The deposition signal chain that prevents bad audio

Bad audio kills a deposition video.

If the audio is unusable, the video is unusable. Attorneys can read a transcript; they cannot watch a video they can't hear. The single most expensive mistake in legal video is unrecoverable audio — and it is almost always preventable.

The reference signal chain.

Lavalier mic on each speaker → mixer → camera audio in → backup recorder. The mixer is the redundancy point. The camera records the mixed signal. The backup recorder records the same mixed signal independently. If the camera fails, you have audio. If the backup fails, you have audio. If both fail, something has gone catastrophically wrong and you are about to have a hard conversation.

Mic placement actually matters.

Lavalier on the lapel, six inches below the collarbone, off-axis from the mouth. Boundary mic on the table as a fallback for the witness only — counsel covered by their lavaliers. Hand-off pattern when a deponent leaves the room: cut the mic, save the file, restart cleanly when they return.

Gain staging is the discipline.

Mixer at unity, channel gain to peak at -12 dB, camera input matched to the mixer's output reference level. Set it once before the witness arrives. Verify on every break. The most common signal-chain failure is somebody — usually you — bumping a knob during the day.

The three errors that kill the record.

(1) No backup recorder. (2) Camera audio set to auto-gain — which sounds fine in the room and unusable on playback. (3) Mic battery not changed at the morning break, dies at 2pm, you don't notice until you review.

Reading the meters during the deposition.

Glance at the mixer meters every five minutes. Glance at the camera audio meter every break. Listen on closed-back headphones for at least the first two minutes after you go back on the record after every break. If something has changed, you want to know inside two minutes — not at the end of the day.