Buck Forester
Well-known member
I've searched the forum and this sub forum and didn't see anything on this mic (Mitra 3D Mic Pro), but I would guess it's been discussed. If so, can someone provide a link? If not, what are your thoughts?
3D Mic Pro
- Thread starter Buck Forester
- Start date
Buck Forester
Well-known member
Here's the link to the mic and there are video examples by Vincent Laforet and Philip Bloom, but I otherwise haven't heard much about it and thought I'd check here.
http://www.3dmicpro.com/Mitra-3D-Mic-Pro/dp/B004VQ9N8E
http://www.3dmicpro.com/Mitra-3D-Mic-Pro/dp/B004VQ9N8E
Noiz2
Sound Ninja
Some of my opinions are in the post thread (stickies) and there was one currently on microphones. Though none are directly about this mic.
how useful it is for you depends on what you are doing. If your working on narrative and or docs it is somewhere between may be of some use to being no use at all. If your collecting nature sounds to be played basically unedited it might be cool. If your recording a concert and your only planning on listening through headsets it might be very cool. Recording for games pretty much is the same as narrative films so NG.
So first off does it work? My guess is that they are using the technology LAKE developed and Dolby bought from them. I forget what Dolby calls it and I haven't actually seen it advertised but I have one of the LAKE boxes and yes it does work quite well. But only really when wearing headphones.
Why this mic doesn't excite is actually two fold.
First there is the whole headphone issue. The LAKE box was designed to let mixers do surround premixes in rooms that would never spec out for surround. A side effect is that it almost eliminates the ear fatigue that using headphones gives you. For a film most people are going to listen on speakers and you won't get the effect.
Second in films the soundscape is created not recorded. I.E. you take a lot of recordings and create the world your actors are pretending to live in. They are actually on a set so you don't want to record the world they are actually in. All surround recordings have this problem for post. You can't easily modify them because the audio clues are time based. With stereo there is a bit of time based location but volume can fake it pretty well. With an encoded surround the viewer position is fixed and it's not easy to change that.
Which leads to 2B which is that it's hard to impossible to edit surround recordings and make them work together. For multi track surround you can always just toss the tracks you don't want, kind of defeats the whole idea, but this mic is hard encoding the surround into two tracks. It would be a nightmare to try and make perspectives match when layering up the sounds.
So a track where you are going to use the original production sound unedited would be a contender, but that is a very very very small slice of the pie.
how useful it is for you depends on what you are doing. If your working on narrative and or docs it is somewhere between may be of some use to being no use at all. If your collecting nature sounds to be played basically unedited it might be cool. If your recording a concert and your only planning on listening through headsets it might be very cool. Recording for games pretty much is the same as narrative films so NG.
So first off does it work? My guess is that they are using the technology LAKE developed and Dolby bought from them. I forget what Dolby calls it and I haven't actually seen it advertised but I have one of the LAKE boxes and yes it does work quite well. But only really when wearing headphones.
Why this mic doesn't excite is actually two fold.
First there is the whole headphone issue. The LAKE box was designed to let mixers do surround premixes in rooms that would never spec out for surround. A side effect is that it almost eliminates the ear fatigue that using headphones gives you. For a film most people are going to listen on speakers and you won't get the effect.
Second in films the soundscape is created not recorded. I.E. you take a lot of recordings and create the world your actors are pretending to live in. They are actually on a set so you don't want to record the world they are actually in. All surround recordings have this problem for post. You can't easily modify them because the audio clues are time based. With stereo there is a bit of time based location but volume can fake it pretty well. With an encoded surround the viewer position is fixed and it's not easy to change that.
Which leads to 2B which is that it's hard to impossible to edit surround recordings and make them work together. For multi track surround you can always just toss the tracks you don't want, kind of defeats the whole idea, but this mic is hard encoding the surround into two tracks. It would be a nightmare to try and make perspectives match when layering up the sounds.
So a track where you are going to use the original production sound unedited would be a contender, but that is a very very very small slice of the pie.
To quote Randy Thom "surrond sound recording just isn't worth the trouble". The only real use I see for surround microphones is for broadcast, specifically sporting events. I watched a superbowl at a friends place a few years back (sadly, I do not have surround sound in my house), and we watched/listened to it in surround, and that was pretty cool. It felt like we were in the stadium. Other than that, I've never had a use for surround recording.