Comments

goodtimej wrote on 5/9/2007, 2:54 PM
If you are talking about in camera audio, never use the auto setting. Always put it on manual and monitor with headphones. ALWAYS! The "setting" will vary from shoot to shoot.


If you are stuck with shitty audio, EQ the crap out of it (pun intended) to remove his and background hum and then just normalize the wav file.
cervama wrote on 5/9/2007, 2:59 PM
I appreciate that answer so which is the way to go? For Input 1, is it Line, Mic, or Mic att? For Lavalier Input 2 the same? 48v?
busterkeaton wrote on 5/9/2007, 3:06 PM
Your camera did not come with a boom mike. A boom mike is a microphone on a "boom" or long pole. The "boom" of a crane is the long part that hangs away from the truck. The reason boom mikes were invented were to get the mike as close as possible to the action. Somewhere the on-camera mike on your camera is usually not.
cervama wrote on 5/9/2007, 3:32 PM
My bad, the mic. Thanks for the correction. It helps!
goodtimej wrote on 5/9/2007, 3:35 PM
In your case, go with mic.
totally lost wrote on 5/9/2007, 3:41 PM
"which is the way to go? For Input 1, is it Line, Mic, or Mic att? For Lavalier Input 2 the same? 48v? "

A wedding, set to mic. Live music set to mic att. If you have an external mic set it to 48v to power it up. Your Lav has it's own battery, so no need to use 48v. You would use line if you have a cleaner external mic pre and wanted to use it OR if you want to get a feed from a line source like a sound board or CD player. Eg. Your shooting a dance recital. Take 1 mono feed from the board or CD player and plug it in to line in. Take a feed from your external mic and feed it to your mic in, you might need a pad, make sure to LISTEN. Now you have 2 mono signals. 1 direct feed from the music source and 1 feed that is picking up room ambience (applause etc).

Your best bet is to use your ears and monitor your levels.

Let's say you are recording a music group and your levels look fine, yet you hear distortion. More than likely you are overloading your mic pre and need to put on the pad/attenuator. Flip the switch to your pad and the level drops 10-15 db, so make sure to turn it back up or your signal to noise will not be good.

When I am being lazy or am doing gun and run I use the auto setting as long as it is not music. The auto levels compress the hell out of the audio so everything sounds as if it is at the same level. However auto level is not at all recommended for music.

Sorry I have written way too much here. Get a pair of high output closed cup headphones, Sony makes some good ones. Run in manual mode and monitor your audio ALL THE TIME and make sure you run your levels high enough. Otherwise you will have high noise as compared to your signal. If you have time to run a test; crank the levels on the camera until you hear it break up. This will be digital distortion, so it won't sound exactly the same as analog mic pre/input distortion. Adjust the level until you can barely heard it break up. Then back down your levels another 4 db from there.

farss wrote on 5/9/2007, 3:44 PM
Typical PD170 setup for wedding:

Channel 1:
On camera hypercardiod, not the worlds best mic but it's useable, even on a boom.
So Channel 1 is at Mic, 48V ON. Turn AGC ON. This is your backup track, forget futzing with the gain, just trust the AGC.

Channel 1 record switch should be set to record to channel 1 only.

Channel 2:
This is for your wireless mic. Line Level, 48V OFF, AGC OFF. If you don't feel confident about riding gain as well as shooting the video then run with AGC ON.

Most important. Set the gain on the wireless transmitter correctly. On our Senny G2s we run at -10dB. Not ideal but we've yet to have anyone clip the transmitter. Now wind the output level of the receiver up all the way and wind the gain of Channel 2 in the camera down. This will hopefully reduce the noise from the PD170's cruddy preamps. If you cannor get enough level from Chan 2 in the 170 switch Chan 2 from Line to Mic. Depends on the wireless mic rig you're using.

Practice and test. Wear sensitive headphones. We've yet to find good headphones from the likes of Sony or Senny of any use for this task. Buy a set of Takstar DJ Headpones off eBay. For $30 and for monitoring audio from the PD170 they walk all over anything else, simply because they're LOUD.

Using the above setups our clients would have shot 100s of weddings and no audio disasters to date. Many of those shooting those weddings have never used a camera before. It's far from best practice but if you're not 100% confident about what you're doing it works reliably.

Bob.
cervama wrote on 5/9/2007, 4:04 PM
Thanks . Those were the answers I was looking for. I will try those and take it from there.

MAC
farss wrote on 5/9/2007, 4:36 PM
A couple of tips:

During the speeches put the wireless mic up on the lecturn if they have one or use a rubber band to hold the lapel mic on the PA mic. If they start to wander around you're goosed of course.

If you want to shoot vox pops during the dances take the people outside, well away from the DJ and his eardrum bursting music, no one can shout over that. If you can, get a 5M XLR lead, take the mic off the camera and have the 'talent' hold that.

Bob.