Stuart Allman
Forum Replies Created
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I have a more diabolical and sinister approach. Hire an audio person for the first few shoots…write down what he/she uses…and buy that. You’ll still have a learning curve (audio isn’t simple), but at least you should have the right equipment the first time.
A good field condenser mic should be less than $1500. Some of the pro shotguns like the ME66 run $1100. Studio mics tend to be large diaphrahm condensers (LDC’s). Typically a half-way decent one runs around $1k. I bought a Pearlman for $1500 that I love and it’s made a few people jealous. You’ll need a good preamp as well, otherwise you can ruin the sound of a perfectly good mic (no camera pre’s for studio work!).
Stuart
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Good catch. I actually made things worse with my last post. I meant to write LS and RS. My mis-type.
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I think I made one of the points unclear. The LR and RS should be equidistant from the listener, but don’t have to be the same distance as the L/R/C speakers are to the listener.
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Tim,
I was a home theater junkie for years and worked in the industry for a little bit. I thought I would throw in some basics on the recommendations I learned.
1. It’s nice to make the front speakers equidistant if you can.
2. The L & R should be about +/-30 degrees from center
3. The LS and RS should be about 110 degrees from center and placed about three feet above your ears on the walls.
4. The LR and RR don’t have to be equidistant since they are typically delayed by you or the encoder to enhance the early effect. You may want to add a temporary 15ms delay to the surround channels while mixing. The Dolby encoder should do this for you. Not sure about DTS.
5. Speaker calibration levels DO matter and since you have m-audio speakers, don’t trust they will match levels out of the box. L,C,R,LS,RS all match, sub is +10dB from that level.
6. After mixing, encode your work and listen to it again. There will be differences.
7. The room acoustics will make the biggest difference on your ability to hear a good versus bad mix. i.e. put your money here.I remembered Dolby having a customer education document. They’ve definitely changed it through the years, but here’s the latest incarnations.
https://www.dolby.com/consumer/home_entertainment/roomlayout2.html
https://www.dolby.com/dolbycast/transcripts/home-theater-speaker-placement.html
Stuart
PS. I’m jealous. Wish I had a surround mixing room. 🙁
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Dan,
I would assume with four cameras and a one day shoot you didn’t have time or a reason to dial in a film “look.” Who really does? If I had an EX1 handy I’d like to take it over to my friend’s studio (outfitted with HVX200’s) and see if the user parameters could make them come close. On a personal level I’m curious about the extent of how color balance and gamma choices were made between these two cameras. I don’t doubt that Sony made some “video” look choices as defaults, but you aren’t necessarily stuck with those. I guess this is kind of a pie-in-the-sky luxury experiment.
S.
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I’m curious about the “filmic look” characteristic that people have talked about with the HVX. Sony has included some alternate gamma settings to the standard rec.709 curve in the EX-1. Has anyone compared these to the HVX? It looks like Sony lets you control gamma past anywhere you would really want it to go.
I guess this makes the assumption that the difference is really just in the gamma curve and not some MTF tweaking that Panny is doing as an “special sauce” process to emulate the color dependent blurring of film layers.
Also, has anyone confirmed the SDI-out color space on the EX-1. Is it stuck to 4:2:0 (hopefully it’s better than that)?
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Rod,
I realize that this may not be much help in your immediate situation, but ror a little bit more than an AJA box I have a nearly new Sony HVR-M15U deck for sale. It handles DVCAM and definitely comes with firewire. Give me a call if you’re interested. (858) 655-5767.
Stuart
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The CD printers work good, look great, but aren’t durable worth squat. If you get a drop of water on the label side of the disk the ink tends to wash right off. The sticky labels tend to be the worst option. I completely agree with you there.
It really depends on if you want the disk to be durable. Burned DVD’s are only good for about 10 years anyway, so it may or may not matter depending on your clients.
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Labelling disks?
One word – lightscribe.
The lightscribe technology allows you to permanently label disks using the laser on your DVD drive. You have to have a lightscribe drive, media, and software. The downside is that the labels are monochrome, but verbatim sells pre-colored disks so you can at least do two-tone. The upside is that there’s no sticky label to come off or inkjet printing to rub off/fade in sunlight.
You can use any bmp/jpeg image for the label.
I recommend staying away from HP media because the contrast is very poor, but memorex and verbatim seem to do a decent job (especially Memorex).
Stuart
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Donovan,
You might want to consider renting a couple large diaphram condenser mic’s for your shoot. I’m going to take a rough guess and say that your camera supports 2 XLR channels. My Pearlman TM-1, like most LDC mics, has a power supply that you put inline with the mic cable, so you would need to hide two of those near the mic stands. Mic placement REALLY depends on the venue and acoustics. Generally speaking you will probably want to consider placing the mics above and slightly in front of the muscians, a good distance apart from each other, and arrange the postion to your personal listening taste. I would recommend a cardiod pattern because omni is going to pick up a lot of useless noises.
A great resource for further information can be found at gearslutz.com (I’ll probably get sensored for the web site name). It’s a community of audio geeks and as I recall they have a forum dedicated to live events. I found the information there quite useful.
Stuart
PS – A lav mic? I’m in pain.