multi camera shoot help
 

We are shooting our first 2 camera wedding and I have a question I am trying to think through. I will have a wireless mic on the groom and the receiver will be on the camera near the front. i will have a second camera in the balcony and that mic will be on the podium. The balcony camera will have the better angle for the groom. How do you keep the audio from the groom when you switch to the balcony camera. Do you lay the entire camera tapes for audio only? We are editing on FCP 5. Thanks. John

I would use the sound from the lav on the groom. You can use the balcony mike to help sync the footage but trying to use the sound from the camera(s) it was recorded to may be difficult. Your balcony camera will pick up ambient noise, echo and probably a "delay" that will not be present on your lav mike.

Jim

The way we do it is to try to get a feed off of the soundboard, a wireless on the groom (and sometimes the priest/pastor), and an ambient mic for applause. You can record two feeds on each camera, so I would put an ambient feed on the balcony mic, see if you can run a feed from the sound board to that camera too, and then do the wireless mic to the front camera. Your sound from the groom's wireless is not going to be solid all the way through -- I usually just use that for the vows/speeches and a mixture of the ambient mic and the sound board for the rest.

Just my own way of doing it. I've thought about getting a portable audio recorder to pick up the audio from the board and syncing it in post to eliminate tough long cable runs, but haven't done that yet and I'm doing less weddings now anyway.