Can’t Catch Cab

On Sept 25th, Alex and I went to an anti-bailout rally and march around Wall Street. There was pretty good turnout, and we had the opportunity to give our new camera/microphone rig a try. The conditions were actually very different from what we’ll really be filming in (lots of noise, lots of loud sound sources, tons of people you had to maneuver around), so the video and sound is not very indicative of what the documentary footage would be like. That said, I thought I’d share just over a minute of footage. All in all I thought the new shotgun mic did a pretty good job, and the video quality is very good (though I did a pretty poor job of keeping the camera stable). I haven’t taken any video editing classes yet (as Alex did), so using Final Cut Pro to do this 1-minute clip was actually a bit challenging at first, but I think I’ll get the hang of it as we do more of these short edits.

What you’ll see are several short clips with the audio of one of them going throughout. This technique can be useful, for example, for playing an interview’s audio before the person being interviewed appears on screen, which is fairly common in documentaries and helps put scenes together. You can see the video in HD quality by clicking on the vimeo link or HD button.

There were so many video cameras at the rally, that at first they seemed to outnumber the attendees. Apart from a few professional/TV people there were tons and tons of more low key videographers, a lot with pretty nice equipment. I was pleased to see a few people with the same microphone or camera that we got. There were also a few with interesting Steadycam-like setups to keep the camera stable. Good-quality film-making has definitely become a lot more affordable than it used to be.

Yet to come: a photo of our camera rig. Oh, and the Sony V6 headphones worked great.

Posted by Matias on October 13th, 2008 under Tech. Comments: None

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…

Posted by Matias on September 30th, 2008 under Tech. Comments: None