[Danny Kane]

Yes – I should have been more specific. Let me describe it a bit…

This is very much a low-budget gig as it is going to be a YouTube based show – more of a hobby than a professional show, but we’d still like to have a good quality production. My partner is a highly skilled music video editor and I have worked with him on a few video projects before, but this new territory for both of us.

I guess these would be “run-n-gun,” informal interviews done (mostly) outdoors. Interviews will be a dialog between both the interviewer and the subject.

We need this to be as portable as possible as we’ll be on the move a lot during the course of shooting and there are just two of us. We will both be hosts of the show, but the interviews will only have one interviewer and one subject as the other host will be operating a moving camera during the interview. For that reason, I’m not sure that a directional/shotgun microphone would be ideal as there will be times when the subject will be speaking but will not be in the shot while the camera moves around.

We had originally planned to do this with lavaliere microphones and purchased a couple of A.Lav mics. During our two “test” shoots we found these had decent quality audio considering we were just doing the recording onto a smartphone. But these were a little inconvenient to set up for the interviews. We had originally wanted to stay away from handheld microphones mostly for aesthetic reasons, but we’re giving in at this point. Either way, we knew eventually we’d want to record into a proper audio device rather than just the phones.

Which I guess is why I asked the question. I know that many of the portable recorders have the omnidirectional microphones built-in, but I was wondering if there is one that has a decent built-in microphone that could be used for this style of shoot. Would it actually just be easier/better to use a handheld mic plugged into a portable recorder? If so, what would be a decent budget choice?