Advice on mixing mics

J

johnnyspack

Active member
Hi Gurus,

need advice on any potholes I might need to avoid on an upcoming low-budget corporate jobbie...

Shoot involves filming 1 trainer role playing with different seminar attendees in meeting room. Levels should be fairly consistent, but the trainers role play opposites will be picked randomly at the moment.

My plan is to radio mic her and boom the whoever attendees get picked. As mentioned it's low budget and am shooting on a Canon XHA1 HDV cam (2 x XLR inputs). Have a Sony UWP-V1 radio mic set-up and the boom mic is a sennhieser MKE 300 cheapie 3.5mm mini jack on a boom pole.

With this gear, whats the best settings to put the camera on? Radio Mic on one channel , Boom mic on the other? Auto or manual audio level? I'm hoping I can get a 3.5mm female to XLR adaptor to plug the Sennhieser into the camera. Sorry for the base questions, but any advice is welcome.

Thx D
 
I'd suggest that you look into renting a better mic and shockmount (no need to rent a pole if you already have one), and if you're going to be in a conference room you really want a hypercardioid instead of a shotgun. It's not as expensive as you might think to rent a mic kit for one day.

As for recording, record them split (boom to Ch.1/L and wireless to Ch.2/R) so that you have complete mixing control in post. Manual level controls are a must... cameras that have any kind of automatic level controls will chew the signal up and spit it back out. Just keep headphones on (and if you have a boom op, make sure s/he can listen as well) so that you know what you are recording and can detect problems if/when they arise.
 
I did that couple of weeks ago, I set up a shotgun with a stand, I talked to the organizer about the sound issue on how to get good sound for the attendees. So... we made a plan, whoever get picked or wants to speak up, has to come up in front of my shotgun and speak, it looks a bit silly, lots of people has to talk around, but I got perfect audio, as two camera shoot, one of the camera can always keep an eye on on whoever comes to speak.
Of course, I wirelessed the speaker, he actually speak to a conference mic, i managed to hide a B3, gaffered with the conference mic, which people didnt realized it.

Good luck

Hiro
 
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