Audio help - sweet settings for Sennheiser ME66/G2 combo with Scarlet?

[Hywel Phillips]

Hi All,

On my first couple of shoots with my Scarlet I've got acceptable sound, but not as clean as it was from older cams with the same mic/wireless transmitter receiver set-up.

I strongly suspect this is due to inexperience setting up the Scarlet. I set my system up waaaaay back in the days of my DVX100, based on some nice hard numbers in Tomlinson Holman's book and have frankly never touched them since as I've been using a sequence of different Panasonic cameras, plugging in via XLR and everything has just worked the same from camera upgrade to camera upgrade.

I think the settings are non-optimal for the Scarlet and I'd appreciate some help if anyone is using a similar set-up?

I take the output from a K6/ME66 or K6/ME64 direct into a G2 transmitter, set at Sensitivity -20 dB (which seems OK historically using these mics).

I receive that on a G2 at the camera.

What I can't figure out is what combination of output level on the G2 and input level on the Scarlet I should use. I started with -12 dB on the G2 and 18 dB on the Scarlet, but I seem to have some low level noise around -45 or -50 dB which becomes audible if you need to boost the levels in post.

I'm using a "straight" mini-jack cable from the G2 to the Scarlet, not Sennhesier's cable which clearly was shorting something out.

Should I have the Scarlet set to balanced or unbalanced audio? (And could someone explain why?) It doesn't seem to make much of an audible difference.

Would I be better off turning the G2 output to -6 or +0 dB and the Scarlet down as low as it'll go? Naively I'd have thought that getting maximum output from the transmitter and minimal signal boost from the camera should be cleanest rather than attenuating the signal then re-boosting it, is that right?

I'm using an H4N for backup audio in any case, but I'd like to get the audio in camera a little cleaner- it is nearly clean enough to use as-is, which saves fiddling about with dual source audio in post.

And can anyone tell me what the tick marks on the audio bars on the Scarlet correspond to? They aren't labelled or defined in the manual!

Cheers, Hywel.

 

[Hywel Phillips]

Ahhh, following up on my own question after spotting another thread- the noise problem comes from using the camera on AC power. It is there on the days I shot on AC before my V-mount arrived but absent on the subsequent days when I was shooting on battery power.

I'd still appreciate any advice on audio setup, but the specific source of that noise was definitely interference from the AC power.

Cheers, Hywel.

 

[Marie Turock]

Hywel,

I have noticed that many people who post here are not as concerned with audio acquisition as most traditional videographers are. This could be due to the fact that for a large number of owners, the Scarlet is part of a two system setup, meaning that the audio is acquired separately by an 'audio guy' who uses his own gear. However, I would love to consume as much information as I can about this elusive part of the Scarlet feature set, so I thank you for posing the questions!

I really wish that Red included standard XLR ports rather than their current implementation. Even if everything works as advertised, the connection is not solid and the wires come out of the camera too easily. 24bit sound is not that important if it is unreliably difficult to acquire! Then again, Red does not make equipment targeted for the standard videographer, so it is what it is.

 

[ericyoung]

That is one of the few downsides to being so focussed on the cinema image from the camera. The audio side has always been much lower priority on Red cameras, and lacking even compared to old cameras like the DVX100! :sad: