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Yes, I wrote this with you guys and gals in mind!


Dan Brockett

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I'm not a professional sound mixer but I know enough to be dangerous as the saying goes. 

I anticipate that many of you will not agree with my gear recommendations or other parts of my diatribe 

but this is my small part to try to elevate the art of location sound mixing in 2021.

Feedback and comments are welcomed!

 

https://www.hdvideopro.com/blog/a-location-sound-primer-for-camera-ops-videographers-and-dps/

 

Dan

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Overall, a good article I think.  I know it's a bit taboo here to discuss camera peeps doing their own sound, but on some gigs it is simply a budget reality.  When my camera friends ask me how to up their sound game when they can't afford me (or when the circumstances dictate), the only thing that comes to mind that you touched upon is the sound recorder vs camera issue: a third option is to purchase an interface to do the heavy-lifting.  The SD MixPre-D is a great example of such a device, where you get the granularity of pro audio controls, but not the added step of sync in post.  They are great value for the $. 

 

For those who believe that helping camera people do their own sound is cutting off our noses to spite our faces, I've found it pays off over time.  Those camera people, when successful, will more and more acquire gigs where they now understand their own sound limitation better, and will hire me for those gigs.  If they never get better paying gigs in the end, my advice cost me nothing in the end anyways.

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I completely agree with you. As a working DP/Producer, we have to face the reality that on a lot of low end to lower medium end production, especially interviews, events,

panel discussions, live streaming, there often is simply not money allocated by the client for a pro sound mixer.

I'm also partner in a live streaming company and my partner is a long time professional post sound mixer so we completely get the value equation of hiring a pro sound mixer

for any live stream that we shoot on location with more than one or two talent. We budget it into proposals and have a stable of three or four pros that we like to hire. We recently invested

in four channels of new Shure digital hybrid wireless systems and bough an Allen & Heath SQ5 specifically for mixing sound on our higher end live streams but we know that we are 

both way too busy with other tasks to man the audio gear so we like to work with great sound mixers who take care of that for us. 

It's true, if all that a videographer/DP/camera person is ever going to get is low end work, it's likely they will never hire a sound mixer anyway, they'll bumble their way through and will never

end up with great sound but the entire industry, in general, is pivoting away from quality and professionalism, other than in the high end 1-3% of projects for studios/networks/streamers. It's hard to read and hear as a DP also

that clients are becoming most focused on self-shot, boring talking heads via Zoom, Teams, etc. where the client can generate their own new content daily or weekly, essentially for free. 

We are bidding on a pretty big Microsoft project and I was amazed at the amount of user generated content that was integrated into the project, all stuff that pre-Covid, would have been shot

on a stage by pros. That content was ALL replaced by user generated, self-shot content via Teams. The main production will still be shot by a production company by pros, but over a week, 

I would estimate that at least 60% of the content will be remote content shot by presenters themselves. It's just the way of the world now, at least in corporate work. 

I keep reading and hearing that if we, as content creators and pros are pitching clients to hire us because of "quality and professionalism", our days at being able to even make a living in this business

are numbered because especially during Covid, the general audience's perception of what is 'good enough' dropped precipitously since many people were sitting at their computers all day every day.

Everything I've been seeing and hearing tells me that the only way clients will still be hiring us moving forward, other than for streamers and the studios, is if we can offer them vision, concept, help them execute

and yes, that it will involve lots of relatively bad quality self generated content, but we, as pros, often still have a skillset and mindset that non-pros simply won't have and that's where our value lies in still getting hired. 

I know that's amorphous but that's what a lot of the industry experts who track trends in media are telling us, selling quality and professionalism to a non-studio/none streamer client base that doesn't really care about it much anymore

is a dead end. That part makes sense to me.  There will still be opportunity, but it won't be the same opportunity that most of us have faced during our careers, where the goal has been to practice, work hard, learn constantly, network and 

ascend up the ladder to bigger, higher profile jobs as your skillset and rep grow.  

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My world as a re-recording mixer includes a lot of personal, journalistic sorts of content-docs, and those folks are forced by circumstance to work alone mostly, or without a separate sound person anyhow.  If they have a 2nd person, they are probably on a 2nd camera, not on sound.  So we get it.  And as you say, the experienced one-man-banders all bemoan the quality of the sound they can get alone and the hassle of worrying and doing it.  But that's just how things are in that world now.

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