Sound, sound, sound!
If there’s one technical aspect of our low-budget filmmaking that keeps me awake at night, it’s sound. Since the film will hinge heavily on interviews, the quality of the recorded sound is obviously very important. And we’re unlikely to have voice-over or dubbing sessions after the fact, like they do for most movies.
When we first started practicing for the documentary, we had a $25 lavalier mic, the Audio-Technica ATR-35S. Despite its low price, it recorded fairly well; but I was worried about a constant hiss in the audio, and I wasn’t sure if the microphone was to blame.
I got in touch with a friend of a friend, Jost, who’s studying to be a sound engineer, and described our recording scenarios and low budget. To my surprise he recommended we use a shotgun mic (the ones that mount on top of the camera), saying that the sound quality would be better, and it would give us more flexibility when filming than a wired lavalier mic. (It would also prevent the dreaded scenario of doing a street interview and having someone walk right through your hanging microphone cable).
I did a bit of research, primarly on hv20.com, and it seemed like the new Sennheiser MKE 400 would be a good choice. At about $200 street price, it wasn’t cheap, but we decided to give it a try. We headed to B&H (a huge A/V store in Manhattan) one Sunday, and ended up talking to a knowledgeable sales person who convinced/persuaded us to buy a much bigger, more professional microphone, the Røde NTG-2. We got the kit which included a shockmount, a shoe mount adapter, and a short XLR-to-minijack cable, all for around $260. One of the benefits of this microphone (which looks huge on the camera, making us look more professional) is that it could also be used with a boom pole as a boom mic, and its XLR output means that it can connect to high-end audio mixers.
Speaking of XLR, one of the things we have yet to decide is if we should get an XLR adapter for the camera, which would give us two or more XLR inputs (useful for mixing different sources) and a minijack output, like the Beachtek DXA-2s or the juicedlink CX211. These little boxes attach to the bottom of the camcorder, and let you adjust the input gain to reduce as much noise as possible. The juicedLink also has a pre-amp which is supposed to give you even better sound quality by letting you reduce the microphone’s input gain and then amplify the sound that goes to the camcorder. (Some of these terms are explained here).
Anyway, so many choices! Oh, and there’s still more. For example, Jost mentioned that we could also record the sound separately from the camera, using a flash-based audio recorder, and then sync up the audio while editing. This might give us better quality than the camera’s built-in microphone input, but would also entail a good amount of work during editing.
Of course, none of this is very useful if you can’t hear what you’re recording as your’re recording it. For this I got a great pair of monitor headphones that have uniformly great reviews, the Sony MDR-V6. They were $69 from a merchant at Amazon.com.
In any case, last Thursday we went to a rally in Wall St and I recorded some footage using the new microphone. I’m hoping to put up a few parts online so people can see how it sounds, but we haven’t even looked at the footage yet. Stay tuned for the results…