I am a Wildlife Photographer and have recently begun Videography in and during my hunting excursions, doing interviews, kill shots, approaches and so on. My question being about audio equipment and the required settings for my Canon XL1S. What are the recommendations for equipment for my type of surroundings? I will be mainly using the camera 20 to 30 feet in the air filming my hunting partner, in a hunting blind, at the truck or house, at the beginning of the hunt, after a kill, or in a boat a duck blind and so on... I want to know if the Mic on my XL1s will be sufficient to film interviews between hunters,]
If your hunters are 4-8 feet in front of the camera the Canon stock stereo mic will likely work but, since you are doing most of your work outside, be prepared for wind noise. The standard foam windsock will help to some degree. The whole point of a wind sock is to stop air movement around the microphone's pickup elements, because air movement is what causes wind moise. Foam wind socks work to some degree, but they also vibrate when impacted by wind. That causes a new sound which is picked up by the mic. The furry sort offers better isolation, and LightWave makes one of the best for the XL1s mic. However, if you are in a gusty 20+ MPH environment, all bets are off.
[plus do you recommend some sort of wireless mics?]
Absolutely! A two channel system, probably UHF, will best suit your needs. A system with several broadcast frequencies to choose from will be a decided benefit, as you will get a much larger geographical area in which to comfortably work. Wireless mic systems usually operate without the need for a FXX license, and at very low transmission power. Other boradcasters with FCC licenses have the right to use those same frequencies you access. Where you are physically located may be an issue.
[And now on to the camera settings; what is the difference between 16 bit and 12 bit and which should my camera be set to?]
MiniDV sample rate at 16 bit, 48k is really good quality for 2 channel stereo. Recording 4 channels of stereo audio on MiniDV requires a reduction to 12 bit 32k. It is a step down in quality, and perhaps acceptable for field footage audio. The real probpem is with your NLE editing system. Many NLE's can't accept more than 2 channels of audio when loading video into the computer ... which usually means the video has to be loaded twice to get all channels of audio. An application called "Scenealizer", which I do not use, is positively supported for capturing 4 channel, 12 bit audio on other forums within this site. Personally, having experienced both 2 and 4 channel recording in the field, I favor two channels only. It is cheaper. It is easier. It is simpler when loading video.
[I am using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (not that I have a clue what I am doing) so is there any special settings I have to set to get the correct audio from my camera to the program? Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is very confusing stuff... ]
I don't use Adobe Premier, so I can not offer any assistance. However, everyone working in video suffers from the "I know what I want to do, but I have no idea how to set my system up so I really can do what I want to do!" syndrome. If you live in the boondocks like I do, your friendly local computer expert very likely has no idea what you are talking about. Enter online lecture websites. There a lots of them out there. My favorite is
http://www.lynda.com. Good basic online lectures on the most useful software. Reasonably priced, always available, and always a wonderful opportunity for your significant other to tease the crap out of you when the CC bill arrives.
[Also, what would be a good learning toll for me to better understand Audio in my camera? Thanks,