Bruce Watson
Forum Replies Created
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[Hal Beery] “Please suggest best headphones for this barebones recording situation (sitting in the same room/space as the performance… often tooooo close to the source.)”
To be frank, there aren’t any. Your problem isn’t the headphones, it’s you being in the sound space. No headphone is going to cure that for you.
The problem is that you can’t attenuate more than mid -30s dB with your head in the sound field. The reason for this is that there’s more than one path to a persons eardrums. The main path other then the ear canals themselves are through the sinuses. Which, if you like breathing, are difficult to isolate.
About the best you can do from a headphone perspective is something like the Remote Audio HN-7506, which is a set of Sony MDR-7506 Drivers in a somewhat better closed back isolation case. But I’m telling you up front that these will in no way solve your problem. They will at best improve your situation only marginally.
You’d be better off getting creative. Run some long XLRs and take over a bathroom. Anything with a door. Someone’s office. The lobby (which has it’s own problems, but different ones). Loading dock. Anywhere else but in the room with the musicians.
If you won’t do that, then think about not live mixing. Just get the individual mics down with reasonable levels and mix it in post.
‘Cause there ain’t no magic headphones that will solve this problem. If there were, everyone would have a pair and you wouldn’t need to ask the question in the first place.
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[Joe Loria] “…and yes I will be using it primarily for film. I know the issue with some of the low budget recorders is in their preamps. From my “understanding” the mixpre-6 has the better preamps as well as better limiters so that is definitely an option if it can get me closer to pro level sound.”
Not closer — you’ll get “pro level sound” from a MixPre-6. Many pros use these devices.
I realize you are trying very hard to avoid this, but… smart money says to sell your 302 and put the money into a MixPre-x and move on.
[Joe Loria] “I feel as if I am defeating the purpose of owning/using my 302 which is such a great little mixer and sending it into an h5 :/ as many on the web have already pointed out. I was looking at some of the Tascam low budget recorders too as I heard they work better than the Zoom H series for line level signals fed from the 302?”
If you insist on using the 302, you’ll probably want to find a recorder that can accept pro line level inputs (+4 dB). Make sure this will bypass the recorder’s mic preamp stage (some line-ins are just -40 dB pads that turn around and feed the mic-preamps, which you really should avoid if you can). There are, I think, some Tascam units that will do this. Marantz used to have some I think. Any recorder that was designed to be used with a mixer as a front end should do this, but you have to check to make sure.
But really, why use the extra box with the extra cables, power/batteries, setup, and faffing about required? The reasons to move forward are better sound and more convenient and reliable operation. Which is why I say the smart money is on selling what you have and putting that money into a modern single device mixer/recorder, be it from the SD MixPre line, the Zoom F line, or something else.
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[Josh Williams] “It’s not. But I have limited desk space and get tired of cables and would prefer some good wireless headphones but if there aren’t any suitable wireless studio quality headphones then I’ll stick with the wired ones I’ve got.”
IMHO there are not any “suitable wireless studio quality headphones” available. The radio hop is just a seriously bad idea for critical use. That said, I like listening to my Sennheiser PXC 550 noise cancelling headphones when I’m wandering about the house on Sunday mornings streaming a baroque music show I like using my smartphone. Bluetooth headphones work great for that, and they are marvelous on a train trip (never leave home without ’em). But I never use them for editing, because for editing I need to hear exactly what’s going on at the edits. Rocking back and forth over a few frames deciding where to cut is no place for bluetooth headphones.
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[Adam Worth] “what can I expect to not have banding shutter and FPS – wise?”
If your lighting is using mains frequency (50Hz in PAL countries, 60Hz in NA) as a driver, then you need a frame rate and a shutter speed that are multiples of mains frequency. This is one of the reasons PAL runs 25/50 fps, and it’s one of the reasons that TV in NA is 30/60 fps.
So, try a test at a multiple of mains frequency and see if your banding doesn’t go away. For example, in NA try 30fps and 1/60th second shutter. See what happens.
