Bruce Watson
Forum Replies Created
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Music Bakery is one of my favs. There are dozens of others, just search for “royalty free music”.
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[Peter Robertson] “The cellist had a spot mic and the orchestra was recorded with a main stereo pair (actually 2 pairs – 2x omni 2 x cardioid) about 3 feet behind the conductor and about 12 feet up.
The problem is that the cellist dominated too much on the main stereo pair.”What’s your balance between the omnis and the cards in your mix? IOW, can you back off of the omnis, pull them down relative to the cards? If you can, how does that effect the “cello domination” problem? And just for our information, cards in ORTF? NOS? And how wide an AB for the omnis?
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[Merlin Vandenbossche] “I have only vaguely heard of the 85 dB LEQ standard and have no idea how to measure or control it. I would like to learn more about it.”
This might be a place to start. IDK.
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[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.
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[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?
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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’.
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First, and you of all people already know this, divide and conquer. Hire a video person, handle the audio yourself, problem solved.
But since I’m pretty sure you don’t want that answer, I think what you’re looking for is an in-ear monitor (IEM). Custom ear molds will give you about as much blocking as you’ll get from the 7506s (which I use as well) if not a bit more. And custom molds will be both more comfortable and more secure as well. This will of course be more expensive than headphones. If you want, it can be very expensive indeed. And then if you go wireless on top of it all… well, you can spend some serious cash if you want to.
A place to start might be Etymotic (their homepage is a little… underwhelming, so you have to dig for what you want), or Ultimate Ears. There’s a big overlap with the IEMs that stage musicians use, all the way over to hearing aids. What you seem to be looking for is somewhere in the middle. So I’d probably start with Etymotics. Clearly, YMMV.
EDIT: Ah, found it. I’m thinking the Etymotic ER4-SR might be a good place to start.
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[Larry Richards] “A boom mic.”
Well, the usual suspects tend to be the same ones used in dialog recording. Those typically being hypers like the Sennheiser MKH 50 or 8050 and the Schoeps CMC6 mk 41 (perhaps the best sounding mic for dialog, but that often becomes a religious argument). If your studio is big enough that it doesn’t present any close surfaces (walls, ceiling) that can give you rapid reflections that make an interference tube comb filter, you could go the shotgun route, with Sennheiser MHK 60 or 8060, the Schoeps CMITs (there’s even a CMIT 5u in “chroma green” so you can key it out), the Sanken CS-3e, Neumann KMR 82i, etc. Just beware of the rear lobe on a shotgun; usually not a problem if it’s pointing up and you have sufficiently high ceilings like you should on a studio sound stage. Just don’t point the rear lobe at a light in the lighting grid to avoid picking up any odd pops and hums.
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[Larry Richards] “I work for a network affiliate and am in need of a quality Broadcast Mic for our studio.”
Define “broadcast mic” if you would. Are you talking about a lavalier or something else? If it’s lavs you’re talking about, the main local news stations in my market all seem to be using Tram tr50s. Like they have for at least 30 years now it seems. Still looks fine and sounds great.
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[Drake Silver] “Recently we shot some footage on the iphone X with (freefly movi gimbal system) and recorded sound separate to sync later, (48Khz) into my sound man’s recorder — on trying to sync footage with the sound today, we simply… can’t get it to sync!”
Yes, well, Apple has some interesting ideas about video. iPhones used to shoot a variable frame rate. And this would loose sync with sound recorded on the same iPhone. I remember filming some stuff where the iPhone lost sync with itself (I still can’t wrap my head around that) after just two or three minutes. When I finally checked, my NLE said it was seeing something like 25.7 fps. It was a real PITA to edit, but with enough cuts you can slip and slide the audio for each clip to get all the individual clips to reasonably sync. But that was years ago.
I don’t know if Apple ever wised up, or whether they believed they were trail blazing (believing it won’t make it true Apple). I just remember that’s when I swore off iPhone video. I seem to remember that some of the NLEs eventually figured out what weirdness Apple was doing and added drivers that could convert their variable frame rates back to reality. That said, I had quit playing with it before that so have no experience in that area beyond what I’ve read.
Anyway, something you might want to look into. When in doubt, believe the sound recorder over an iPhone. Just sayin’.