While image quality is important for a professional shoot, people often ignore the need for high quality sound. If the sound is good, nobody really notices, but if it’s awful it stands out and can ruin the footage. We’ve experimented with various techniques on iPhone shoots, including using AirPods and plugging lav mics directly into the phone, but we’ve had the best results from recording sound separately. For this we use the affordable Tascam DR 10L.

This is a portable audio recorder that looks a lot like a wireless lav transmitter, but it’s not. It’s designed so you can wire up your subject and just let it record for a whole shoot without relying on an on set mixer. It even records audio at two levels, so if the audio is peaking on one, the editor or mixer could always use the other one.

We consider it paramount to monitor the sound remotely - to make sure there aren’t any problems, such a shirt noise. To get that working we use an Audio Technica ART2x-USB, which is basically just a cheap USB audio interface.

To use our setup, see the attached guide with all of the instructions we send to people who will be self-taping for a remote shoot.