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In my state, when they take people’s property to widen a freeway, the state is often forced by the courts to build a “noise abatement wall” between the freeway and the adjacent land owners. If this is not being done for you, you might want to consult a lawyer to see what your options are. A noise abatement wall would probably be well worth having just for the higher frequencies. Low frequency noise (traffic rumble) will generally travel through the ground.
As to construction technique, there’s too much to consider to be able to cover it all in a few postings. You would probably be best served by hiring an acoustical consultant. Just the variables in how to construct a wall to a given STC level can be overwhelming to the inexperienced. Here’s an example of some of the options available. Which method is right for what you want? I have no way of knowing.
All this, and you still have to meet your local building codes which force electrical outlets where you don’t want them, etc.
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There are better ways. First, if the three walls of drywall aren’t hung properly (think resilient channel and similar techniques), you’ll still get noise conducted in through the nails and studs that are attached to the exterior walls. IOW, if you do it wrong you’re just throwing the money away and not getting any benefit. Said another way — if you build it the same way your house is built, it will sound just like your house sounds. And you already know that’s not going to work, yes? So it’s reasonable to think that a standard “stick built” house wall is insufficient for your needs.
There are better and more efficient (noise wise) techniques than the standard builder “stick building” 2×4 walls used to make your house, like “double stud” construction. Start reading to find them. And I’m not convinced that the third layer of sheet rock can be that useful — law of diminishing returns and all that. There’s a reason hardly anyone tries that.
Best way IMHO is to build a room within a room. That is, a thick masonry shell (think poured concrete). Then, build a room inside that isn’t touching the walls or ceiling, and float the floor off the concrete pad. And think about what you are doing — you can’t let the HVAC or electrical ducts / conduits, etc. touch the outside wall either or you’ll “bridge” the noise into your room within your room.
If you aren’t going to spend the time to research how to do this effectively, use an acoustical engineering service. It’s too easy to mess this up, and sound flows into a structure in ways that are not at all intuitively obvious. And, BTW, it’s really difficult (and expensive) to fix your mistakes after the building is already up, so you really should try to do it right the first time. Good place to start is one of the books about how to build a home studio. There are a number of books about this — it’s a popular topic.
Also, you could participate in some of the online forums about this. Gearslutz has a Studio Building / Acoustics forum for example. There are of course others. Does CreativeCow have one? IDK.
Another source to examine is the home theater people. This group usually understands the difference between sound proofing (keeping out your dog sounds) and acoustic treatment (controlling absorption, diffusion, and bass traps to make your interior sound good), and they build stuff like this all the time. IOW, they know all about green glue. You should too.
IMHO you need to know about and understand all these considerations well before you start digging your foundation, or you’re likely to be an unhappy camper later. I’m just sayin’ that there’s a lot more too it that just:
[joseph wilkins] “I read that the best way to stop sound is to put mass between you and the sound and to seal up any cracks and holes the sound may get through.”
If that’s all you got, you need to read more. Seriously. A lot more.
Also, save yourself a lot of heartache and build a video studio with 12′ ceilings at a minimum. Trying to light from lower ceilings is a PITA. It’s always better to light from a light grid, no matter how small that grid is. A single section of grid pipe is often all you need to hang lights, and you can always expand a grid as you need to. But if you don’t have the height, you can’t install even a tiny grid. Just sayin’.
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[Harlan Rumjahn] “if you want usable sound for things like home movies or documentaries, then mounting a shotgun on top of your camera will absolutely work.”
Depends on how you define “usable”. I’m a fan of documentaries, and I’ve walked out on more than a few because of poor sound. I image that the producers of those docs thought the sound was usable. But I did not. That’s what I mean by “define usable”.
[Harlan Rumjahn] “If you are pretty close to your subject — no more than about 3-4 feet, depending on your environment — then it can be difficult to tell the difference from a mic boomed from overhead.”
I disagree. It’s usually fairly easy to hear the difference. You just have to learn what to listen for. What typically gives it away for me is what I call “small room sound” which includes rapidly occurring first reflections from nearby hard surfaces (walls, ceiling, etc.). This is stuff that the human ear/brain processing can fairly easily discard in person, but which a microphone/recorder dutifully records and you hear when watching a screen, because your brain doesn’t get all the other queues needed to be able to discard the “noise”.
