I’ve twice been on assignment to shoot town hall meetings, special gatherings where residents can voice concerns about targeted issues. These are some situations where the video could be good, say if everyone goes mad and chaos ensues. But they also have the propensity to be pretty average. In such case, I have to create a video of the event anyway because I dropped an hour or so of my day to be there.

But considering the video is good, what about audio? How in the world do you get quality sound from only the people who will stand up and speak at the meeting, and perhaps only the people who stand up and say something interesting?

You want to avoid audio like in this video I shot:

The only audio I got was from the camera’s front mic. Then I duplicated that channel twice to turn it up while avoiding too much hiss (rather than just cranking up the volume level).

My best solution is two-fold: First, mic the podium. Second, mic everyone else.

To do the latter will likely require some teamwork with the other videographers on the scene, if there are any. Gather them in a huddle, and suggest one of you carry one mic to each person who speaks from the crowd. Have all the videographers set their audio receivers to the same channel and voila. Cake.

You’ll need to ask the meeting’s organizers if this is OK. Chances are they may then decide to have one from their staff mic the audience for you so everyone can hear, if they haven’t arranged this already. Then all you have to do is plug into the sound board.

The problem with doing this in my example video is that the subject was kind of touchy. The meeting was held to discuss a murder in the neighborhood. Still, two TV reporters ran and crouched next to the speaker when she began. You can catch a few glimpses of them. If the media had decided in advance to work together to collect good audio, it wouldn’t have been such a circus.