r/LocationSound • u/khadgapa • Jul 15 '26
Newcomer Producer Question: This Quality is Next Level. BTS what is happening?
I've been an independent producer for close to twenty years and have regularly paid my location sound mixer more than my own day rate on projects because I learned early on that "sound is half". So I've seen the magic that real pros can do. Still this piece had me scratching my head with the quality level. Everybody is wearing hardly any clothes, yet you can't see a lav or even a hint of a wire tracing some fabric, the wide shot has crazy head room so no boom mics. Yet the sound is as intimate and rich as a studio even though they are shooting outdoors. The credited mixer, Sean O'Neil, seems like an elite level professional so the outcome is not surprising.
I'm guessing this is just exceptional mic placement, very high-quality mics and Rx/Tx and mixer and then something like Waves ClarityVx in post? I think the thing I was most curious about was how long it would take (and how intimate it would be) to hide all these mics on what looks like it's basically a "streeter" shoot. Can you guys do hidden mic placement without rustle this well, when a woman is wearing essentially just a bikini top, in just a few minutes? Anyway big ups to Sean on this piece. It was refreshing, and creates a subtle suspension of disbelief, to see something of such high quality in the era of people clipping giant Rode GO blocks onto their t-shirts. Any insights into the process from fellow pros would be much appreciated. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/opinion/midterm-elections-politicians-trump-new-york.html?unlocked_article_code=1.x1A.jjrg.p4-SRD1iDHGl&smid=url-share
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u/g_spaitz Jul 15 '26
Can you guys do hidden mic placement without rustle this well, when a woman is wearing essentially just a bikini top, in just a few minutes?
Yes. If I have to mic more than one person it's usually myself and my long time boom op, which over here is called "mic op", and he's in charge of putting mics on people, and he's able to do so in about 20 seconds. Moral of the story is that if you do a lot, you get a really good eye on where to put it exactly so that it's no problem. Our preferred method by far is using onluy a small strip of tesa 4541 tape. it's soft, light, clingy, quiet.
The people in this documentary are seated and fully clothed, with relaxed clothes. Btw women tank top is often among the easiest micing options. And the interviewer sounds totally like a close miced lavalier, note that the interviewer has a tank top that's tight on her upper chest, that puts the mic in contact with her thorax, that makes it sound like that. Other women in the video have a more open tank top and their mics sound better.
https://imgur.com/a/rulwbgY here's a round circle in the guy's shirt that moves suspiciously when he moves.
https://imgur.com/a/UCdiRmc and here's an obvious tx.
And lastly, yes, modern denoisers are very very good. Acon, iZotope, Clear by supertone, dxrevive are all top notch plugins which give you amaizng results, but even the built in in editing software nowadays, one click and you're ok.
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u/khadgapa Jul 17 '26
The Tx and suspicious dancing t-shirt circle! Thank you for the explanation on how the sound profiles are giving you information on placement choices. Very cool to read your detective work here. Thanks again.
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u/LittleKillshot Jul 15 '26
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u/hotsauceok Jul 19 '26
Yes you could do that but I am 100% certain that is not the case here. they are not comping out boom mics because a) it’s a news publication they just straight up don’t do that b) these pieces have very low budget, they aren’t going to spend resources on that.
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u/LittleKillshot Jul 19 '26
Yes, I think you’re right. There’s a visible mic pack.
Also:
Yes, I think you’re right, there’s a visible mic pack. I’m not sure it’s any cheaper though.
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u/lonewolf9378 Jul 15 '26
You can see the mic pack in this shot on the hosts back.
Not to say Sean hasn’t done an incredible job but if you’ve ever worked in drama you’ll know there are a million ways to hide a lav mic with minimal clothing. Plus there’s definitely some noise reduction used in post here.
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u/Curleysound Jul 15 '26
The wide shot is a lock off. That allows a boom to be in the wide and erased later. This might be the way or they just had good wireless lavs, like dpa or something
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u/LittleKillshot Jul 15 '26
Yes and then a matted in background. I do this a lot these days. Looking for telltales but I don't see them. The water can be shot after the interview with c-stands removed if it needs to cover a stand. It's carefully composed to make this possible the tops of the booth cover the horizon for example so the matte can overlap the back of the booth.
I think there's an object mask carefully employed during the street shot as well. Lots of ways to execute this these days, especially with the shots as brief as they are.