[Harlan Rumjahn] “Quiet outdoor environments will give you the ability to be even farther from your subject and still get good sound.”
This I really disagree with this. The farther you get away from the source, the lower your signal to noise ratio. That’s the laws of physics, not an opinion. But also, the farther from the source, the more gain your amplifier has to supply. And the less expensive an amplifier is, the less clean gain it can generally supply. So turning up the gain to compensate for the distance, adds mic preamp noise.
[Harlan Rumjahn] “Everyone seems to knee jerk the response that on camera mic mounting is not good.”
Not everyone. There’s plenty of people who, for one reason or another, insist that they absolutely have to mount their mic on their camera. People gotta do what people gotta do. Often the same people come to forums like this and ask about how to fix their audio in post. When they find out how expensive/difficult fixing in post is, they start trying to figure out how to make a better capture. Pretty soon they’re asking about which boom pole to get. This is a more or less standard path people take, IMHO. It seems to me that the more people have struggled with audio from a camera mounted mic, the less willing they are to mount microphones on cameras. So I think it’s less of a knee jerk response, and more of a learned response.
[Harlan Rumjahn] “audio from a mic mounted on camera will often produce great results!”
Again, it depends on how you define “great results”. It’s possible that some people will like it. But then again, it’s just as possible that they’ll like the sound of the camera’s internal mics. They are in the same position, more or less, as the camera mounted mic. And position is perhaps the biggest determiner of sound quality.
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[Gabe Blank] “My fear is that it simply can’t operate farther away from the subject (say, 1-3 meters away.) And also that the pickup pattern will make it useless in this environment. I’m sure anyone who has used this mic before can confirm/deny those fears pretty easily.”
It won’t be “useless” so much as at 3m it just won’t sound much better than the VideoMic Pro.
Audio is mostly about signal-to-noise ratio. The reason you get in close when booming is so that you increase the ratio of the signal (voice) to the room reflections (noise). As you get farther away, you’ll hear the signal get lower compared to the noise. It doesn’t take being very far away (slightly more than a meter does it for me) for the audio to become unacceptably noisy. Certainly by the time you’re all the way out to where the camera is, your signal level will be near what the noise level is. Sound will get… yucky, for lack of a better term.
A secondary problem you’ll get is in using a diffraction tube mic (aka “shotgun”) in a room that features rapid reflections. That is, has hard reflective surfaces nearby like ceilings, walls, etc. This often works against the interference tube design and results in comb filtering artifacts which are often just nasty sounding and very difficult to impossible to correct in post. If I were going to use a single mic for both interior and exterior dialog work, it would be a hypercardioid and not a shotgun, for just this reason. Something like an AT 4053B (which I have and can recommend) would work nicely. I only use a shotgun when I can get it sufficiently far away from reflectors like walls and especially ceilings. That said, shotguns tend to work great outdoors, but can still be effected by nearby stone or concrete walls.
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[Gabe Blank] “…and would like the freedom to simply mount the mic to the top of my camera and get good audio that way too. Is this at all possible with the NTG4+?”
Not likely going to happen. The optimal place for a mic to record sound is almost never on top of a camera. Doesn’t matter what mic you put there or how expensive it is. It’s always going to sound like it’s out of position, because it is.
That’s just the laws of physics talking to ya.
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[Peter Robertson] “There wasn’t much I could achieve by changing the mix from just AB to just ORTF,”
Not what I suggested. I’m suggesting that you try dropping the levels of the AB pair anywhere from -6 to -12 dB relative to the ORTF pair. If you read what Tony Faulkner said about his four mic array, his mixes never end up with both arrays equally loud. One is always louder than the other. Which one is loudest depends on the needs of that session. That said, you should also try with the ORTF pair down -6 to -12 dB or so relative to the AB pair. You might be surprised what happens to the overall balance, which is why you try the variations.