The location sound mixer is the number one person as far as sound goes. He/she gets the what, where and when of the shoot and they decide on who and how of putting the audio in the can. They decide the need to bring a boom op and or a utility person (read cable pager) or just run and gun by themselves. They capture the dialogue of the film and any ambient sounds in the area of the location shoot, They will hold the up the shoot if unwanted noises are obvious (such as air traffic, trains, heavy traffic, etc.) and, they do some scouting to find good alternate sites that might help. This is a good time for the location sound mixer to get some ambient tones of all of the locations to help later in the post world and as possible ammunition for the change of location argument.

The sound crew starts their day by assuring themselves that every piece of hardware they have works flawlessly. They post a header and test tone at the start of every days work. The crew takes meticulous notes on every track they record denoting the SMPTE time code at the beginning of each take and the track number as indicated by the recording device. After each take they assign a grade to the tracks so the editor can find the best audio to use in the film. On the last film I worked on we recorded two tracks of the same dialog from the same microphone at different recording levels to insure we were acquiring the best possible sound. Sometimes the first half of track ‘A’ was great but the tail really sucked, but, the head of track ‘B’ was weak and the tail was great. In post we ‘comped’ the tracks together so the whole line was great.

If what I just said flew over your head like an F-15 on afterburners then maybe you should hire a professional sound team.
All of the preparation and attention to detail insures great recordings and less work for the post production team, less ADR, and a great sounding film. In case you’re interested the current budget requirements for a location sound mixer is approximately $300- $500/day and the budget for a boom operator is approximately $150-$250/day. You might think this is expensive unless you were to buy the field mixer , recorder, microphone, boom all of the cables, batteries, headphones and chargers required to do a day’s worth of recording, learn to connect it all together and operate it correctly, all while trying to film, direct, light and produce the film.

Do the words ’Good Luck’ come to mind.
Enlist the help of a professional sound team and let your viewers hear what they are seeing.
The wise man says, ‘the sweetness of a low price today is lost in the bitterness of an inferior product tomorrow.

                          

            What makes the audio weak or hollow? Most low budget film makers use a quality camera with an attached microphone, so the distance from actor to camera is the same distance from actor to microphone, greatly reducing the sound pressure level arriving at the microphone while allowing other noises to enter the microphone. The further the microphone is from the source, the more open and hollow the sound is.

            Try this experiment. Video a friend speaking any lines at a distance of two feet, now do the identical shot from a distance of twelve feet. It should be quite obvious which one sounds better. The shot from two feet will sound better but look bad, while the one shot from twelve feet will sound bad but look great. A common remedy for this bad audio is to add music to the track. All this does is further bury the dialog, making the film a chore to listen to, and detracting from the essence of what is being said. In some cases, there is so much noise in the audio tracks, that the film is not even worth watching.

            Just to be fair to the videographers out there, I researched two Sony professional handy cameras: the DSR-PD150 which retails for approximately $1300, and the HVR-Z7U which retails for approximately $4000. I found a very curious fact. The two cameras sport the same microphone: the ECM-XM1 which retails for $129. Apparently, the extra $3000 for the HVR-Z7U went into the video capturing and not the sound capturing. Why? Sony, as with all of the other professional camera manufacturers, realizes that the onboard microphone is for reference audio, and not for the sound track. On board microphones that are rigidly attached to a camera body pick up every noise that is generated within the camera and, worse yet, every noise that is transmitted through the camera, the “handling noise.” For anyone who’s been to a live event and someone bumps into a live microphone or tries to grab a live mic out of a stand, you know what I mean.

            Professional sound companies use two microphones that conform to industry standards: The Sennheiser MKH-416 which retails for just under $1000, and the Schoeps CMIT5U which retails for $2100. These microphones are used in dialog acquisition by the boom operator for the sound recorder, and the purpose is to place the microphone closer to the speaker or actor than the camera. Trained boom operators can move the microphone to and fro without generating noise, thereby getting a cleaner sound.