[Melodie Bryant]

I’m wondering if I’m not being overly cautious.

I began this project with a Sony 1-chip camera and, using the Rode mic (with an adaptor using batteries) got audio that peaked out pretty high (+12db). LOTS of room to spare – I usually brought it down. Maybe that was too high to begin with, and I shouldn’t be comparing it with the audio from the dvx. But since it’s a new camera, I’m still finding my way around.

The dvx, on the other hand, has been giving me peaks of -2db to -1db (yes, it was a very quiet talker), but there’s no noise and if I crank it all the way in FCP, it’s almost passable. So if I just boost the gain in the dvx menus to -60db and work with the (input) volume dials, go futher into the red, maybe that’s the way to go for the quiet talkers. There’s some noise in the headphones, but it doesn’t seem to make it into FCP…

There are so few options to change audio/line/mic settings in the camera (that includes the one page devoted to it in the manual), I can’t really find any bad routing on my part(?). And maybe the levels I’m getting, are actually appropriate and the earlier ones were actually way too high.

What is (actually) the correct level for spoken audio?

[Melodie Bryant]

I actually did read the manual before I contacted you, and as far as I could see, did everything accordingly. Clearly I’m missing something…

[Melodie Bryant]

Thank you for the reply. It’s really great to know there’s help out there.

I only have the manual that came with the dvx, but t he only choice I see for the mic/line level is the switch at the front of the camera, and I already set that to mic. Does the limiter have an effect overall? That’s something I can turn off in the menus…