Location Audio Simplified: Capturing Your Audio . . . and Your Audience 1st Edition

This is a very basic (simplified?) book on location audio. How basic is it? For starters, it has five pages explaining how to coil an audio cable. If you cut out all the really basic stuff such as where the power switch and microphone inputs are on a recorder, what an XLR cable looks like, and all the pictures, you might have 40-50 pages of text with a few tips and tricks buried in there, but not much more. And some of the information is strictly based on the author's personal preferences and quirks of experience. For instance, he says that his way of recording is (on page 69) "hard to the limiter." This is recording so loud your audio is peaking and constantly triggering the limiter to compress the spikes. In all my time around audio, I've never heard anyone espouse this method of recording. Usually, hitting the limiter is considered a warning, not a good thing. But he swears this is the way to go and claims he gets no complaints from his clients.It strikes me as strange that he doesn't even address other ways of recording audio, such as letting the signal peak around -12dB, and he refers to other professionals who might employ equally effective techniques as critics.He also proposes a method of holding the boom pole with one hand, something I've never heard or seen recommended. If I saw one or two other recordists using these methods, then I might give them a little more credence, but he is the only author I've seen recommend these things. For the price of the book, I feel it should have had more content, gone into more depth, and had some discussion of post processing. I feel that if you relied on this book alone, then not only might you be engaging in some relatively unusual techniques, but your ultimate knowledge base would be incomplete. For instance, if you compare this book to Jay Rose's "Producing Great Sound for Film and Video" or even The Location Sound Bible, there really is no comparison. Both books are much more comprehensive and jammed with valuable information. I simply can't make that same claim about this book, even though it offers some good practical tips.

I'm disappointed in the quality of the advice dispensed in this book. The Focal Press brand takes a negative hit in my mind, because of the unconventional, sometimes bad advice offered by this book. The author is quite proud of his technique of recording so hot that the limiter is constantly engaged. He's done this for past editions of this book apparently because he notes that he's received emails telling him this is a bad thing to do. He dismisses the criticisms with sketchy rationale: pumping (what happens when your levels engage and disengage the limiter) is not an issue because if you record hot enough, the limiter is *always* engaged. I've never heard such bad advice! There are other questionable practices mentioned too.For example, a pan regimen in which you never change the pan settings after initial setup: if you run a lav in addition to a shotgun you should unplug the shotgun from one channel to access a second channel which is panned for 2 mic configuration!. But the "record hot enough to continually engage your limiters" advice takes the cake!He goes over other very basic things, like an extended discussion on how to coil a cable, and he doesn't cover dual system recording (instead, the book is all about mixer-to-camera signal chains); dual system might have been more common than when this book was initially written. Other oddities include non-standard nomenclature and spellings, and the advice that "how you look when you are all put together is important".The basic coverage is useful basic information, but the bad advice will make me not recommend this book to beginners. Instead, look to the excellent books by Rick Viers, Jay Rose, and Richard Patton.

I've been doing production sound for a decade, yet I've picked up some pretty good advice from this book, which tells you something. It's well organized and is useful for the beginner as well as the more advanced engineer./mixer.

Since I am lucky to be an ENG soundman for a TV station, this book provides me with many helpful tips and tricks that I did not know. And makes my job a lot easyer.

I found myself learning lots of new stuff in this book. It covers the overall subjects like mixing for camera and boom placement pretty well. This would be ideal for someone looking to get into documentaries and corporate video.

Very Detailed!

Very informative and educational, great coverage of subjects thoroughly a great book to read thanks Dean Miles

Fantastic read for novice, pro or somewhere inbetween. Highly recommend.

Das Buch beschreibt sehr ausführlich auf welche Punkte bei der ENG-Arbeit als Tonassistent zu achten ist.Es wird nicht sehr weit ins Detail gegangen, dies war aber auch nicht das Kaufargument.Die einzelnen Schritte werden sehr schön erklärt und sind auch gut nachzuvollziehen.Eine klare Kaufempfehlung für jeden werdenden Tonassi, und eine gute Auffrischung für alle die schon läünger in der Branche arbeiten.KIeines Manko dabei: es wird auf Videos verwiesen welche zusätzlich erworben werden können.

I read Ric Viers book and this one. They cover two different aspects to location sound and therefore, actually compliment each other well.This one is less about core principles and more about how to calibrate your gear with other gear (something this book does really well). Being more geared towards ENG work, it covers off connecting to cameras and goes into that detail a lot more. For this reason, I give this book five stars!