How to Set Lavalier Microphone Levels

Video Transcript

"Now that we've got our Lav. system set up, I'm going to show you how to set the levels. And, I'm wearing headphones because you always want to be wearing headphones when you're monitoring. But, typically, I'll be using our actual levels indicator to set my levels. I just want to listen, makes sure everything sounds all right. First off, we already plugged in to channel one, here. But let's make sure everything is correct. We're switched over to mic and I can hear it so it must be working. Earlier we switched our XLR input on through our menu. Right now, I'm set to channel one and two so it's duplicating the single audio channel and putting it into both stereo. For some reason I just wanted it in one channel. I could choose to switch this to channel one and now I'm only going in to the left channel. But I'll go ahead and duplicate it because I have no other audio and it will save me the trouble of duplicating it in post. I'm going to set my levels right here and also on my Lav. Now, I already have my Lav. set to where I want it, but remember you have two sets of levels to actually adjust. What I usually will do is almost go in the middle with both. You don't want one to be super loud and then you have to set the levels really low over here. Try to find the medium, work with your particular Lav. I know that my Lav. is set to a good place and I only need to do fine adjustments here on the camera. So, that's what I'll do here with our audio levels, also making sure we're set to manual levels. So, if you watch my levels, I'm just talking and they're actually set really well where they are. Because I'm only plugged in to channel one on my XLR input, the only dial that is going to affect my levels is the channel one dial. So, I just turned it down. You can see this is a little bit too low; this isn't going to sound good. You just start turning it up, turning it up, turning it up, turning it up, a little bit louder. But you don't want to go too loud because, remember, you'll start to peak and can see that I'm getting distortion at that point so I'll turn it a little bit loud. What I would do when I'm setting audio levels is to get my microphone on my talent, and then I would just have them talk, and do a mic check. Usually I will ask them to talk as loud as they're going to be talking when we're shooting. Sometimes you're like, "Can you do a mic check for me?" They go, "Yeah, okay. Test. Test? Then you start shooting and they go, "HEY!" Make sure you get them to talk as loud as they're going to talk when you're shooting, when you set those levels. Be real careful to get those level set. Do it before you shoot and everything should go great."