Recording Audio To RED ???

[Gian Joon]

First of all, I am not a sound guy. So I am trying t gather as much as info on audio as possible. I have read few comments suggesting audio should be recorded separtely for film work.

Here is an invaluable discussion on RED audio from likes of Robert Kennedy of Coffey Sound, Glen Trew of Trew Audio and Ty Ford.
http://www.groupsrv.com/movie/about88514-0-asc-0.html

There is also a detailed article here:
http://www.trewaudio.com/audioflow/2008/03/12/are-you-redy/

So my question in the light of above articles is: Can we use RED AUDIO for film production work or do we definitely need to record audio separtely? ( Low budget features)

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

 

[B Newberry]

links dont work for me, unless i manually type them.

 

[jbeale]

Those who are actually shooting real film negative are used to double-system sound. As far as I know, film cameras do not record sound internally. So, capturing your sound with a separate recorder has been the cinema "standard" up until now. That process is what Hollywood is familiar with, and I'm sure what professional sound recordists would recommend.

In the past, video cameras have had a well-deserved reputation for sub-standard sound quality due to noisy preamps, poor internal shielding causing digital interference, etc. I'm not familiar with the sound situation on Red. I think the hardware is probably ok, but right now the workflow is not all in place so it's inconvenient to use the internal sound at the moment, especially on a PC.

Double-system sound is not really hard to do. Even doing low-end event video, as a single shooter with no crew, I would often use several different sound recorders, as backup if nothing else. With long takes, syncing the sound later didn't take too long, even without any benefit of timecode sync.

Note, you should not trust my answer, because I have not tried to use Red for any kind of actual production. The best answer can only come from your own tests.

 

[ChristopherKenworthy]

Double-system sound is not really hard to do. Even doing low-end event video, as a single shooter with no crew, I would often use several different sound recorders, as backup if nothing else. With long takes, syncing the sound later didn't take too long, even without any benefit of timecode sync.

Agreed. If you've learnt your trade on DV or HDV (or similar) the thought of double-system sound is daunting. But if you try it, you'll find it's really easy. In FCP you just Merge Clips, and the timecode of your audio aligns with the timecode of your image. Simple.

 

[REDefine]

Hi Christopher
If I remember you are doing a feature with RED. How are you doing your audio.
It would be great to know.

 

[Koa M. Stone]

Hey Joon,

The audio works great on build 14 on. We've had no problems so far well some xless audio stuff, but otherswise we're all good in that department for our show. We have considered backups on dv or dat, but not time for that on a low budget... The preamps on the thing are not bad at all, and I'm a sound guy-this is of course assuming you're using decent mics. Even if you use external preamps-like eg. apogee, because the AD converters are 2448, it'll sound better than previous cameras. If you really want real quality, well, you'll just hire a real audio team, and they'll do things like spot micing and multitrack on their system. But number one is mic selection-pick a good mic, it's the first thing in the chain that matters most. If you go in camera, you'll have less things to worry about in my opinion. For post, you can pull the audio from the proxies if the workflows aren't working for you. If you go with external audio, I'd say get a guy with a dat, and it'll work just as great, just with a few more steps to get editable footage.

Best