Seth Bloombaum
Forum Replies Created
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Research and price wireless lav rentals in your market, and always ask the UPM (or whomever is hiring) if you’re going to need them for the job. Lectrosonics UHF is the standard. You could easily drop another $4k on a pair of wireless, renting would be a great way to start out.
Don’t forget to get some rental compensation for your equipment. If you do it now you’ll be better positioned to get more $ as your equipment inventory increases.
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‘Round here (Northwestern US) the Sony MDR-7506 is somewhat of a standard for location work. Yes it does fold, and yes it typically discounts for about $100. Comes with a leatherette drawstring bag and a 3.5mm to 1/4″ adaptor that screws on and won’t accidentally fall off.
There is also a pair of Sennheiser for about the same price that many people like for music. Don’t have a model number – sorry.
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You’re going to have to figure out where the hum and hiss is coming in. The way to deal with the problems you’re experiencing in mix is to not record them in the first place. IMHO your modest selection of mics is a different issue.
1) Buy or borrow a tester and check EVERY cable you use.
2) Listen to every mic you use before you go to the shoot. Figure out best use and placement on yourself and friends before the shoot.
3) Use of a mixer will give you a better opportunity to monitor levels into the camcorder. Take that camcorder off auto-gain and find output settings on your mixer that will reliably allow you to know when you’re peaking at -10 to -12db on the camcorder. The idea here is that you should be able to tell this by looking at the mixer meters.
4) Build a cable set that sends two xlr from your mixer to the camcorder, and returns the headphone output from the camcorder. Insist on listening to playback of tape frequently.It’s a lot of hassle, but this is how to deal with hum and hiss – catch it at the source and make sure it isn’t recorded. DNR is a band-aid that you should only have to reach for very occasionally.
Possible sources of hum and hiss include bad cables, broken mics, bad setups on wireless mics, bad recording levels, bad gain structure leading to mixer/camera electronics noise, ac cables lying parallel to mic cables, broken cameras, broken mixers, dirty AC power source, etc. Using the techniques above should allow you to catch any and all of these problems at the time of recording. If the work is important you want to be sure you have a clean recording while you can best fix it.
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Powerpoint is usually very stable with video. It likes WMV and MPEG-1. Perhaps there is some other issue with your PC.
The quickest way to create slides is in… Powerpoint! You could then “save as” png for use in Vegas or DVDA.
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Yes, the MobilePre is an excellent value and incredibly clean. Also, you can move it from laptop to desktop to Mac as your needs change. I had occasion to benchmark one against my Sony VAIO laptop’s sound card, there was no comparison, the MobilePre was near silent and the VAIO’s sound card was all hashed up.
What the MobilePre and similar devices do is:
Replaces the function of the sound card.
Provide two microphone preamps. Instrument or line level inputs may also be used.
Provide a headphone amp for monitoring.
Provide line output for pro monitors.
Provide phantom power, which most condensor mics need.All in all a very handy little box, for the pro as well. It has many competitors in both USB and FW, but it stands up well.
For a great narration mic for cheap, check out the MXL-990 for $70 at musiciansfriend.com. With good monitoring you’d have all you need.
Note that you can also bring in narrative via your video camera. Just record your narrative to tape and capture as usual, put it on the timeline, unlock the picture and delete it.
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I suppose so. However that will be a step back in terms of quality, as you’ll take whatever the MD preamps put on disk, play it out through the headphone amp as analog, digitize with a consumer device… You won’t really know the quality until you benchmark it.
Remember, the idea was to get away from consumer quality preamps 🙂 and it would sure be nice to get your sound digital and keep it that way without subsequent conversions. I guess this falls into a “best practices” discussion, but only you can determine if consumer MD digital-analog-digital conversion is sufficient quality and better than what you’re doing. It might not be good enough, I don’t know.
However, you’re asking advice of audio professionals and my knee-jerk reaction is spend more money and get pro quality!
Have you ever tried a beachtek or similar audio interface and a pro lavalier on your TRV-900? The hiss could be coming out of your mic…
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Not that familiar with the TRV-900.
A buddy has the larger of the Marantz CF recorders – he likes it, works fine for him. Of course he has to always travel with his laptop and dump off his cards once or twice a day.
If that’s a problem then Minidisc is nice in that discs are cheap. But I spent about $1400 on the HHB, it has XLR in and phantom, digital in and out, etc. It’s the $2-300 consumer MD that you have to buy a tabletop MD to get digital out.
But if I were to purchase today, it would probably be one of the Marantz CF recorders or the R-4 4-channel from Edirol.
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I do this all the time for event videography where I need a couple more tracks. I’m presently using an HHB pro minidisc unit, should work fine with the Marantz.
Occasionaly you see posts from people saying they have drift over 15 or 30 minutes – I’ve never experienced this. Of course both Video/sound and minidisc are coming in digitally, the minidisc typically via S/PDIF, and I’ve had to lock my sound card to the MD clock.
If you’re recording on a CF card you’ll probably not even capture, just file transfer. If there is a gross pitch/time change that probably means that the file header is off, and your mac thinks it’s a 44.1 file instead of 48. There should be a utility for you to fix this if it happens (Soundforge on the PC is what I use).
My typical setup is a stereo pair of mics into the minidisc, short shotgun on the camera for reference audio, sometimes I use it for wild sound, and that leaves a channel open on the camera for maybe a wireless lav.
Then everything into the NLE and rough sync, then slip the audio for final sync and turn off the reference track. I’ve had no problems with 60 minutes of sync. My NLE allows me to move the audio in less than 1-frame increments, which is important for this kind of work (it will allow movement by 1 sample!).
How bad is the audio on your camera?
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Yes, if you are doing a digital capture via 1394/firewire all that is happening is that the existing digital file (and levels!) are being transferred to the hard disk.
Volume changes would have to be accomodated in an editor or with analog capture.
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Suggest you take your question over to the Web Streaming – Audio|Video forum on Creative Cow. There are a couple of regular contributors there who are QT experts. Hinting for streaming is indeed an issue I’ve heard of, but not had occasion to work with.