Richard Crowley
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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It is not clear whether you are talking about a fixed installation or portable?
Do you (or your customer) control the space? Can they make improvements?
Is there a budget for this?
Certainly there are many acoustical consultants in the LA area who could help you. I would certainly recommend starting with the acoustics and THEN determining the best kind of speakers to get sound into that space. -
It sounds (no pun intended) like your major problem is the room. If you have a rather reverberant space like that it is difficult to get intelligible reinforcement to the audience without bouncing around the room.
The proper way to do it would be two-prong:
1) Treat the acoustics of the room. Damp especially the reflections from parallel surfaces.
2) Use a speaker(s) which control the sound to hit the audience’s ears but NOT hit the walls, floor, or ceiling. Doing this in a fixed installation is rather challenging and often requires custom speaker system(s). Doing this in a portable application where you must troop the equipment in and out is extremely difficult.Using a headset mic on the presenter is brilliant. There is no better way of capturing the speech while minimizing the unfortunate ambient problems. However, using microphones in the audience area while also trying to reinforce the sound back into the audience area is just asking for trouble. Especially in such a small and reflecting space.
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Duplex cable appears to be around 40 cents per foot.
https://www.redco.com/Gepco-D61801EZGF.html
https://www.redco.com/Gepco-D72401EZ.htmlNot sure what is your definition of “relatively expensive”?
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I would assume the the lower numbers for input sensitivity indicate MORE gain. So I would think that the -62dB setting would make the input MOST sensitive and the -32dB would make it LEAST sensitive. For distant micing where you are dealing with low signals, I would think you would want as much sensitivity/gain as you can get. Now there may be a point where too much gain starts increasing the noise and the signal-to-noise ratio starts going south again. So there may well be a “sweet spot” which only you can determine by experimentation.
Dunno what “Ref Level” means? Does it actually change the audio level of what is recorded? Does it change how the metering displays levels? Does it change how the auto-level feature works. You can determine all these things for yourself by spending an hour playing with all the audio settings on your camera.
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I viewed a couple of your video resumes. Fancy graphics and effects, video was good, but I have to say that the audio was pretty sub-standard. Any time I hear that near-echo audio I think: “these people just used the microphone on the camera and didn’t care enough to mic this properly.”
No shotgun microphone will perform well in the presence of near reflections. It is just the nature of the beast. For distant micing indoors, we use hyper-cardioid microphones because they are not as sensitive to near reflections.
And when I say “distant” I mean 18 inches, and maybe 24 inches if you are pushing your luck. If you can’t get the microphone that close, then use a clip-on lav. At least if you want people to take your audio seriously.
And if you have more than one person, or if the subject(s) are moving around, then you need a boom operator with good headphones to monitor the audio to keep the microphone aimed at the subject’s mouth.
And a wired microphone is ALWAYS better than wireless. A $30 cable ALWAYS sounds better and is infinitely more reliable than a $3000 wireless microphone kit.
And last, but not least, ALWAYS monitor your audio while shooting. ALWAYS! Recording audio without monitoring and metering is like framing and focusing without a viewfinder!
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“-48V” doesn’t sound right. Phantom power is +48V. Do you mean -48dB?
What lav microphone? It isn’t particularly helpful to omit details like that.
If you need more mic gain, then set the internal adjustments for maximum gain, and then back them off if you run into trouble. Trying to set things by the numbers is a dubious pursuit.
It is probably heresy to say this here, but if you are just shooting documentary-level stuff, I say don’t be afraid to use auto-level for well miced speech.
Of course be sure to experiment with all the gear and all the settings well in advance of needing to use them so that you will be familiar with all your options and how to use them.
IMHO, you are fundamentally doing the wrong thing by trying to use a distant mic technique, ESPECIALLY in a small room. Unless you want it to sound like you were recording in an echo-chamber. “5-20 feet away” is just completely unreasonable, IME. Quite possibly not even good enough for “transcription-quality” audio recording. Much less any higher-quality expectation.
Unless the speakers are just getting up to speak for a minute or two, I would much prefer to put the lav on the speakers and let the facilitator fend for themselves. Unless the facilitator dialog is equally important, in which case I would dump the shotgun completely and use a second lav. Wired or wireless.
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BOTH models meet your primary requirement. Not clear why there is any confusion?
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The microphone connection is hard-wired from the female input XLR over to the male output XLR connector. The Rolls box does nothing to the mic signal.
I don’t understand your question about the connector. The microphone IN and OUT connections are XLR.
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Yes, it passes through the phantom power. It cannot power the microphone on its own.
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The Rolls PM55 is more suitable for boom operator monitoring as the mic signal is just a “pass-thru” and unaffected on its way to the mixer/recorder/camera.
Typically you would have a short cable from the microphone to the PM55, and then a long cable from the PM55 back to the mixer/recorder/camera.
If you use google image search for: production sound cart, you will see that many of them have simple PVC pipes attached to the sides for holding boom poles when not in use.
There are also special pockets and clips made for holding boom poles: https://www.filmtools.com/sounboomhol.html