Steve House |
October 9th, 2006 12:26 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by David Delaney
I have a shotgun mic, and although it works well, I am finding it doesn't give me that crispness that I require to make actors sound really good. A lot of times when shooting with it, the actor sounds like they are in a large room, thus it is picking up too much noise from around the room etc and there is also too much static noise as well.
So I am in the market for a better mic, with a tighter field (if that is what it is called). I would like to use this for indoor and outdoor use for short films/features etc. I don't want to break the bank on it, but I would like a good Sophmore level shotgun mic I can stick on a boom pole and get some quality sound I won't be embarrassed about - hopefully under $200.00
Thanks
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The hollow, lost in the room sound and your comment about "picking up too much static..." makes me wonder if it's the mic at fault or perhaps the mic placement? Is the mic on the camera or is it up close to the actors? The hollow sound says you're using a shotgun in a reflective space while the noise indicates you have the mic at some distance from the talent and have to crank up the gain to get adequate levels, thus booosting the noise as well. Is this correct? If that's the case, a "better mic" may not actually be the solution for you. The first step would be to eliminate room reflections as much as possible with sound blankets, etc. The second step would be to get the mic as close as possible to the talent, preferably within about 3 feet or so.
Your impedance matching transformer is intended to match a low impedance source to a high impedance input, like plugging a mic into a guitar amp. But your camera is most likely expecting a lower impedance source than it sees when you use you mic with the transformer. Better to look at something like a Beach to mate the XLR mic to the camera's minijack.
If moving to a new mic does turn out to be in the cards after all, remember that most shotguns are generally not very well suited for normal interiors. Their colouration of sounds arriving from off-axis and from the rear, a characteristic of the line gradient process they use to achieve their directivity, is what causes that distant hollow sound and this is as true of $1500 mics as it is for $150. That's why the standard boom microphone of choice for most film and video production is a hypercardioid, giving you high directivity without the off-axis colouration. So rather than replacing your current shotgun with another budget shotgun, assuming the one you have isn't defective, you might want to look at adding a hyper to your kit instead.
Remember too that a lot of the high quality sound you associate with theatrical films and network television series is done with lav mics hidden artfully on the talent.
Just a few ideas for you to ponder
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