Recording and mixing audio on set for reality television is arguably the most challenging situations for a sound department. It takes the unpredictability of documentary shoots, multiplies that many times over with separate lines of action occurring simultaneously and then puts it all under a pressure cooker of time and budget constraints.

Production on season four of Next Food Network Star had 14 contestants, which could appear in any one, or combination of, the six handheld cameras roving around the set. To expedite the editing process the producers wanted each camera to record the audio specific to what that camera was recording, thus the challenge becomes making sure the audio matches what the individual cameras are recording.

“With the requirements that the producers had laid out – there were going to be at least six cameras roaming around the floor or on location, 10-14 people on camera, and of course these cameras are going to be shooting whatever the director called them to shoot so these cameras could be shooting these three people and the next second be shooting a different three people, every thing had to be wireless,” explains sound supervisor Michael Bergman. “So everything was coming wireless back to the big mixing board and then they wanted a production mix going back out to be recorded onto the individual cameras. That production mix in the past had been supplied by auxiliary sends. The wireless comes in on an individual channel and then there are auxiliary send for each channel so we could send wireless sends back to each camera. So how you normally work is that you are spinning these auxiliary sends up and down as fast as you possibly can based on what you are seeing on the monitors showing what the six cameras are seeing. So it’s six different mixes for the individual cameras on the fly. The auxiliary knobs on the mixing boards are all scrunched together and it’s maddening to try and stay on top of it all. All the wireless we are receiving of course are being recorded onto there separate tracks.”

Unlike other multi-cam shoots where the audio is only recorded as a master and then linked up through timecode, the production schedule simply didn’t allow for that process.

“It’s done for a few reasons. For one, for ease of editing. Number, two they are on a tight budget and editing schedule. If that mix to the camera matches what the camera is seeing then they can just use that audio that is on the camera rather than going back to the master mix and splitting out the tracks. Also it helps with story editing. If the camera is not hearing the audio on the camera it slows down the story editor because they don’t have the audio then need,” says Bergman.

To provide some logic to the process of sending out six different mixes back out through the mixing board, Bergman turned to audio rental/consulting house Gotham Sound, which devised a system to graphically solve the problem of matching the correct audio to the cameras.

“Gotham developed a system that I had never seen before. I think it was the first time this system had ever been used,” Bergman notes. “They used the Lemur touch screen system and some Lectrosonic gear, so that it was basically a touch selection. It was laid out so we had three video feeds on top, three on the bottom. For each camera feed coming in we had the 14 names of the characters so if you see a certain person shows up on that camera you simply touch their name, the button goes green and that means the audio is being sent out to that camera, you hit it again, the button goes red, and it’s not being sent to that camera. So it was just an amazing design. Peter Schneider at Gotham set it up and did all the trouble shooting. I know the Lemur system has settings for Logic and ProTools but I had never heard about it being used in television production in this way. So my A2 Joram Schwartz was handling the touchscreen while I was listening to all the wireless audio and doing the master mix.”

Chris Morgan of TVBoy programmed the video monitors with the Lemur touch screen.

So how did the Lemur touch system work compared to just using the auxiliary sends from the mixing board?

“I would say doing it the usual way where you are just using the auxiliary send knobs on the mixing board we’re able to get about 60 to 70 percent of the audio recorded on the cameras to be usable. The rest they have to go back to the master mix, match the timecode and select the right tracks. With the Lemur system we were able to hit about 95 percent,” says Bergman. “I use the term maddening during these types of productions because there is just so much going on at once. With the Lemur system the maddening factor was greatly reduced because it wasn’t scrambling to crank up and down 16 different knobs, it was just: see a person, touch their name, done. The graphic element just makes everything so much more logical.”