two person interview
 

I have a two person interview. a celebrity and interviewer. Have two lavs and and octava on a boom and a mixpre 4 channel mixer. Two HD100 cameras. Suggestion for wiring it all up?

First, what mixer do you have? When you say you have a "four-channel mixpre" you mean have specifically a Sound Devices MixPre? If so, that's a two-channel, not four-channel, mixer. Was that a typo, do you have two of them, or do you have something else?

Don't try to mix your lavs and the boom into the same track (s) on set. Doing so will give you headaches... all three mics will pick up the same sounds but with slightly different arrival times due to varying distances. When you combine them this can lead to comb filtering and reverb effects that will appear as distortion.

If you're going to use all three mics, you need to record each one to its own isolated track. Since you have two cameras and two stereo tracks per cam, one possible method would be Lav A to Cam1 Track1, Lav B to Cam1 Track2, Boom to Cam2 both Tracks. Use the mixer to send the mono boom mic signal to both the left and right stereo tracks and adjust the levels so one track is about 8 dB lower than the other. That way in the event an unexpected loud sound drives the primary track into distortion, the lower level track is there as insurance to cover it in post. Or if you're going to use a setup where each camera covers one of the subjects, you might send that person's lav to track1 on his cam while the mixer splits the boom to send a copy of its signal to track2 on both cams.

You do NOT have a four input Mixpre. It's a 2 channel mixer.

Put a lav on each person and split track the audio, one voice per channel. Then fix it in post by removing the parts of each track whenthe other person is speaking.

Regards,

Ty Ford

it's a shure sp33 mixer. the rental guy said it's 4 channel.
the lavs are lectrosonic vm400's.
all of this is rental stuff.

Brian

I see no listing for an SP33. There is an FP33, three channel mixer.

A MixPre is a specifc model name of a Sound Devices two channel mixer.

Regards,

Ty Ford