Recording surround sound in the field

There was one mike that I looked at a year ago NAB that is a round black ball mike that records 5 suround channels to a set of stereo tracks. I can't remember what the thing was so I'll look for some lit. I think it was quite pricy at about 2 or3 grand. It was cool and would work with any dv camera.
 
Wow a lot of posts. I wasn't ignoring you. I had the impression from your first post that you had already ordered. The reason I was thinking the Sony would not be a great choice was handling noise and the lack of good wind protection. I haven't used the Sony but I have used some of the other all in one recorders and it has always been a problem. But if you know someone using it for what you want and it's working great then go for it.
I would also recommend you get a portable backup device. I use one called Nextt DI, but there are others. You stick the memory card in push a button and it's backed up to a battery powered harddrive. I traveled two weeks and backed up camera (still) and recorder once to twice a day and the batt still read full when I got back.

As to surround. Circle surround is a Dolby prologic knock off (not really the right word, as it implies a lesser quality). It uses matrixed encoding to get more channels into two tracks. It's the same as the analog Dolby surround in theatres. SRS has designed a way to squeeze more tracks in and extract more out. BUT this is matrixed not descrete. So there is interaction, some things can steer to the wrong speaker, there are band with limitations and your not "compressing" the data flow your sharing it so your splitting what you would normally use to record two tracks into six tracks. Plus there is a bit of hype going on. Prologic isn't 5.1 its 4.0 with a filter that lakes everything below a certain point and sends it to the sub. SRS claims up to 7.1 encoding but if you play it back on ProLogic it's being decoded as 4.0, so I suspect that the .1 is the same as Dolbys and your at 7.0 with a filter, but I'm being picky. The point is that your trading quality for tracks. Generally probably not that big a quality hit but... The other problem I would see is that mixing a matrix track involves playing some games to fix steering errors. SRS was/is? a bit more prone to steering errors than Dolby was (probably because of the higher track count?) and that would make me nervous in the field. Especially since you won't be able to monitor what the matrix is doing to the sound. Things like a squawking bird doing a flyby in a reverberant space can do very strange things in a matrix. Like instead of going left to right smoothly start popping into the surrounds and then back into the front. I imagine they spent some time working on those kinds of problems but I would want to do some heavy testing before I went into the field with it.

And as others have said surround is (as a rule) mixed not recorded. In fact very few edit rooms are set up for surround. Films as a rule are not edited in surround. A lot, and maybe still most, sound designers don't work in surround. One big problem for surround recording (for FX work anyway) is that it locks in a perspective much more than stereo does. Since sounds are used over and over again in different situations even in the same film it's very problematic having such in flexible sounds. Your situations is probably one of the very few that I could see the poss usefulness. But I don't think it's worth the work and really requires a sound person to have any serious chance of it working smoothly.
 
As far as "on camera surround mics" like the Holophone mini or similar devices, or cheapo camcorders with "built in surround recording" - has anyone tried these? I can't imagine that they're anything but useless. At best, the surround channels would likely be the operator snuffling and wheezing, no?
 
Well, many amateur camera operators do a running commentary while filming, at least that would come from the right direction...
 
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