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Summary: Learn about audio booth recording for TV news with expert journalism advice from an experienced broadcast journalist in this free television career video clip.
Views: 666 | Tags: tv, editing, television, news, journalism, reporter, reporting, anchor, news careers, television careers
About the Expert
Bill Albin Bill Albin is currently the head reporter at WLAJ 53 in Lansing, Michigan. He attended Specks Howard Broadcasting school in Detroit, Michigan. read more
BILL ALBIN: Hello, I'm Bill Albin. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach you what you need to know to be a local news reporter. In this clip, we're going to talk about some of the basic functions and things that are in an audio booth. For example, I would come in here to record something for a package, a package, of course, being a pre-produced story with me in it and video and sound and so forth. But in order for me to have that pre-produced story, at some point earlier in the day, I would've had to have recorded my voice doing the story. So I would come into an audio booth, and in an audio booth, you have things like a microphone. You have an audio mixer. The audio mixer is a device that, well, that's exactly what it says, it mixes audio. A variety of things come in and out of an audio booth. You have different sources. Not only is my voice going to be recorded, I may want to record something off a tape, or I may want to record something, a sound effect. All of those things can be mixed through this board, and you have various things down here, like these little sliders that are basically just volume controls. You have a variety of other buttons that do different things and adjust the audio signal in different ways. Most of them--it looks like a lot. There's a lot of buttons here, but really all you have to worry about is each one of these rows is independent of each other. And each one of these rows is completely separate from all the others. You would put a source into one of these rows. For example, this row here on the far left is just this microphone. If I adjust this slider here, I'm only raising or lowering the volume on this microphone. I'm not affecting anything else on this board. The under things are assigned different other things. There could be a VTR or a deck, like something on your home VCR at home, plugged into one of these. If I wanted to record sound off a tape, a video tape, there might be a CD player plugged into one of these channels or some other sort of media device that has sound on it. All of these things go through here, through this board, including the microphone, and get recorded somewhere else. So if I need my voice for audio, I would come in here. I would adjust the volume on the microphone one, and I would speak into this microphone. I would speak at a little bit on an angle. I wouldn't speak directly in. I was kinda speaking at a little bit of an angle. This is an omnidirectional microphone so it picks up sound from all around it, and my voice would go through here, through the audio mixer and to a tape in another place.