best pro video camera for audio

[Ty Ford]

Hello Adrian and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

I hope others will tip in. I have a JVC HM 650 camera. I think it has exceptional preamps. It’s pix limitations are relatively obvious.

Here’s Michael Gabel doing an audition. One Schoeps CMC641 on a locked down boom over his head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erGL6dQ_wSs

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Bruce Watson]

There really aren’t many. The best are probably going to be ENG cameras because they are designed for one-man-band operation, and crappy audio on the nightly news is a no-no. On the more cinema side, I’ve heard (no experience) that the Canon line (C-100 and up) are acceptable.

The best you can do is probably “acceptable” audio. Why? Because video cameras are about… video. Audio is typically an afterthought. Normally this means a cheap chip implementation and a massive design team fight for the camera case real estate needed for the connectors.

Perhaps a better way is to feed the camera with a mixer like a used SD MixPre-D (which can output anything from line level to mic level to AES3 digital, balanced or unbalanced, XLR or 3.5mm stereo plug). A mixer like this will give you three advantages over whatever cheap audio circuits the camera is using. First, the mixer is almost guaranteed to have better preamps. Second, the mixer should have excellent limiters which you’ll likely need if you’re going to try to do one-man-band work. Third, the mixer will almost always have better meters than the camera. And for extra credit ;-), fourth, using a mixer to feed a camera will make most any camera an acceptable recorder, so it opens up your camera choices considerably and may save you a fair amount of cash. Just sayin’.

[Adrian Smith]

Thanks Bruce. Good advice about using a compact external mixer. I’m probably going with a Canon C300. I usually work with a sound person but this is a solo project where I’m going to be working in some very remote locations. So I need to be as compact and low profile as possible. Thanks again.

[Ty Ford]

Adrian,

Bruce is right, but…….many cameras, in order to be cheap, simply put a pad at their mic inputs and call it a line input.

As a result, the audio goes through the camera preamp anyway. The question becomes how much of the good audio in the external mixer preamp actually survives. I don’t know the answer.

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Richard Crowley]

Ironically, the more expensive the camera the MORE likely it is that the designers assume you are using separate sound recording so there is no corresponding increase in sound performance on high-end cameras.

As Messrs. Ford and Watson have already mentioned, the best you can do is to use an external mic preamp to bypass the preamp in the camera and give some measure of improvement to the signal-to-noise ratio and distortion factors.

The “go-to” solution is typically one of the preamps or mixers from Sound Devices. They have the reputation of making high-performance and rugged construction gear for professional use.

———————————————————————————
Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Bruce Watson]

[Ty Ford] “…many cameras, in order to be cheap, simply put a pad at their mic inputs and call it a line input.

As a result, the audio goes through the camera preamp anyway. The question becomes how much of the good audio in the external mixer preamp actually survives. I don’t know the answer.”

One of the reasons to use something like a MixPre-D is that you can feed a mic-level signal to the camera. On top of that, you can use the 1kHz calibration tone to turn down the camera’s mic preamps. This let’s you “set and forget” the camera audio and do everything from the mixer. It also lets the mixer’s preamps do a large majority of the amplification. So the sound you end up with is mostly the sound of the mixer’s preamps, with the camera’s preamps applying little gain, and therefore (we hope) little noise.

That’s why I was saying that using an external mixer to feed the camera can “make most any camera an acceptable recorder”. Because it can minimize the effects of the camera’s audio circuits.

The only “gotcha” I can think of in doing this is that you might find that the camera is metering in dBFS, while the older SD mixer is metering in dBVU (a hold over from the old magnetic tape days?). This can result in people recording at too low a level thinking they need to set the mixer to record at -12 dB peaks, when actually you want to set the mixer to record at around +8 dB peaks. And this dovetails nicely with the factory default of +18 dBVU for the peak limiters. Used like this it makes the combination of mixer/camera nearly “unclippable”. And unclipped audio is a good thing, yes?

[Ty Ford]

Well, you’re right that the MixPre preamp is likely better, but if the signal is still mitigated by the camera preamp, you’ll lose quality there. How much? Dunno. Clearly, a circuitry that offers an appropriate line level that bypasses the camera preamp is preferable, but camera specs seldom if ever offer that information easily.

Back in the miniDV days, some of those tape-based cameras, like the Sony PD150 had XLR inputs and could be switched to line level, but it wasn’t Pro Line level of 0 dB, or + 4 dB, it was consumer line level of -10 dB. If you tried to feed it 0 or +4, you could set tone, but the peaks would clip way early. What a mess!

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Bruce Watson]

[Ty Ford] “Well, you’re right that the MixPre preamp is likely better, but if the signal is still mitigated by the camera preamp, you’ll lose quality there. How much? Dunno.”

I think we’re violently agreeing here.

The problem with cheap preamps is they they can’t give you much clean gain — you ask for 50 dB of gain and they give you a healthy portion of noise with that. Good preamps can give you 50 dB of good clean gain no problem. So the point of using a good mixer with a less expensive camera as “audio recorder” is that you can turn down the gain in the camera so you’re only asking for (say) 10 dB of gain, while you’re getting 40 dB of gain from the mixer. You’re still getting 50 dB of gain, but only 10 dB is coming from your noise source. Maybe think if it as proper gain staging?

So yes, going through the camera’s preamps does introduce some noise, but if you keep the gain down, you keep that noise down too. And that’s what using the external mixer does for you.

I’m just saying that this technique can improve a less than ideal situation. Where you can’t do second system sound, you can still do this. It won’t give you the sound quality of a good dedicated sound recorder. But it might be able to give you sufficient sound quality. And everybody is going to draw that line in the sand in a different place. So clearly, YMMV.