Richard Crowley
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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You have painted yourself into a corner. You say that you don’t want to put a microphone on the presenter, but then you describe environments that make any other kind of technique unworkable.
As Mr. Ford says, shotgun mics are NOT like zoom lenses or laser beams. And in acoustically difficult places, proximity is the best solution. Since you cannot affect the acoustic environment, your only choice is to get the microphone as close as possible to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.
Not to mention that shotgun mics are actually WORSE in environments with near reflections because they confuse the mic so it can’t discriminate between direct vs. reflected sounds.
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Or slow down (or freeze) the video until the too-long narration “catches up” to the visuals. That is the problem with shooting video that will be “synced” to narrations that haven’t even been translated or recorded yet.
I would find it awkward to try to translate and/or voice something technical to fit within a certain timing while maintaining the proper grammar for the language and preserving all the necessary detail. That is a judgement call only you can make. But if I were doing this I would be reluctant to tell the translator/announcer: “you must translate all of this content and make it fit into 34 seconds.”
And especially if you don’t speak the language, you would be wasting a lot of time if it turns out that they had to make cuts to the script to fit your timing that compromised the quality of the content.
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If it isn’t “sync”, it is not clear to me why the voice talent even needs to see the video (or even know the timing, for that matter)? The simple solution would seem to be to have them just do them as a simple narration/voice-over. Does it affect the voice performance to see (or “sync”) the visual?
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When I did something like that decades ago in the pre-digital era, I found (rather easily) one language that was perpetually longer than the others (German, IIRC). Because all the languages had to run concurrently (selected by the viewer during exhibition), I cut the visuals to the longest language and then slotted in the other languages (with the resulting gaps). We recorded the language VO tracks “wild” since (like your project) it wasn’t “sync”.
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Post your sample on a public file-sharing website and post the link here. Without hearing the sample, we can offer only wild speculation. Don’t get your hopes up that the problem can be fixed in post-production editing.
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“Has technology reached a point where our needs and wants have outstripped whats actually been produced either in a hardware or software form?”
Not exactly. But we are always seeking new and more efficient ways of doing mostly the same old things.
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If you understand RF propagation, you know that deploying the TX and RX antennas adequately is often a cause of poor performance. Folding the flexible wire over against the TX case or burying the RX antenna among a bunch of cable greatly reduces the effective range. And cheaper units have lower TX power, and less sensitive and less selective RX front-ends.
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Assuming you are running MS Windows? What part of the stock audio mixer application is inadequate for your project?
I am currently designing and intent to build a “fly-by-wire” mix-minus mixer for webcasting (like TWIT.TV). It will be implemented with I2C controlled chips. I plan to have both a software control (via USB) and hardware control panel. I would use an off-the-shelf commercial mixer except that I need mix-minus to accommodate people calling in on Skype.
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In addition to everything Mr. Ford said, remember also the inverse-square law. If you can get your microphones very close to the source (i.e. headset type microphones) you can survive in a somewhat more noisy ambient because you will have increased the SIGNAL side of the signal-to-noise ratio.
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The general consensus is that no wireless microphone kit (mic, transmitter, and receiver) is worth the money unless you spend over US$500-600. Anything less than that is a fiddly, unreliable, plastic toy that you will regret sooner or later. You appear to have already done the experiment for yourself. Some of us have a box in the basement full of toy plastic wireless kit that was a complete waste of $$$.
Once you have a decent wireless kit, arranging the cabling from the receiver to your camcorder is the least of your worries.