Bruce Watson
Forum Replies Created
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[David R. Falzarano] “In a situation like this, what should I do? A lapel mic would be a good idea? A more directional and less noisy mic?”
The first thing one needs for good dialog captures is a quiet environment. You don’t have that. First thing you should do is set expectations by telling your client that making a recording in a noisy environment is going to result in a noisy recording. You can’t change the laws of physics.
You can try a lav., but it’s only going to help so much. It will not eliminate the background. And resist the temptation (I’m not kidding here) to use a directional lav. as these introduce their own problems (head movement taking the voice out of pattern, proximity effect becomes a variable, etc.). Even professional actors and newscasters have trouble with directional lavs, and they’ve had the training and have the skills.
You can try a shotgun, but a shotgun(interference tube) mic near reflective surfaces (walls, ceilings) causes it’s own audible artifacts. And even when perfectly placed, a shotgun will only lessen a noisy background, not eliminate it.
Your best shot is perhaps an earset mic. Since it’s worn on the head, it turns with the head, so you can use a directional mic without much of a problem. Since the mic capsule sits near the corner of the mouth, it’s about as close as you can reliably get, so your signal-to-noise ratio will be as high as you can get it. Will this eliminate all the background noise? Of course not. All it can do is minimize it. But it may well minimize it to the point of practical inaudibility. Broadway shows use a fair amount of earset mics for example.
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[Pete van Haren] “I can easily record without issues on Apple products. Have tried, Mac Book, iPad MinI and iPhone 6 and all these apple products work fine with the same attempted set up as Android.”
Something is tickling the back of my mind that says that Apple didn’t follow normal TRRS wiring conventions. Check to see if the Apple and Android phone wiring for the TRRS jack is the same. If not you’ll need a different adapter for the Android stuff.
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[Bob Mark] “I will be doing some sit down interviews in gov’t. buildings with noisy central air conditioning and some street noise. There is also quite a bit of RF in the air. What would you recommend for microphones?”
Wired lav. as Mr. Levin suggests, or a hypercardioid on a boompole on a c-stand. I usually get better sound from a boomed hyper. Use a hyper that has a HPF, or use a field mixer that has a HPF (or use both at the same time for a sharper cut off). If you can drop everything below 80 Hz, you’ll drop out the vast majority of HVAC noise, and there’s no human speech in that low frequency range, so you won’t loose any speech quality.
If you’re running wired with XLR cables, the RFI issues become nearly moot.
I had to do a series of interviews at a hotel. The room they gave me was nearly empty, but shared a wall with the floor’s air handler. Very noisy, lots of low frequency noise in the 60 Hz range. I was able to walk the room and find some room modes. I was able to place the interviewee in a nice armchair from the hotel lobby in one of the room’s nulls. Then I used an AT4053b with the LPF switched in (-12 dB/octave at 80 Hz), and the LPF on my MixPre-D (another -12 dB/octave at 80 Hz). The combination results in -24 dB/octave roll off, very sharp. Client figured I was wasting my time and that the interviews would be useless, but couldn’t get me a better room. When client heard the results, she was pleased and amazed. The air handler was nowhere to be heard. The interviews sounded like they were recorded in some CEO’s executive suite. I do love to underpromise and overperform. 😉
If you go the hyper / boom pole / c-stand route, I advise a nice comfortable arm chair if possible. Why? It limits their movement so they are less likely to go out of pattern on you. Women, particularly short women, might try sitting on the front edge of the chair, so you have to deal with that (either get them to sit back, or move the c-stand forward to get them in pattern again). And if you can, pull that chair off the wall; this helps getting away from some of that “small room sound” (but it’s not going to eliminate it) you’ll end up with in small offices.
