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Wire your subject like a pro with these top lav mic tips

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Regardless of whether you call them lav, lavalier or lapel mics, they are wonderful things. Often used for interviews, spoken pieces to camera, and for when you can’t get a shotgun boomed overhead. What makes them great is that they can be so easily hidden from the camera’s view. You can hide them in clothes, under hair, on set pieces, and all kinds of places to keep them off camera but pick up quality audio.

This video from Creative North shares a handful of great tips on how to do exactly that. Mount and hide them to create great quality audio. It also covers some of the things you can do to cut down noise as your subject moves around – which can be a big problem for beginners to lav mics.

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DIYP Reviews the Saramonic UwMic9 Dual Wireless Lavalier Microphone Kit

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Getting good quality audio is often the biggest challenge faced by DSLR & mirrorless video shooters. The microphones built into most cameras are notoriously bad. They hear all kinds of background noise and echo, they hiss, and pick up a lot of unwanted sound from the camera itself, like autofocus (or even manual focus adjustments).

The easiest solution, of course, is to use an external microphone. You can then plug this either straight into your camera or a separate portable field recorder. While there are many different types of microphone out there, sometimes a lavalier is your best choice. This is where there Saramonic UwMic9 dual wireless lav mic kit comes in.

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Tascam are changing the way we record lavalier microphones with their new DR-10L belt recorder

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Wireless lavalier microphones have been a standard in the film & tv industries for years. They’re great for picking up sound while staying hidden from the shot. They’re also very useful for moving subjects where following them with a boomed microphone may be impossible. As more and more wireless devices enter our daily lives, however, issues can start to appear.

Interference, signal drop outs, and other problems can happen in densely populated areas. There’s also the problem of knowing whether the radio frequencies of the microphones you’re about to use are even legal in the location at which you’re using them. Tascam has presented us with a very elegant solution to these problems with the new Tascam DR-10L belt mounted lavalier recorder.

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Five Audio Options for Your Home or Office Studio

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Being photographers we are accustomed to pay attention to composition, lighting, depth of field, colors, focal length and many other factors that comprise the final frame.

Photographers entering the world of video have the advantage of already mastering all these aspects, but one of the most important aspects in video gets ignored way too often – audio.

Audio recording is not something that automatically comes to mind for a stills photographer, in many cases leading to sloppy sound that ruins the video, but luckily Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens is here to help.

Watch the video for five options for recording audio in your home studio. Jay explains the advantages, disadvantages and price of these solutions, ranging from free to $1,000.

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How to Approach A Talent To Place a Lav Mic On Their Shirt Like A Pro

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If you are shooting a video with someone who is not accustomed to getting videos that part where you attach a Lavalier mic to their clothes can be kinda awkward. If you are wiring up an actor, there is a good chance they did this before and they maybe even done this enough time to help you. But with documentaries or interviews it may be your talent’s first time where someone approaches them to run a cable through their shirt.

If you do it wrong (and there is definitely a wrong way of doing this) not only you look like a PITA you may also take from your talents confidence which you want to be high for the actual interview.

The Location Crew came up with a short 10 minutes tutorial that explains how to do this right. Interestingly enough, an important part of the process is not even related to connecting a microphone, it is connected to gaining your talent’s trust and breaking that personal barrier to make them feel comfy.

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