How is sound recorded on a reality TV show?

How is sound recorded on a reality TV show?

Audio is actually more difficult than video, on reality shows, especially if you have lots of participants. A camera generally has two clean inputs on a reality show. When you have lots of participants, and you're mic-ing all of them, what you're doing, basically, is creating a separate audio receiver, a base station, for audio. This is where all of the feeds from the wireless mics are being mixed onto a board that can handle 16 or 32 or 64 inputs, in addition to what the cameras with their two channels of audio can pick up for you. Audio is, technically, finding all those frequencies and clearing them, making sure all the batteries are working, and the wireless units are working - they don't slip and fall when people move, and they don't run against fabric. Audio is actually a bigger job than the video. You can look at a bank of video monitors, and you can see ten video monitors, and in about twenty seconds you can realize if anything is amiss. If you have 16 audio inputs, there's a lot more work involved before you can tell everybody that we're good to go. You have to listen to every one of them, and you have to listen to the person move with the mic on, and you have to do a mic check.