Ghosting on the XF300

[Peter Moretti]

Guy, BTW if you have any tips on limiting clothing noise with lavs, I'm all ears... so to speak. :)

[Guy McLoughlin]

Originally Posted by Peter Moretti

Guy, BTW if you have any tips on limiting clothing noise with lavs, I'm all ears... so to speak. :)

There's a great hands-on location audio book that really helped me improve the quality of my audio work:

Location Audio Simplified - Trew Audio

It covers all kinds of typical location audio problems, including several different ways of securing a lav mic to eliminate clothing noise. Looks like a new updated version is due very soon.

My 2cent suggestion is to follow one of two options:

1- Secure the lav mic so that it is visibly exposed ( nothing covering the mic head ) which may not be as pretty to shoot, but you won't pick-up clothing sounds.

2- Use "Mole Skin" ( you can pick this up in any pharmacy in the "foot" department ) to create a small pocket to securely hold the lav mic, this can be taped to the speaker's skin or pinned to the inside of a jacket or shirt. It's a bit of a hassle to set-up and take off, but done properly you can effectively hide the lav and not get the normal clothing sounds interfering with your audiio.

What lav mic are you using ?

I use Sennheiser G2 100 UHF packs with TRAM 50 lav mics, which are my favorite general purpose lav. ( especially because you can clip the TRAM mic to face towards the vampire-clip which effectively limits most room noise while still picking up great audio of the speaker ) I also own a Sanken COS-11x which is an outstanding sounding lav mic ( almost as good as a condenser pencil mic ) but it picks up everything in the room, so I only use it in very quiet environments. I also own a Sennheiser MKE-2 Gold lav, which sounds better than the TRAM 50, but is a little more noise prone than the TRAM but not as much as the Sanken. I threw away the lav that came with the Sennheiser UHF kit as it was absolutely crap compared to my other lav mics.

One other nice bonus when using Sennheiser UHF lav mics, is that they will plug directly in to many small digital recorders like the Olympus LS-10/11, so you can bypass the whole UHF business, and have several people mic'd up with a digital recorder in their pocket or clipped to their belt. I plan on trying out the Zoom H-1 as a cheap solution ( $100+ recorder ) to mic up 6-10 people with lavs. ( the sync might be a bit of a pain, but I've been doing this for years so I am pretty quick at this )

[Milton Raposo]

Guys, thanks for the help. I'm sorting this issue out. It's obviously my own handicap.

As for the audio, yes I know. I don't think I bought a robust enough lav system but as for that woman in the video and the crappy audio, I don't know what happened but she must have done something because when I put it on her and I listened thru the headphones it did not do that.

Fortunately it's just her.

[Bill Weaver]

I've noticed ghosting as well, reddish or greenish "lags" when there is camera movement when shooting in minimal light. Shuttter is normal, Noise reduction off, images stabilization off.

Now -- I'm realizing that this is the lagging effect of the TV screens I've been evaluating the camera on. On a computer monitor, the effect is barely visibile.

Still testing.....