Location Sound - Get It While You've Got It

Good videomakers know how to divide their undivided attention to videomaker whenever location sound enters the picture.

Try this experiment: Turn on your TV, button the volume all the way down. Watch for 15 minutes, switching channels to try out a variety of programs. Get a sense of how well you can understand what's going on just from the pictures.

Next, turn the volume up and turn the brightness all the way down so you can hear the sound but can't see the picture. After 15 minutes, you'll probably agree that the basic story-line content of most programs is conveyed more through sound than picture.

Despite its importance, audio is the most neglected aspect of hobbyist videomaking-and nowhere is the problem more acute than when you're shooting on location.

In a living room "studio" you can reasonably expect quiet, and you can take control of many potential noise sources such as refrigerators and air conditioners by shutting them off. When you're on location, outdoors or in, you're often faced with much noisier circumstances-with less control over them.

Understanding some of the basic principles of recording sound in the field is as essential as understanding how to frame your shots. Sound recording is a very major part of professional film and video production, where elaborate 64-track sound mixing is not uncommon.

In a big-budget Hollywood film, there can easily be a half dozen different sound tracks-just to recreate the back ground sounds of the beach: two tracks of the ocean, one of the wind, one of birds flying by and two of families talking in the background.

While amateur and semi-pro video sound tracks are not nearly as complex, aspiring moguls with tin-pan budgets do require considerable ingenuity to make do with simple one- and-two track audio-for-video produ…