In camera settings help!

[Clayton Taylor]

Hey everyone... here's my setup.

I'm running a Sennheiser m66 shotgun with a k6 power module through a custom 8" xlr cable to the WC A-Box... then Abox to camera.

I did some test shots, but I'm not too good with all of the audio settings. The sound was barely audible - not sure what went wrong. Can anyone share what settings I should be using for something like this? Should I use battery power in the mic? Phantom?
What other settings need changed?

Thanks!

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Use the battery in the mic, and turn pahntom power off on the camera

 

[Clayton Taylor]

What about levels, balanced/unbalanced, and those ?

And I apologize if these are dumb questions - I'm still very new to RED and come from DSLR where it was onboard audio with external for your usable audio..

 

[Mike P.]

A-Box/XLR is almost always balanced as far as I'm aware.

Also, are you saying that it's super quiet in the footage (when watching on a computer), or super quiet when monitoring on a set? Because RED's headphone jack is total weaksauce, even when maxed out. Just watch your levels and (if memory serves) try to land between the first solid line (-20db) and the second perforated line (-12db)...

 

[Clayton Taylor]

super quiet on playback on the pc.

 

[Mike P.]

Try boosting the levels... I think I default mine to +42db or something and the levels seem okay (though it's usually in semi-controlled environments -- so not a studio, but a home/office/etc where we can turn off the AC and unplug fridges if need be.)

 

[ericyoung]

A-Box is a completely passive wiring breakout of the 2.5mm sockets on the Scarlet which are switchable in the menus between Balance and Unbalanced, with or without +48V Phantom Power.

As you are plugging a ME66/K6 microphone directly into the camera via the A-Box, you need to set the input you are using to Microphone Level. It's likely set to Line Level which is expecting a much higher level as you would get if you were using a sound mixer between the mic and the camera - hence really quiet audio!

You should also set the same input to Balanced and +48V Phantom Power if you aren't using an AA battery in the K6 module.

Then adjust the audio input gain levels to as loud as you can without clipping into the red on the audio meters - then back it down 3-6dB to give yourself a bit of safety margin.

The microphone Pre-Amps in the DSMC cameras are rather noisy, so you may find that audio recorded on the camera may have quite a lot of noise, especially when recording quiet voices. The only way round this is to leave the camera input levels at their low default gain or less, and feed the camera via a mixer which can supply a higher level audio.