Posted by R&B on 03/12/06 21:36

"jazu" <nofreakingspam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:Xa9Nf.80843$sa3.73828@pd7tw1no...
>
>>>> Simple answer. No Ranting.
>>>>
>>> I can se now, I need Sony VX2100
>>
>>
>> Having a $100,000 camera isn't going to help if you don't understand what
>> you did wrong and, more importantly, how to prevent it from happening
>> again.
> VX2100 has manual audio level. Isn't that what you need for a loud rock
> concert?


That would help. But it's not the whole answer.

Capturing live audio at a concert presents fairly complex problems.

Presumably, you would be getting your audio right off the sound mixer that's
being used to mix the show for the live audience. There's a HUGE problem
with this method, and I run into it all the time at my church. When mixing
sound for a live audience, the engineer will typically factor in issues such
as room acoustics, feedback and such (as he should). But those issues have
very little to do with how you would mix the same band if you were recording
them in a studio, which is essentially the way you'd want it mixed for video
since your viewer won't be experiencing the room acoustics.

How does this affect your sound? Well, let's take my church for example.
The choir doesn't really need amplification to be heard throughout the room,
but they are mic'd. The band, on the other hand, has certain instruments
that are plugged into amps that require "help" from the room's sound system
to be heard througout the sanctuary. So they'll get mixed louder, often
drowning out the choir in the mix coming off the board. The people in the
sanctuary will hear the choir just fine, loud and clear, but when I listen
to the sound played back as it was recorded right off the mixer, you'd think
the choir was singing somewhere across the street, barely audible in the
actual mix. It's really not usable at all for my purposes.

It's best to work with the audio engineer beforehand to see if his board
allows for sub-mixes so you can take a different feed into your own audio
mixer and have your own audio engineer mix it for your video recording.
Ideally, your guy should be in another room, or wear headphones that cancel
out the ambient room sound (which is probably going to be quite loud).
Otherwise, he won't get a true idea of what you're capturing on tape.

If you can't get sub-mixes off the main mixing console, you're kind of
screwed, without renting your own sound equipment, placing your own mics (or
tapping into those already on stage and splitting them off into a separate
feed to your own mixing console) and running your own sound-to-video feed.
And, of course, paying your own guy (or gal) to do the sound mixing for your
video recording.

Plus, there are other issues you have to factor in. Does the mixer you're
tapping into (whether it's the room mixer or your own) have compression
(auto leveling)? In professinal recording, you would compress drums quite
differently than, say, vocals (drums are very "fast attack" sounds, while
the human voice or keyboards or strings are far less so). Without some
dynamics processing in the chain, you will have loud "spikes" of audio,
which surely will cause a problem in digital recording as they will exceed 0
VU, causing that awful clipping (distortion) sound. If the mixer is
analogue, the engineer needn't be overly concerned about these spikes when
mixing for the room. But if you're recording sound in a digital realm, you
HAVE to be concerned about it. There's no such thing as headroom in digital
audio.

Randy

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