How to make your event sound good.
9th June 2026
How to make your event sound good.
We film lots of events, from small talks in front of a few people in a meeting room to all-day conferences to many hundreds of delegates in a large hall.
Picture is one thing, and sound is another. I thought it would be useful to share some tips and processes that may help event organisers.
Most cameras come with onboard mics, designed for 'run and gun' interviews, but cannot deliver clean sound from multiple sources in a large room.
If the room has a Public Address (PA) system, we plug into it if possible. This feed should contain all the clean sound from the various mics - lapel / lectern / radio / handheld etc needed to cover the event. Typically a PA - especially if it has a sound engineer operating it via a mixing desk - will be able to supply this feed to to us via a cable from the desk to one of our cameras.
In our case it's an XLR input to our main camera, but most can supply AUX too. Once we have the feed, we need to do a bit of fiddling with levels during a sound check - is it Mic or Line? - and this direct feed from the desk will be our main clean source of sound.
It's also sound that is free of all the distractions / echos of the location. Venues can present very complicated and unexpected sound profiles, interference and feedback issues.
If a long cable to our camera isn't practical or causes too much obstruction at the event, the feed can go into a standalone recorder such as a Tascam DR 40, although it's easier to monitor and tweak if it's into a camera, as the operator will be checking it via headphones.
In theory, this should be all you need. In practice, all sorts of challenges can arise.
Speakers walk away from the lectern mic, hold the handheld mic away from their mouth, fiddle with their radio mic or in many cases - and this is particularly true for Q&A sessions - start talking before the mic is brought to them.
The solution? Wireless lapel mics like the DJI Mic, deployed carefully around the venue. These have saved an awkward silence on many a shoot.
Yesterday for example, we had a DJI mic on the lectern, which saved the sound when a speaker forgot to take the handheld mic. We also placed one next to a loud speaker on the second camera as a backup for room sound in case the feed failed.
We've also relied on the on-board mic of the third camera (A7s3) on a few occasions, particularly in Q&A when it's close to an audience speaker who doesn't have a handheld mic.
All of the above is why we typically ask to be in the room at least an hour before the event starts for sound checks. Sound can be tricky. People don't tend to notice good sound, but bad sound immediately lowers production value.
If all else fails, you typically have the on-board mics of each camera with a room track to fall back on. AI sound tools have come a long way in the last year. Adobe Enhance can now often recover understandable, if not ideal, audio from recordings that would have previously been unusable.
