Dave Plowman
Personal lapel mics, in the vast majority of cases, don’t produce decent vocal quality. They are simply convenient – and sod the quality. It’s the equivalent of a headlight on a camera.
I was interested to see an excerpt from a Scandinavian current affairs prog. Everyone was wearing headset type mics. And it sounded so much better than the BBC prog it was an insert to.
Mike Jordan
Yes, except the headset mics with windshield look as if there is a creepy-crawly on their face and the mics, let alone the windshields are not changed to reflect the colour of the person’s skin.
I was not a sound man (sorry, person) but also was told to always put the personal on the side that the presenter usually turned to the interviewee so that at least they talked into it.
Also what is equally amateurish is the deaf aid squiggly cable placed on the camera side of the head and wobbling around in shot whilst talking.
I note regularly on news inserts now, the presenter has to hold his deaf aid in with finger whilst talking! No more custom earbuds.
Dave Plowman
Depends on priorities, I suppose. Which is more important on a current affairs TV prog – clear dialogue, or pictures of those talking?
Does make you wonder how they ever made anything for TV (or film) before the invention of personal mics. But even when they did arrive some attempt was made to make then give their best – unlike today where they simply seem to be thrown on and faded up.
Of course in the quest to save money – and for the god of filling a picture with as much irrelevant information as possible – we now use any old location as a studio regardless of noise, and fill it full of even noisier equipment.
Do we really need a constantly changing background behind every presenter regardless if it adds information or not? Or is it simply there to amuse a viewer who isn’t interested in what’s being said?
I tell you Victor Meldew has nothing on me once I get started.
Pat Heigham
Putting the lapel mic on the ‘talking’ side is a bit page one, innit!
Working in feature films, I was always very careful to install personal mics so they were invisible to camera, yet clear of clothing etc. but sometimes the costumes were unfriendly to sound.
An Austrian actor in Vienna was highly disturbed when I was fitting a Sony ECM 50, the rather old larger one, with a foam windgag – it was a very windy park location – up his tie. He felt that it was visible and ruined his dapper appearance. I had to constantly reassure him that it was perfect, and as this was film and not video, couldn’t show him!
My production mixer (also BBC trained) was often surprised and appreciative that I managed to fit personal mics to get the best possible audio.
On “Fiddler on the Roof”, being a playback picture, with live dialogue in the middle of a pre-recorded song, we used an induction loop around the set (even in the farmyard!), and the artistes had personally moulded earbuds from an induction receiver. Luckily the long hair styles helped to hide these. So the playback was ‘silent’ allowing boom mics to pick up the dialogue. We must have got it right, as the picture gained Best Sound Oscar! (OK, maybe a lot was down to the music!)
I was interested to see on the Gershwin Prom, that each of the choral singers were equipped with headset mics. I wonder how Andy balanced them? Fade everyone up equally and hope that they individually yelled as loud as one another?
A story about “Alien” at Shepperton:
Because of set design and wide shots, we were forced into radioing all speaking parts and the costumes were useful in that the jackets of the fatigues had ‘pen’ loops, ideal for fitting Sony ECM50’s with double-sided tape – no smaller mics were then around (Trams/Cos/DPA etc came later). Ideally, the headset comms should have been practical!
I used to watch carefully on rehearsal, to which shoulder Yaphet Kotto slung his firearm and mounted his mike on the other side. Whereupon, he would invariably shift the sling to his opposite shoulder, lying right across the mike!
