Wedding ceremony audio from the clearest mic, part by part

How to record wedding ceremony audio

The first rule of wedding videography audio: record more than one source, because one of them will let you down. A good wedding ceremony audio setup covers each voice twice: a lav on the person saying the vows, a lav or small recorder on the officiant, a feed from the DJ or venue board, and a backup recorder near the front. Keep audio on in every camera too. It is your sync reference and your last resort.

Start every recorder before the processional and let it roll through the recessional, so nothing stops mid-vow. If your recorder offers 32-bit float, use it: it saves you from a level set too hot, and Hailo reads those files correctly rather than treating loud moments as distortion.

DJ feed or lav: the answer changes part by part

The board feed is clean and consistent for anyone speaking into the venue's microphone, like the officiant or a reader. It hears nothing else, and it is only as good as the DJ's fader. The lav sits right next to the voice saying the vows, which is why wedding vows audio from a lav sounds close, but it rustles against clothing and can break up when the room cheers.

So the best mic for the welcome is often not the best mic for the vows, and neither may suit the recessional. Picking by hand means auditioning every recorder through every part and cutting between them. That is the part Hailo does for you.

What plays under your ceremony in Hailo

When you build a ceremony film, the recorder under the picture is the one that hears that part clearest. When the best mic changes from one part to the next, each mic is brought to the same speaking level.

Every camera's own audio stays on its clip, muted. Unmute it when you want the room. Where no recorder was rolling, the camera audio fills in, so the picture never goes silent. Your recorders are lined up against the cameras by timecode or by waveform, which syncing external audio covers in full.

The Normalize audio switch on the film builder decides what else lands. Off, the default, keeps the untouched recorder file. On, you get a levelled copy on A1 with the raw recorder muted on A2 as a reference. Speeches films always arrive levelled.

Matching levels by hand in Premiere Pro

If you are searching for how to match audio levels in Premiere Pro, there are two common routes. Clip > Audio Options > Audio Gain can normalize the peaks of selected clips to one value. The Essential Sound panel can tag clips as Dialogue and match their loudness with Auto-Match.

Peaks are the loudest instant in a clip, not how loud the speech sounds, so two mics normalized to the same peak can still sound uneven at a switch. Matching loudness gets closer, then you fix the rest by ear. On a Hailo ceremony that first pass is already done, with each mic brought to the same speaking level, and the finishing (EQ, noise, the final mix) stays yours.