The Shape of Days

Everybody who works in production in any capacity — the DP, the sound guy, the producer most especially — has the same nightmare.

We can’t use yesterday’s footage.

Now, let’s put this in perspective before I get into details: The talent didn’t die. The set, overlit, did not catch fire. The world did not end.

But out of seven interview sessions I shot yesterday, and over six hours of footage, I think I lost the sound from about forty minutes of it.

I had the talent mic’d with a lav, running to one of those little digital recorders that are all the rage these days. It’s basically an iPod in reverse; it’s got a little flash-memory card in it, and instead of copying sound from your computer then playing it back, you record sound on it and then copy it to your computer.

Neat idea, certainly. But man, you wanna talk about putting all your eggs in one basket? Here’s between forty minutes and two hours of sound, depending on what kind of memory chip you use. If anything bad happens to that chip, all your sound is just gone. Like it never happened.

I think that’s what bit me yesterday.

Now, I don’t think it’s a total loss. I was using the shotgun mic on the camera to record safety sound, and that’s still on the tape. But the full-bandwidth signal from the talent’s lav mic? I think that’s just gone.

So obviously this morning my thoughts turn to ways of preventing this from happening again. Since I know precious little about sound and sound recording, I’m kind of a blank slate. Does it make sense to split the main mic and send it to a solid-state recorder and the camera, for security? Should I just go ahead and double-mic my talent, and record the two signals separately? Should I stomp my feet and hold my breath until I finally get somebody to run sound during my shoots?

I dunno. I need to think about it.

But hey, I’ve faced my nightmare now. This is pretty much the worst that can happen, practically speaking. We got picture just fine and the producer will surely want to use it. But the sound is no good, and can’t be fixed in post. That’s about the worst possible case.

Well, no. It could still be worse. The talent in question is still, you know, alive. We can always reshoot. It could be much, much worse.

Man. I feel better already.

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