Best Audio For HD-100U
 

Anyone can recommend best audio to record into the HD100U? I am looking for a Boom w/mic and 4 wireless mics and a possible mixer. Hopefully evreything can be wireless and be connected directly into the HD100U for digital recording.

Any suggestions?

Or is this the wrong forum?

Brian.

In relation to the boom with mic:

indoors: Schoeps MK41, Sennheiser MKH50
outdoors: when you can get away with it the above and when not a shotgun (interference tube) mic like Mkh60 or the venerable Senn 416 or one of the Sankens (these are the usual suspects). Though you might want to check out the brand new Schoeps shotgun (Yes thats right a Schoeps shotgun!) which looks awesome and is a newcomer.

Good mixer cant go wrong with a Sound Devices - the three channel or four channel.

I personally try to avoid wireless so cant help you there.

Rob

Consider this...!
 

Hi Brian,

If you're considering mixing more than two audio signals during production, I definitely recommend sending your signals to a dedicated multitrack recorder instead of to your camera's onboard audio.

If you're planning to record audio from more than two sources and mix these while you're shooting, your're asking for trouble. You will completely tie your hands as far as flexibility in the mix goes, and will likely run into problems that you won't be able to fix easily or at all in post.

We usually record audio on camera via a Sennheiser shotgun to one track, possibly a wireless lav to another, and then record all other sources to a Tascam digital multitrack so that each audio source gets its own channel that we can mix down later in post. This audio quality is also better than what you typically get from the onboard audio of the camera.

Cheers!
Stivan

The Tascam's we bought record to their own internal hard drive and ran about $600 or so...

Oh, and we always record audio on the camera even if we don't intend to use it to make it easier to sync up the other audio later.

...Stivan!

Thanks Stivan,

Which Tascam did you use?

I plan on ALWAYS running the boom, and then 1-4 wireless on individual actors. I wanted to save the time of having to sync the audio in Post, but at the same time I don't want any problems with the audio, so if you think it is better to have seperate device I will do that.

When you ran audio to the camera, did you actually use that most of the times, or did you end up syncing the Tascam? Its just a pain spending all the time syncing.

Thanks

I know this might sound a bit off topic... but does anyone have any references to how to actually run sound? A basic setup of some sort?

I am also trying to figure that out, but I just bought this DVD which I think will help. http://soundforvideo.com/component/o...hop/Itemid,41/

Time will tell once I get it. =)

A really good primer (and even more actually) is Jay Rose's Producing Great Sound for Digital Video.

Your basic choices are recording direct to camera which will be ok for interviews and some doco work or recording double system to some external system - nowdays this is likely to be hard drive/solid state.

Generally speaking the audio components in most cameras at this level are crap but it is just so much easier recording direct to camera if you dont have a crew or resources. One possibility for getting better sound into your camera is to get yourself a simple high quality one or two channel mic preamp such as Sound Devices make which can go onto your belt so that you can send a line level signal to the camera. In this way you avoid the rubbishy microphone preamps on the camera and can get half decent sound.


Good luck!

Rob