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[Todd Terry] “…even though we had the mics fairly close, the environment was pretty loud. I could hear the car fairly well, and the traffic around us pretty darn loud. I’m not too sure how to deal with that…”
Signal to noise ratio with audio is not that difficult — you just have to get the mics closer to the talents’ mouths. Easier said than done of course. 😉 You can also effect signal/noise ratio by choosing a more directional microphone polar pattern, but this is dangerous in lavs; it requires rigorous training of your talent. If they move their mouth(s) out of pattern it’s difficult to impossible to fix in post, and if they dip their chins toward the mic they can make the directional mic proximity effect a variable. Your post guy may become irritable with you. Just to be clear how I feel about the trouble directional lavs can be, I have to tell you that I no longer own any; all my lavs are omni. Which brings me to earsets:
If you can sufficiently control your blocking (e.g. use a single camera), you might be able to get away with ear-set mics, like the Countryman E6 series. That is, put the mic on the opposite side of the head from the camera so it isn’t seen. You can also hide them on eyeglass frames, baseball hat brims, etc. It might be possible, and it might not, but it might be worth investigating. If you can do it, you can rent a handful of these mics for the day or two it takes you to film this scene.
The joy of this approach is that, since the mic is attached to the head (and therefore moves with the head) you can much more easily use directional mics (cards, even hypercards). This can really help improve your signal/noise ratio. Yet, they will also be more susceptible to wind buffeting noise (a pressure omni’s capsule is sealed so the back of the diaphragm can’t see the wind, a directional mic can’t be sealed like this). And your talent isn’t going to talk out of pattern, or change proximity effect by moving closer/farther away which makes audio post much easier.
If you have the money/time/talent, you can just leave the earset mics in the shot and rotoscope them out of the shot in post. Yeah, I didn’t think you’d like that one either. But it’s been done before.
You can also use some compression in post to push the noise level down some. As long as there’s some level difference between the signal and the noise to start with. If they overlap, compression isn’t much help. And don’t go too far or you’ll end up with audible artifacts.
Good luck with it.
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Have you been coiling it up using the “normal” over/under technique you’d use with your good XLR cables? If not, you might have “set” the cable with a twist. What works with some XLR cables that have been mistreated (coiled “over the elbow” style, which is a bad thing to do) is to stretch them out in the sun to heat them up and “relax” them. I’ve read of people draping them across their roof for a few days and letting them “bake” in the sun. Then you coil them over/under to “train them” and they can be deployed flat again without the spiral looping (foot grabbers) that “over the elbow” creates.
The same may work with your lav. cable, IDK. Might be worth a try. I do over/under with my OST lavs (which feels silly for a meter of cable, but it can’t hurt) and I don’t have the problem you’re describing.
As to mounting, you could try making a (strain relief) loop underneath the mic, and twist the cable in the loop to make the mic head go where you want. Then tape that loop with your twist down with gaff tape or micropore medical tape (if to skin) to hold that twist in place.
Another alternative might be to tape the mic head itself, using something like the Rycote Undercovers. This might preserve the orientation you want, IDK.
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[André Mascarenhas] “Thanks, Bruce! Do you have any tips of websites to get used audio gear besides eBay? As you said, it seems hard to find used MKH50s.”
You could try the video forums like DVXuser.com. Most of them seem to have a used equipment sub-forum. Things show up there on occasion, from mics to mixers to boompoles to c-stands. And of course cameras and lights.
You could look at the GearSlutz (hey, I didn’t name it) classifieds sub-forum. Lots of stuff there, but not much of it is aimed at dialog, it is mostly a studio music recording place. But I have seen MKH50’s come through there on occasion.
[André Mascarenhas] “Do you know about any website, book, etc, where I can learn the basics of recording with a mixer? Pre amps, limiters, etc?”
You can ask here. And most of the video forums have sound sub-forums. Since field mixers are usually used by video dialog recordists, you might want to search in those forums and see what people have been doing. You aren’t the first to ask, so investigate what others before you have asked and answered before you ask your own questions. Saves everyone some time that way.
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[Todd Terry] ” We need good clean audio (well, as clean as possible under the circumstances), and will be in a noisy open convertible vehicle in real traffic… so I don’t think boundary mics or mics at any greater distance than on each actor will do the job.”
