advise on audio solution?

L

luis bunuel

Member
i recently bought a t2i/550d and awaiting my zoomh4

i have to shoot a documentary interview tmrw but have a dilemma
i need good quality audio...and from what i read the t2i is crap when pluging external mic straight in without a preamp.

other solutions at my disposal

1. use my panasonic gs400 minidv camera as an audio recorder

2. use a minidisk as audio recorder

3. record straight into my macbook pro to a sound prog

any advise?

thanks
lb
 
whats your microphone situation like? thats pretty important too. but i'd use whatever you are the most comfortable and confident with.
 
fwiw, i'd go with the mini-disk. if you have time, do a test with it to see how well it will hold sync. seems like it SHOULD work.
 
MiniDisk has some issues. They can sound great and some of the later ones could record uncompressed way files. BUT the non "pro" boxes generally have poor or worse input electronics and the way they write to disk means if something interrupts the power you loose your recording.

I used one for FX. It was not a pro model but I had a MixPre feeding it so other than the battery issue it worked pretty well. The other draw back is that unless you have one recording WAV files and some way to read it your going to have to go out it's wanky analog out. My solution was to buy a MD Deck that would give me a pretty clean digital output. The whole chain made the MD work about as well as a DAT. I never was recording sync sound so stability was not an issue but I doubt that the MD is all that stable in non pro models. So if your doing short take your probably OK but long Doc interviews...

BoomRecorder for the Mac is a very stable and professional production recording software. Last I looked the two track version ran around $20 so it would also be your cheapest solution. It would be an excellent choice but you really want to add an audio interface so that ups the price a bit.

Going into the DV camera isn't much of an improvement over MD, seems way klunkier and fairly pricy once you start adding tapes.

The T2i needs more than a preamp to sound good. You can't turn off the auto gain with out using Magic Lantern (and that voids your warrantee). There are boxes that feed a low tone into the camera to defeat the AGC but I have yet to meet anybody who cared about sound that liked what they did to the sound.
 
Do a youtube google for "magic lantern audio". I think you will be surprised with the quality tests that some have done.
 
datadogie said:
Do a youtube google for "magic lantern audio". I think you will be surprised with the quality tests that some have done.
Click to expand...

Didn't mean to imply ML made the sound bad. The audio circuits in the camera are pretty weak and the boxes that attempt to disable the AGC I have been told by four different users have some bad side-affects.

The problem with Magic Lantern is that it voids the warrantee on the camera. That may not be a problem for the user depending on how comfortable they are with installing firmware and such. There is the possibility to "brick" the camera installing ML so potentially your out a camera body.

Personally I'm pretty comfortable with firmware updates and if I owned a T2i I would probably do it. My wife has a T2i and she isn't comfortable with firmware updates so she wont go there. So YMMV
 
I've gotten decent audio with a T2i with Magic Lantern with the Hode VideoMic Pro going straight in, or with JuicedLink Preamps, or with Sennheiser G3 (G2) wireless units. Here's a video I made showing some of that.
 
thanks for the replys everybody.....i already have magic lantern installed but have no preaap...have a preamp on my soundcard so might just record audio straight into my mac book pro.....

wondering what progam would be best for this..

has anybody had syncing issues by recording straight to computer when matching up afterwards
?

might just use audacity
 
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