VX2000 Audio Straight ahead
 

How can I get better audio from people directly in front of me using the onboard mic of the VX2000. I find it picks up sound really well around me, but NOT the people directly in front of me. Do I need to make some adjustments to improve this?

I get, IMOHO, decent sound all around, under normal circumstances with my cameras. What distance are you talking about?

You need a better microphone but more importantly you need to get any microphone you use very close to the person talking. I'm talking withing a foot or so.

Lavaliere's are placed below the lips at a distance equal to the span from thumb to little finter tip with your fingers splayed. Shotguns are held just out of frame and pointed at the speaker's lips. Or you can hand the subject a microphone and let them talk directly into it.

What you can do depends on the crew and time you have available. I use a lav in a sit-down interview setup, a shotgun on a boom when I'm shooting scenes. In a run and gun situation like interviews at a wedding reception, I'll hand the interviewee a wired Shure Beta58 knowing that if they hold it just below their chin, I'll get good voice with the room noise way down from their voice levels.

Shotguns at 6 feet are not very good (grabbing voice and minimizing surrounding noise) except in a quiet environment and then never as good as they are at 18" or so.

Hmmm, I guess I'm still a little stuck

How hard is it to edit the volumes in Final Cut Pro? I could raise up just the speaking parts couldn't I?

Its simple to raise the volume in FCP .A few ways to do it as well.You can move the slider on the audio timeline or double click audio and adjust in the viewer window.The only problem with this is you are going to raise the entire volume of the clip during the speaking parts so the ambient sound will be louder as well.

Presumably FCP allows you to manipulate any portion of the sound along the timeline so you can bump up the speech and drop the sound when they aren't talking.

But you cannot do a whole lot about the situation. Sometimes you can take dialog into something like Sound Forge and clean it up so it is more understandable.

I recently did this with a 10 year old wedding video where the camera and microphone were 40 feet away from the ceremony and the wind was blowing quite hard. They can now understand the vows although the quality is poor. Before there was only a murmer on top of the wind.

Ahh the cost of ignorance. It really makes me sick to think how much I paid for the vx2k when the onboard mic seem to be practically useless. Why is it even there, for looks? I can see me buying a new car to then find out it doesen't go fast because I have to pedal it. In order to go faster I'll need to put a motor in it.

Charles, I understand what you mean it was a surprise for me as well, when I was shooting a wedding and interviewing the bride's brother and I was about 6 feet away from him while shooting and when I got home to edit, I found out that it barely captured what he said, when he was sitting 6 ft away in front of the camera, most I picked up is the wind noise and my own voice behind the camera. This holds true for all my interviews. I guess the onboard mike sucks. On my VX9000 there is a switch on the onboard mike to change the degree of coverage from 0 to 180 degrees.

I recently bought a Sennheiser MKE 300, an unbalanced short shotgun, for my VX2K. ($170 US from B&H).

While not a professional mic, its output is 6 to 10 db hotter than the built in mics, so the camera can be run in manual and kept below the 50% gain setting to minimize the dreaded VX2K hiss.

A definite improvement, but I've not had much opportunity to test in noisy environments.

BTW, shotguns have little rear sound rejection being down only about 6 db or so. The camera operator, being much closer than the subject, will probably be heard at the same or higher level than the subject's dialog. If you are doing an interview, you will have to speak pretty softly or knock the levels down in your editor.