So… you want to record dialog inside a hurricane? I’m thinking this isn’t going to be a great idea. The problem is wind buffeting the lavalier(s). I’m thinking you’re going to want to body mount the lav (tape to skin) to get it as far under clothing as possible, then you’re going to want to use a windblocker (something like the Rycote Undercovers). I would definitely use omnis, though you may be tempted to go directional. Omnis do better in the wind because of their design (back side of capsule is sealed).
Lack of headphone monitoring might well hurt you here. You’re going to have to listen to every recording (all five) after every take to make sure that you don’t have any lav. in the group that’s having wind problems, or mount problems. Or some actor didn’t turn your recorder on when you told him to. Etc.
You may find in the end that your dialog just doesn’t pass the understandability test, and you may have to ADR it all anyway. I’m just sayin’ to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. If you need to do that, it won’t hurt you to have a mic on the car recording the sounds of traffic that’s upwind of the actors so you minimize dialog bleed. If you have to ADR, you’ll need that “room tone” for the post audio work, and it’ll have to match the video of the take that you actually use so that the sound of the traffic matches the actual traffic that you see in the scene.
Good luck with it. Might be quite the challenge.
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[André Mascarenhas] “Should the mics I’m considering, like the MKH50, be ok connected directly to a camera?”
Probably yes. You’ll have to try it and see. But if your MKE600 is OK with it, the MKH50 should be also. The MKH50 has been a favorite hypercardioid of the Hollywood dialog set for quite a while, but there are (or were) quite a few on the used markets as people moved to the MKH8050 which is smaller and lighter which makes boom pole operators happy.
The reasons to use a field mixer include better mic preamps, better meters, flexibility in what your output is (you can feed balanced mic/line or unbalanced mic level to your camera), and better headphone monitoring. But the main reason I like my little MixPre-D is the limiters. They have saved me more than once and made me a believer in good limiters. I realize that you don’t want the extra piece of equipment, but good limiters are something to really think about. Just sayin’.
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[Todd Terry] “… we have a potential commercial shoot coming up where I might need to mic four or possibly five people riding in a car… the setup is sort of like James Corden does on his show with “Carpool Karaoke” if you’ve ever seen that. I think I need lavs for this, which I never ever EVER use anymore, so I don’t even know anything about them.”
The usual suspects are, in no particular order, Sanken’s cos-11D, DPA’s 4060, Countryman’s B6, Tram’s tr-50, Oscar SoundTech’s 801/802, and no doubt others that don’t come readily to mind. Some of these are made for mounting on people and under clothing (high frequency bump to make up for the high frequency lose due to the clothing), so which you choose might depend on how you place the mics. Most of these mics have available XLR power converters so you can power then with phantom power. Many (most?) can be terminated for whatever you need — I have a pair of OST 802s that I had terminated for Sennheiser wireless, but also have the XLR converters also in Sennheiser, so I can use the mic wired, or with a Sennheiser radio. This makes life with lavs much easier IMHO.
Do go wired if you can. Wired is better sound quality, higher reliability, and way cheaper than wireless. And it’s a no-brainer if the mixer/recorder are withing a few meters of the source.
You might want to mount the mics on the individual performers. But you might also want to mount them on the car itself. Sun visors make a great spot for mics for example; very similar to booming. Center consoles can work. Gaff taping to the roof liner, etc. All depends on how creative you feel.
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[Miranda Shar] “I’m in the market for some equipment to start getting some gear together. I’ve heard that Rode are relatively good mics for the price. As a person starting in the industry is this the way to go?”
Which industry? The various subsets of sound recording will push you toward equipment that works best for that subset. For example, if you’re recording classical and acoustical music in excellent performance halls, you’ll find yourself looking more toward omnis and wide cardioids, and interesting stereo techniques (OK, interesting to me anyway). The opposite end of the spectrum might be dialog recording for movies, which will push you toward small lightweight hypercardioid and shotgun mics that work well on a boom pole.
Rode makes mics for a whole range of subsets of sound recording. Their new NTR ribbon mic is gaining good acceptance in classical and jazz recording markets, while their NTG3 shotgun has good acceptance with the indy dialog recordists. Those are just two examples; Rode has a full-ish range of mics.
I’m just sayin’ that the equipment you get should match the job you’re working.