very basic question
 

I just did my first wedding and noticed that with the ambient noise and room shots, there is music in the background, which is chopped up between the different shots. It's really annoying. What is the best way that you guys have handled this? I guess I could put it over some other music but I really do want the ambient noise.
thanks

Probably the only option if you want to keep the original audio is to crossfade your audio so the music blends from one clip to the next. It's not really that hard and I think people will understand that time is passing between clips. It might make it smoother is there is a visual crossfade so there is further clue to time passage. In this situation, I had made the audio crossfade more slowly than the video. At least try it once to see if you can live with the effect.

That's a good idea - I'll try that. What is the best way to plan for that when shooting?

Unfortunately, once the music and the room noise is mixed together you cannot separate it.

What you can do though is to make sure you get an audio recording of ALL the music (tap the PA or put an audio recorder near the organ). Then you can strip out the audio of the scenes that you do NOT need the audio from the pastor/couple (i.e. walks down the aisle) and overlay the continuous music track. Then just pull up the neccesary spoken audio when you need it (i.e. during the vows).

What kind of scene is it? Are you just taking some shots of the room and making a montage? If that's the case, I would recording a few minutes of room tone. Then lay the visuals over that.

If you are doing something along the lines of greating a sequence of different guests addressing the camera directly, I think the choppy feeling is excusable since the audience will recognize that there is a passage of time.

Without knowing specifically what scenes you're talking about I can only give you a general rule that we follow.

Lay down the first part of the scene that you want. Keep the audio track intact for the entire scene. Cut up your video and lay it down on top of the original uncut audio track.
Allen W

Well, this part is just views of the two rooms with interview scenes and well wishes in between.
I guess I could have kept the camera running through one full song. Instead, I put it in standby mode, got hte next room shot, recorded, etc. So maybe in the future I'll just keep it running even though the tape shows me adjusting the shot, then edit in over it.
Or like was suggested, get a recording of all the audio.

Use a shotgun mic for interviews, or simply overlay another track over teh original recording and kill ur cams audio

Thanks everyone for your thoughts on this! =)