When you need sync sound

- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington. - And I'm Robert Carman. - And welcome to this week's episode of Corporate Video Weekly. We're going to talk a little about a problem that you sometimes face, which is that getting sound back to your camera could be difficult, Rob. - Definitely, it can be difficult. It can be challenging depending on the space that you're in, depending on who you're trying to record. Is that person moving around? Is that person not moving around? And of course there are a lot of ways to attack this problem, right? From wired solutions to wireless solutions. But sometimes the thing you have in your pocket all the time, your cellphone, can be a viable choice for doing audio and getting good quality audio that's not necessarily going back to your camera.

- Yeah, so what we're going to do today is talk about a situation where you might be using a cellphone as the recording camera. Now we're in an office here but you could be at an event, and maybe there's somebody at a podium and they're, you know, a good 30, 40 feet away. Well the prospect of trying to run a cable that far just isn't going to work. - It can also be complicated to tie into a house audio system, at a presentation event, and things of that nature. And the phone is just going to be something that is going to be nice and compact and easy to get close to the subject.

- And even if you do have that tied in audio or the wireless system, well you know what? This is a backup and in the world of production backups are good. In fact, your client may have a phone themselves. Pretty good likelihood, right? And whether it's an Android phone or an iOS phone, they could just quickly take it out, go to their favorite app store and download an audio recorder and they'll be able to record that as a backup source of audio, and I like this for a couple of reasons. One, it's a backup. - Yep. - Two, it gives you an immediate digital file that if you need to do things like get a transcript made or send a speech over to someone to review or legal, well it's right there on the phone.

And you can just connect to the internet and push it over. - Yeah, and don't worry about quality, right? I mean your phone is going to be a pristine digital audio recorder, depending on how you get audio into the mike, it can be really high quality. So even though it might seem like you're dropping quality by using a phone, just remember a phone is a high quality digital audio recorder. - It's got a battery, it's got a hard drive, it's got digital input. - Right. And even though it's going to make things slightly more complicated later on in post production with syncing that audio backup to your video, this is the dual system method of recording audio in one place and video in another place, has been used for decades in productions of all sorts.

- Yeah, it's been part of the movie-making process for really since the beginning. Because film couldn't record audio so they always recorded it separately. So we're going to start things off next by talking about how do you actually position the second recorder on your subject or nearby so it gets good quality audio that doesn't sound hollow.