I know that you need a boom mic, boom, lavs, hard disc recorder or dat machine, and a set of cans. I am asking because I am interested in buying my own on location gear, and I am just curious about what is the "norm". What is the best gear at a reasonable price? Is it better to have a hd recorder, or still use dat?
What is the essential gear for on location audio rec?
- Thread starter TimMcK
- Start date
Steve House
Veteran
Current practice is to use a direct to disk or CF card recorder. DAT's are very dated, getting harder to get tapes and parts for repair.
Define "reasonable cost" for your budget. I just bought a Schoeps CMC641 mic - for my aspirations and the direction I want my career to go over the next few years and for what I plan to use it for, it was a reasonable investment even if it did take some penny pinching. For someone gearing up do audio more as a hobby, it would have been an outrageous extravagance unless they had very deep pockets.
puredrifting
Major Contributor
Tim:
This might give you some good ideas about assembling a location sound kit http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/location_sound.html
The article is old so I would agree with Steve about recorders, MiniDisc is pretty outdated but the concepts I wrote of in the article are still very valid even 6 years later.
Good luck,
Dan
i should have stated reasonable price better. I really should have said price range. I have no intent for hobby use. I would have full intentions of using all the gear for freelance.....(I know, I know good luck with that.)
Thank you for the article. Very interesting and helpful. I figured that recording in 1 and 0's was becoming the norm. As everything seems to be dumped in to Final cut and Pro Tools. I just threw it out there to see if people were still using DAT.
puredrifting
Major Contributor
BTW, good luck in LA on sound mixing. As with all other production professions in LA, there are already too many good, qualified and sometimes desparate to work people. I am a producer and DP and it is difficult to make a living doing those, sound is no different.
What you really want to do is to hook up with a good DP who can recommend you to producers when he/she gets hired. That's how you get work in LA.
Best,
Dan
Steve House
Veteran
A good starting point would be to look over the contents of the sound packages offered by some of the main industry suppliers like Trew Audio, Coffey Sound, Location Sound, etc. Here's Trew's offering for EFP - http://trewaudio.com/store/product.php?productid=712&cat=66&page=1
As for a recorder, Tacam HD-P2 for entry level, Sound Devices 702T or 744T in more mainstream bags, or Deva or Cantar for top of the line multitrack sound carts.