Throughout the years, we’ve been capturing the ceremony audio using a total of 3 wireless mics. One mic would be placed on the groom, another on the minister or officiate, and the third mic would be connected to the venue or DJ’s soundboard to capture any additional person(s) which may participating in the ceremony, and utilizing one of the house mics. In an attempt to provide the best possible audio, I would monitor and mix the audio via our 3 wireless mics at the front camera, while preserving the audio captured on the back camera’s on-board mic for backup or ambient audio.    Mixing audio while shooting video requires a lot of attention. Needless to say, at times either the audio or the video may take a “hit” since I would be concentrating on one or the other, and maybe miss either a good shot, or not have the audio set quite right.

While our previous procedure has worked quite well in most cases, there have been times when the church, reception venue, or DJ cannot (or simply will not) provide an audio feed from their sound systems. In this situation, our only other recourse would be to set our third mic in front of the venues PA speaker.  However, this is not always possible as in many occasions the PA speakers may be mounted on the ceiling, or some other inaccessible location.  Therefore, we have had no choice but to use the ambient audio captured from one of the onboard camera mics (with the exception of the groom and officiates mics as mentioned above). Obviously, this is not the preferred method, and is undoubtedly inferior in quality. 

While it would be ideal to have a totally independent sound system with multiple mics and a dedicated sound engineer at each wedding, it’s just not feasibly possible at our current package prices; therefore we simply do the best we can with the resources available, which brings me to the point in this post!

It’s been in the planning stages ever since I attended the 4Ever Group’s Video 07 Videographers Conference and Trade Show held at Jacksonville Florida, in January of 2007.  The title of the seminar was, “You Can Hear a Lot Just by Listening” presented by Darin Esnard of Roland Systems.  He presented the Edirol R-4!  The R-4 is an audio field recorder capable of recording 4 separate channels simultaneously on one stand-alone recorder via an internal hard drive. The WAV files can then be transferred to the computer for postproduction editing. All of a sudden, the “light” came on for me.  This piece of equipment was the answer to all of my “audio reproduction” dreams, and the end to those ”audio reproduction nightmares”. Also, the best thing about the R4 it is that I won’t have to hire an audio production engineer to accomplish superb audio, nor will I have to raise package prices to accomplish this feat!  So, it’s a win-win situation!

The R-4 will record in 24-bit 96 kHz WAV audio!  Now that’s high quality! The addition of the Edirol R-4 also means that I don’t have to worry about monitoring the audio levels while shooting the video.  The R-4 has built in limiters that will prevent clipping (commonly known as distortion) which will allow me to set the input levels, start the recorder and walk away from it and concentrate on just shooting the video.  It also means I won’t have to worry about loosing the primary audio when having to change out tapes in the camera half way though the ceremony, because the camera audio is no longer the primary audio.

With these 2 pieces of equipment along with 2 or 3 camera productions, I will now have a total of 12 possible channels of audio to work with during postproduction!   That’s a lot of audio channels don’t ya think?  I guarantee that I’ll “blow your socks off”!

Since we'll now have so many different streams of audio at such a high quality to edit with, we can take it one additional step and produce your DVD in Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound!  The production of Surround Sound does take an additional effort during postproduction so we'll have to charge extra for that additional work, but you can be assured even if you don’t choose the Surround Sound option, you'll still have the best audio possible from this side of the Ohio River… heck maybe from either side!