Co Commentary in the Same Room?

What’s the recommended method of recording two people in the same room? If we sit far enough away from each other could we both have individual microphones, or is it best to get one microphone for both of us and sit near each other? Any recommended hardware?

I don’t recommend one microphone. The episodes arent out yet, but my current lp was done with one mic and sounds like ass, my next one was done with a mic per person and sounds athousand times better. I’ll bother my cohost to send me the audio so I can whip up a comparison.

Depends on how much you want to spend and what hardware you currently have. I know the Blue Yeti has an “interview mode” setting where you can both sit on opposite ends of it. Works fairly well. Best option I’ve seen (and one that I’m currently saving up to implement for my own podcasts/streams/LPs) is the XLR mics/USB mixer route. Here’s a rough idea of how that would look (ignore the videography stuff):

It’s a better idea to go with XLR mics/mixer because then you effectively remove echo issues that can be caused with USB mics.

3 Likes

I guess I should also clairfy that I was lucky enough to have a co-host who is a musician and has access to a profesional mixer and like, a billion mics, so my approach isn’t gonna work for everyone.

I second bob’s approach, and especially 2 mics. It sounds a lot better when you can shift each person’s audio to the right and left. You’d need 2 recording inputs, but 2 tracks for editing can be helpful sometimes.

Also, if you have a player that pushes buttons loud enough and you’re thinking about 2 mics, you might want to try a couple of shotgun mics to narrow the cone of received audio, because I cannot tell you how long I spent trying to cut out the almost unbelievably loud clicks and snaps my player made with the control sticks and buttons.

And, one last thing, post audio edits in my experience are usually more important than the audio recording setup. If you have an imperfect audio setup, like noise in the background or you want to auto-duck the game audio, you can use a program like Audacity to fix that up.

zfleeman also uses XLR mics with a mixer for his LPs, and they sound great. You’d just need a laptop to plug the mixer into. You also would need to keep the game sound not too loud, obviously.

I’ve been considering a co-op PlayStation 2 game for some time, but I don’t want to handle three live audio sources. I think the plan is going to record gameplay in person & commentary online. Play at the same place, but record with our own independent USB mics across town from eachother. I’ll sync the audio in audacity, then do a final render in vdub.
It’s an extra step or two, but it should mean less headache and easier to manage time by breaking the process up. Does this sound right? Am I missing potential problems?

Thanks for all the tips! I’ll try a few different things to see what works best for me and my budget!

edit: also, doing commentary in post from two separate places and syncing it over a video you did together should work fine. It’s pretty much the same setup as most people use for post commentary with guests.

1 Like