Actually I meant the lower priced pair - not everything in a pro's kit costs top dollar, just most of it <grin>. The $285 ones are a customized unit, excellent product but perhaps overkill for general use = OTOH, if you're taping at a rock concert or on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier they may be just the ticket. The $100 pair is the standard Sony product and you'll find 'em in use on locations everywhere. I've got a pair sitting on my desk about 6 inches from the keyboard even as I type. As for where they plug in, they would go into the headphone jack on the mixer if you have one or the headphone output on the camera if you're going direct. For that matter, if you have a mixer to feed the camera and you've set up the cabling properly, there'll be a headphone return from the camera headphone out back to the mixer so the sound recordist can monitor either the feed he's sending to the camera or the return so he can hear how it sounded after passing through the camera's circuitry.

I don't think that Ty's wrong to say that you should be skeptical of someone who says they want to get into location sound and has no gear. Still, if you've at least got someone with a genuine interest in sound it's better than drafting a hapless P.A. or something. I don't know by how much, but it's something. It can be difficult to get good results with gear you aren't intimately familiar with, and that's not going to be the case here.

I went with the B and H ME 66 boom combo and the Sennheiser G2 100 series ME2 (omni) wireless lav. I was very pleased at the sound through headphones while there (my computer right now can`t handle HDV so I can`t hear it there). I would say, it kind of hurt the shoot to have nicer equipment since there was an airport nearby, it was picking up everything! Then weed wackers off in the distance were like they were next to the camera...man...catch 22. I think it should be usable though.

The sound guys were great. One was more or less learning and did fairly well with the boom, the other was very experienced and very attentive to detail. Scared I was not and it did me well to not worry about 1 aspect. Now I just need to learn how to set it all up myself incase i ever need to do sound work ;)

Nat,

1. Using good gear never decreases the quality of your audio. Bad gear just makes the bad sound worse.

In the case of distant weed wackers, well lets just say, the me66 may have been better than what you were using, but it's still a half-mast shotgun compared to the good stuff.

AND, if you had off-axis weed wackers, it was your "bad" to use a shotgun. Should have tried a hyper like the Audix SCX-1 or, better yet, Schoeps cmc641.

SHOTGUNS (EXCEPT MAYBE THE SANKEN CS-3E) ARE MORE OMNI DIRECTIONAL AT MIDDLE AND LOW FREQUENCIES THAN AT HIGH FREQUENCIES. That's why they do so poorly indoors too. I know you were hot to try your new mic, but it was the wrong one for the job.

2. When you try to be a one man band, something always suffers. Learn to work with people you like and trust. You'll get ahead more quickly.

Regsards,

Ty Ford

Between the boom and lav I should have plenty of good audio. I will head back on a weekday at sunrise before people are out and about to record the room tone and go from there. There is always something bigger and better out there and I was already over budget. I am happy with what I have and will learn to get the most out of it. If i concentrated on what I could have bought for a little more money, well i could do that all the way up to $100k for a mic....maybe just a little more. It is still only my first self produced and funded short film, it won`t be Hollywood no matter what and I`m cool with that. Just thought I`d share my results for others in the same situation.

Interesting Ty, I would never have thought to use a hypercardiod in that situation.

I've "turned off" distracting noises more than once by going hyper and getting a position where its back is to the noise, or at least as far off axis as possible.

I ended up on Capitol Hill's SE steps one day a few weeks back. No one said we'd be outside! We were and with a 0-8 knot breeze. I only had my Schoeps with tear drop pop filter. I stood the mic on the boom about chest high and got upwind of it. Holding it close to my body to keep the wind off of it.

I pointed it at the congressman's mouth, about 4 feet away and cranked up the Sound Devices 442. Got him!

Regards,

Ty