Essential Guide: Location Sound Recording

May 22nd 2024 - 09:30 AM
By Kevin Emmott

This Essential Guide examines the delicate and diverse art of capturing audio on location, across a range of different types of film and television production. A group of seasoned professionals discuss their art and the how it can dramatically elevate the immersive experience for viewers.

Having covered the basics of microphone technology and microphone selection in our Audio For Broadcast book, we move on to discussing real world challenges and how to overcome them with five very different location sound recordists, who between them bring over a hundred years of experience to the conversation.

Working across film, television, entertainment, documentary, corporate and natural environments, they all use an array of recording techniques and microphones. Big ones and small ones, hidden ones and visible ones, microphones with 360° coverage and microphones that are super directional.

And although all microphones do the same job, converting vibrations into electronic signals, knowing how different microphones affect the environment they are in is where the real craft is.

And doing so invisibly is a skill which is earned.

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