. It made such a lousy open that, in post, I had to resort to a totally different begining.

Then, while the show was running skits and guests were speaking their parts, the mic was passed between them. This I didn't mind, except, the tech grabbed the wrong control every time :roll: . The sound would clip at the receiver, then at the board, and into our recorders. It sounded awful . I am posting this project now, and it is a lot of work to cleanup. I could not spare another person for this production, but next time I will insist we have our own audio person.

Sometimes, in a large organization, it is difficult to get someone interested in the task at hand, maybe because there is so much of the same old thing at times. Maybe this is the best opportunity to teach someone about gain riding, and alignment. My hands were full at the time, and it's not perfect. We have no choice but to use it. :d:

--Rick

Rick, your story reminds me of a remote I did some years ago where the client changed meeting rooms on us the night before and didn't notify us. We loaded in a 4 a.m. and started setting up this elaborate (24 mic'd speakers) pharmaceutical roundtable/sales meeting. At 7:30 a.m. the Hotel manager comes back on shift and informs us of the change to a ballroom on the other side of the hotel. The sight lines were completley different and the client had changed the setup/layout in a way that denied us sight lines on the 24 speakers. It was tight but we figured it out by 9a.m. and we got a decent recording. After that I raised my remote rate by 25%.

If you ever want to go to audio post hell, go do it in mexico for a cheap production house that saved money every step of the way, and in the end when they couldn't sell the final product 'cause it was so cheap, they hire us to make it look/sound good.
Ok granted, I should have said no after hearing this explanation but I was 2 greedy and couldn't resist the extra $.

Week one
Find and qualify all the audio material...
As expected, about half the shows are recorded to dat and the other half straight to video (3/4, hissy compressed, distorted, etc...)
So make them match!!! :D


Hugo de la Cerda
Re-recording mixer

I think these conditions can exist just about anywhere. In the past, there seemed to be a bit more time in preparation. Today, acquisition is immediate, the recent war coverage is a good example. There are long periods of quiet in the National News coverage, trickling down to the affiliates, and independent reporting associations.

What happens is things can get a little rusty, lot's of mistakes made in haste. Audio connections, lighting, continuity, testing are after thoughts while people try to get boned up at their assigned positions.
:d:

When we take this stuff into post, and try to make good with it, our own reputations may have to take the heat.
:d:

We have to do the best we can, with what we got. Sometimes some real creativity can make a (so so) production into something special, even if you have to resort to some very interesting tricks.
:s:

--Rick

It's nice to know I'm not banging my skull against a wall alone...
Right now I'm mixing a 1hr doc about an off-broadway production that recently ran it's final show. The final performance was a 4 camera shoot... using the camera mics (yippeeeee!) and 1 boom over the stage. However, somebody decided not to sync any of the cameras or the dat (for the boom) on location. All media is running wild at different time codes. The Avid editor has done his best to manually spot the audio, but obviously it's still out of sync.
Good times, huh?
Now the client informs me they'd like to go 5.1 for the theatre scenes... using the audio from all 5 location sources simultaneously.
I protest... to no avail... after all I'm only the lowly freelance mixer, right?
So I spend today trying to manually sync up and spot the audio from all 5 sources for a "Test Mix"... about as much fun as a root canal. At the end of the day, I play the "test mix" for the client.

"Something sounds weird... like phasey or something (ya think?). Could you fix that by tomorrow morning before the exec comes to screen?"

After deciding against lighting myself on fire in protest, I explain the problems (again) w/ the the location audio.

"Well just try to get it to sound good for tomorrow."

2 hours later, there's a message on my cell phone about a picture change... a big picture change. The AVID editor accidentally gave me an older version of the piece... the wrong picture, the wrong media, and the wrong OMF.

Time for a few beers...

My sympathies. LOL, no wonder nothing synced up. I remember what John Woram said, "Don't use 2 mics when one will do a better job," all ISO aside. One cam, at least, should have had house audio. I hope the new stuff is better. That sounds like a real tough project...and, after all the fine tuning, someone say's, "make me some vhs dub's in SLP, please." :d:

--Rick