Best and Cheapest Rig for a Poor College Student?

[Bryan Cantwell]

check the Rode mini boom:

Rode | Mini Boompole Compact Microphone Boom | MINI BOOM POLE

light, compact, but solid and hits a good length for the price.

Together with this:

Audio-Technica | AT897 - Shotgun Microphone Kit | B&H Photo Video

You'll have an inexpensive but quality rig that will do what you need.

[Tommy Kraft]

Looks like a good deal. Does anyone have any thoughts on using the Shure SM58 mic? Maybe booming that and mounting the shotgun on the camera?

[Battle Vaughan]

Booming the sM58 won't get you much; it's a dyamic mic designed to be used handheld (i.e, close to the mouth) as a performance mike. You would usually boom a condenser shotgun. The sensitivity of the SM58 doesn't make it a good mike at a distance from a speaker, and its cardioid pattern is pretty wide for a boom mike.

Consider that you also need a boom operator, who needs a mixer or monitor so he/she knows where they're doing. For that reason the conventional wisdom is a wireless lav plus a shotgun on the camera as backup. That's a reason for the Beechtec, particularly if you are a one-man band.

The ntg2, at897, etc, are nice mikes for a boom but too big for the HV20, you have to have some way to mount them (shockmount with accessory shoe) and they will either stick out the front too far or poke you in the eye. This is why we bought the Senn MKE400, it is a mike scaled to match the HV series cameras and is a real nice mike, although physically smaller than the full-sized mikes. IMHO you will quickly tire of the lack of manual controls on the HV cameras for any serious work, most everything you need to ride herd on is in several layers of menus, but it is a quality camera and serious work can be done with it, it's just harder. It is a good b camera to, say, and XHA1s, which I suspect you will want to move up to pretty quickly. I'm guessing you are just starting out and are trying out a lot of ideas you have read about but not had much practical experience with. Start simple, get to know your tools, learn by doing, a step at a time. When you really have some experience with audio (imho the hardest and arguably most important part of video production), lighting, editing, continuity, etc, you will be in a better position to know just how you want to build your kit. Best wishes! / Battle Vaughan/ miamiherald.com retired videographer

[Tommy Kraft]

Thanks for the thoughts and information! :) It's true that I am just starting out in a sense. I've been doing editing and visfx for quite some time, not professionally, for the most part. But I do have a lot of experience on the post production side of things. But I really want to get into doing my own projects, and I'm not sure if research has helped me or just made it harder to buy :P

You all have definitely been a big help to me! I'll probably start ordering soon. One final question, do you think that the Senn MKE is better than the Rode Videomic? I've also seen that mounting the MKE400 on a bracket is the best way to go in order to eliminate motor noise pickup. If I got a bracket, would that allow me to mount a larger mic, such as the NTG-2, off to the side of the camera in order to get it out of the frame?