Boom mic and fan noise

[Dave Blackham]

Firstly a mic has no buisness being on the camera. Its rather like suggesting hanging the camera off where ever the boom mic happens to be. its in the wrong place full stop. Even if it were the mic would pick up camera person noise too, breathing, movement and so on.

You have arguably the best camera in the world so why compromise on the audio.

Rule 1 of sound recording is, It is more important what the mic isn't looking at than what the mic is looking at. By that i mean the boom mic is likely to be at the very least cardioid and probably hyper cardioid or super cardioid, so the mic is directional and it will have a dead spot of axis, it may be possible to put the camera in the dead spot so camera noise is much reduced. Its likely by careful mic placement get the action on mic and the camera off mic.

Personal mic's are for the most part omni directional so the camera if it is in the vicinity of the camera get picked up as back ground noise, if you have 2 personal mics then the camera and other back ground noise will be increased if both are left open on the audio mixer.

A boom mic or mic on stand is the best to start choose to work with in most situations, I know its a generalisation but usually it works out.

And this trrad is about fans, so the quieter the better, for some reason ours havn't arrived yet.

 

[John Hope]

Thanks to all for the very deep explanations.
Yes i usually have a person caring for the audio. Lavaliers or Perche, a mixer and a digital recorder. But i can do alone up to 2 lavaliers.
I just wanted to imagine a super fast, simplest solution.
But as you say, compromising in Audio with such a camera is a nonsense.

 

[Arnold F.]

The sheer quantity of photos on the internet of a DSLR and now, even REDs, with mics on top probably means this very wrong way to do things will never go away. The DSLR kids look at the picture and think that's how sound is captured. So much so that they get upset when you tell them it's not. In three decades of film/tv work as a sound editor, production mixer, camera operator and DP, I've yet to work on a project where a mic on a camera was necessary except for a little b-roll sound that is rarely used. Yes, I know my writing this will make people very upset.

Yes a shotgun mic. I would like it mounted on the camera (Rode Videomic Pro) in order to shoot some fast interview without having to put a lavalier on the guests

 

[Terry VerHaar]

1) What Dave said above!

2) When you see a mic on top of a Scarlet/Epic/Dragon, assume (hopefully correctly) that it is just there to capture a scratch audio track. Sadly, Arnold may be right in most of the cases but don't succumb to the fallacy!! lol

Do it right and you won't have to do it over - which can be embarrassing - or impossible - in documentary situations.

 

[Elsie N]

Hi,
Are you recommending putting a boom mic over the camera?
Or will the fan noise make the audio useless?
Thanks

Assuming you have one of the latest firmware installed, fan noise should no longer be a problem. I've set my adaptive fan triggers at 25% record speed and 64 degrees as my target temperature. I do a blackshade at 70 degrees and when I'm recording, the fan doesn't come on until going past that 70 degree temperature, as least not that I've noticed. The fan does come on when not recording, bringing the temp back down to 64 degrees. But even then it is barely noticeable.

This is just my personal method of getting around fan noise. Hope this helps.

EDIT: Forgot to mention... I also plug an off camera mic into both the one and two receptacles on the camera and mount them onto a clip-on that screw-clamps onto a portable table. I set one mic to default and up the gain to about +40 decibels on the other. That gives me two tracks at different levels. Each track protects me from either an inaudible sound or from an unrecoverable loud sound, without using a limiter. Depending on the situation, I may use RODE Ntg mics or cheap, limited DR Chinese mics. Sometimes you don't WANT to capture all the sound.