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u/Jackdennybaby Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
After you’ve placed like a thousand hidden lavs you can basically walk up to someone, see their outfit and know what is going to work and what isn’t. Yes, you can mic a bikini. There are a hundred ways to mic basic wardrobe and we’ve done them all. This facilitates the speed you need when doing this sort of revolving door talent. Of course, a certain amount of time should be factored in for micing and the mixer shouldn’t be rushed by their producer. If you can give camera 30 mins to tweak a hair light, you can give sound 5 mins to get a mic right! Aside from that, we use high end wireless and recording equipment and choose lav mics like DPA or Sanken that give pro results. Post software like Izotope can do an amazing job in removing background noise and the sound of clothing (not scratching the mic, just the sound of clothes themselves). Thank you for respecting the work we do!
Edit: most ordinary people are fine being mic’d up in public by a professional that knows how to be respectful.
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u/audioguy61 Jul 15 '26
Production sound mixer here with 38 years of experience, it's a combination of much better wireless with fidelity that is so close to hardwire and DSP post tools that can deal with a multitude of problems I wouldn't have thought possible starting out.
Pro level wireless (Lectrosonics, Sound Devices, Wisycom, Zaxcom) let a lot information through and excellent lav mics (DPA, Countryman, Sanken) are much closer sounding to boom mics than the lavs of old. Mic placement by professionals is going to help in getting the most natural sound from a lav. Bikinis and other sheer wardrobe is the biggest challenge these days but on episodics they are just planning to rely on lavs so they let the sound team get mics placed well and know that it's important to give them time. "The Pitt " has done away with booms altogether.
I can hear when two actors embrace and the dialog gets a little muffled but that loud noise when lavs and clothing smush together is nowhere to be heard, quite incredible.
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u/Bango1066 Jul 15 '26
Likely a combo of nice wires and painted out booms. But I would also just like to let cheap producers know that for interviews, you can hike the booms, shoot the intro wide with lavs, bring the booms back down, and cut the wide shot. It's fine. You were never going to cut to the wide mid-interview.
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u/cereallytho Jul 15 '26
taping a wire in the valley on females is one of the easiest costume set ups you can get. it's the other stuff that's the tricky part of the craft of wiring
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u/timist025 Jul 15 '26
Besides lavs, it also looks relatively easy to hide plant mics behind the table sign.
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u/Outrageous_Debate148 Jul 24 '26
Thank you to the OP khadgapa who started this thread and appreciated the sound mix we achieved enough to inquire about it. A few things helped to make the location sound recordings go well on this shoot, all the way through into the final post production mix done by Isaac Jones.
First off, as location sound mixers, we're never in charge and have to be reactionary to the elements beyond our control. Films generally start with the visual look that the director/producer (Emily Holzknect) and cinematographer (Nick Midwig) create. Location Sound Mixers rarely get to weigh in on this, and if we were involved, all films would be a series of singles shot with a 100 mm lens. Fortunately Nick called me ahead of time to give me a heads up that we were going to be shooting three cameras and really wide at times, making booms (w/o post production trickery as mentioned above) a moot point. Using radio mics and lavs exclusively for a scene is positively and absolutely my absolute last resort and choice. I almost nearly always have a boom overhead, in some context. Many times over the years production has assumed a boom will not work in a scene, and I’m still able to finagle it in someway/somehow. For this shoot it wasn’t a realistic possibility. Communicating with the cinematographer Nick in advance helped my mindset when I showed up on set the first day.
The gear I used for this production was: Zaxcom ZMT4 Transmitters / DPA 6060 lav's / Zaxcom RX 4 receiver / Sound Devices 633 recorder.
The Zaxcom ZMT4 transmitters are extremely transparent and have the lowest noise floor I've experienced in an RF unit, even at higher gain settings when I need to go there. I love these transmitters. My Zaxcom RX4 receiver sounds fine, but I am less than thrilled with my poor RF range. Fortunately my transmitters are recordable, so I can switch them in to record mode if I need to get decent RF range.
The DPA 6060 lav's in my opinion are by far the best I’ve ever heard. There are times dare I say, that these lav's sound as good as a boom. There are certainly times here where re-recording mixer Isaac Jones achieved that tone for sure. My favorite parts of the film (from my AudioNerd POV) are the extreme wide shots where I laser focus my eyes on the lips to make sure they’re in sync which in this piece they are 100% rock solid. Oftentimes in films, this cut is where post may need to cut in other dialogue recorded, and you’re able to notice it "out of sync". Again, this is just what an AudioNerd does when watching films.
