Always use your own microphone!
Every wedding and video shoot has its own unique challenges and forces us to learn and re-adapt.
Today's post and our first lesson, ALWAYS USE YOUR OWN MICROPHONE! We look back at this week's latest wedding, The Zimmer Wedding.
Arriving at the location (the Woodlawn Park Zoo Rose Garden) of the ceremony I quickly scanned the situation and discovered that the bride and groom had provided their own wired microphone/speaker system to provide audio for the guests of the ceremony. As opposed to going through my normal hassle of applying a "lav" mic to the officiant and thus recording his audio (and the audio of the guests directly) I decided to merely run a wireless mic in front of the speaker and also set my battery-powered Tascam audio receiver in front of the speaker as well, to record any dialogue that would occur during the ceremony. The problem arose during the ceremony itself when the officiant failed to place the microphone close enough to the bride and groom's mouth during their vows and I-Do's (the sensitivity of the microphone was such that you basically had to have your mic placed directly on the mic for it to pick up any audio) . Going over the audio in post there simply wasn't much I could do. Even though I had both channels on the Tascam recording, the sheer amount of background noise (fire truck, car alarm, children running) as well as the wireless feedback on my Sennheiser Lav (which made that recording unusable) left my recording of the vows almost inaudible. The couple asked if they would simply re-record their vows after the fact for me to re-sync with the video (something I told them was almost impossible).
I feel bad and will never trust another microphone system provided by the couple in the future moving forward (DJ provided audio systems prove to be much more reliable although I should always mic the officiant as a failsafe). Below I provide you my version of the Zimmer Wedding, albeit without the ceremony audio as I chose not to include such a poor quality recording in my business portfolio. Live and learn and always improve!