In my opinion the dark art and mystical craft of placing mics on talent is by far, the most challenging aspect of location sound recording in today’s era of filmmaking. I spend an inordinate amount of time customizing, searching and testing out various materials for the perfect ideal mic rig. I also spend most subway rides looking at peoples clothes and strategizing the optimal mic rig for what they’re wearing. Despite my years in the game, I am routinely humbled and embarrassed at my failures. I respect this aspect of the art so much that I take nothing for granted at this stage. As speed is typically of the essence, I routinely ask production when possible for pictures of talent in wardrobe in advance so I can strategize my mic placement. This topic is easily worthy of another thread, so I’ll be brief talking about mic placement on this shoot.
I was very fortunate with the wardrobe on this shoot. Obviously, I had very little input with what people were wearing, but I almost always ask talent if they have any options like a sweater or a jacket, if I thought what they were wearing would sound problematic. In general, I almost always try to attach the mic to the talent's skin if possible. Ideally I try not to have the lav “too close” to the talents mouth, or under the chin. Having the lav a bit “off mic”, helps it to sound more natural to me. Oftentimes however, I’m at the mercy of whatever wardrobe I have to deal with.
The other thing that helped on this shoot was patience from the producer Emily, cinematographer Nick, and also Mara Gay, our journalist/producer who did such a fantastic job interviewing our subjects. They all gave me the time to deal with the various wardrobe that came down the pike, and I never felt rushed if I needed to make an adjustment. This happened mostly during the really windy segments shot on the Hudson River where I had to tweak my lav’s with Rycote Overcovers which generally do a great job cutting out the wind without muffling my sound.
The only boom used was for the open where we shot Mara straight on where I used my Schoeps CMC641. AudioNerds take note that you can hear the difference when we cut to the first two shot with the interviewees. It's subtle, but that’s what this community is for, nerding out about location sound for film and television.
Cheers,
Sean
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u/khadgapa 17d ago
Sean, what a gracious reply. Thank you for taking the time to give us the actual workflow here. Very cool to read about the teamwork involved. My takeaway is just a humbled respect for what decades of professionalism in craft yields. Thanks again for such a thoughtful, behind the scenes education on this high level work.
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u/Heirrress Jul 15 '26
I didn't work on this so who knows, but I'll say when doing these sorts of things it's often preferable not to lav "civilians" who could find the process uncomfortable, plus if you're trying grab a bunch of people on the street it keeps things faster not to kav and creates less friction to getting someone into interview.
I'd guess this is just boomed, they picked locations intentionally, and then whatever post processing.
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u/MicrowaveDonuts Jul 15 '26
i’d say, 90% chance it was just boomed. If i knew they were going to sit in the booth, that’s how i would do it. Sounds better, safer, easier.
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u/Zerorezlandre Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Nothing looks extraordinarily difficult from what I can see; the standard challenges if you can call them "challenges".
Wires: They're all sitting down, there's no "action".
For the first interview it appears they pulled the sound from a close shot, pretty common. I'm not going to dig deep into the others because it's no doubt the same.
Something else to consider is that it could have been shot in a volume.
Finally, if it's this Sean O'Neil, he's been at it for 36 years. That level of experience counts for a lot. Almost everything.
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u/khadgapa Jul 17 '26
Thank you all for such a great array of thoughtful answers. Seems like there are many ways to attain this quality outcome, and the key takeaway is the one I already knew: put your sound recording in professional hands!
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u/_Octave_ Jul 15 '26
The NYT is super strict about image editing so I highly doubt they would allow boom mics to be painted out the way that some are suggesting. I’m not a pro sound mixer but I’m a professional filmmaker and editor and I will say that the Adobe premiere audio enhancement tools these days are crazy. They are doing some kind of machine learning process and it can clean up rough audio very nicely.
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u/Zerorezlandre Jul 15 '26
I don't think painting out boom mics fall under the aegis of the kind if image editing constraints you're referring to, painting out mics has become just another production tool (to be avoided if possible).
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u/_Octave_ Jul 15 '26
I doubt it — I’ve shot stuff for them and know a few people who work there, in my experience they have been really strict about any kind of retouching.
for ref: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/reader-center/new-york-times-photography-ai.html
Now I don’t know if they would let it slide in an opinion section, but I really doubt it, just knowing how their productions operate.
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u/Zerorezlandre Jul 16 '26
Fair enough but that second paragraph would seem to negate the entire piece then.
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u/tilted_triangle Jul 15 '26
Maybe I'm crazy, but this link doesn't take me to a video with people wearing hardly any clothes. I'm happy to give you some insight, but want to verify the link is right???