Any point to 4 tracks of audio with an on-board mic?

S

Spiral

Active member
Ahoy lads, and happy holidays!

I have searched the site and found answers to what I was looking for (damn I love this site! ) but have more of a quasi-philosophical question about having 2 near-useless audio tracks.

Is there any point having two muffled, fixed level, on-camera audio tracks to have do delete in your NLE?

I know someone will say that backup is good, but have you heard those channels? They are near useless, IMHO.

I also saw someone's comment about 4 channels being "broadcast standard." Is this the reason that the 170 has the extra channels? Because I KNOW that I will never use them, broadcast or not.

Inquiring minds want to know :)
 
Last edited:
i more often than not just disable them in the import stage of my NLE.
BUT at least once they have saved me when an external mic had a problem...
 
Yes, you don't wanna hear it, but again I'll say emergency backup is sometimes helpful.

However, other possibilities are opened up, too. Sometimes the internal mics can be useful for ambience, and one very good example of this is, say, recording a board feed of a live event, but capturing some sense of crowd noise with the internal mics.


But... yes, the second two tracks would be a LOT more useful if, say, the RCA inputs could be used to feed 'em...
 
If you're having your audio pored over by a pro, they can do alot of good stuff with that extra audio, like some noise cancellation, noise introduction, or certainly to pick up little snippets that might have otherwise been lost if only feeding in wireless....although I agree that it'd be nice to feed the mics.....I wonder if an HVX could be modified to have a couple more XLR's?:shocked:
 
On the HPX, you can disable the onboard mics entirely. I've considered doing this (for the reasons stated here), but am curious: do you actually gain any additional recording time by doing this? Or does it still record those two channels, but with no acutal audio?
 
Well, certainly good points, but the least that could be done is to make the two INT.'s volume-adjustable. They might be a little more useful (to me anyway,) if I could increase the on-board gain a little. They come into the NLE low and muffled, and one has to increase the gain to +++ for them to be of any use at all.

All of this being said, still a fine camera :)

...not sure about increasing the recording time , but it seems that if it were so, it would be very minimal.

ullanta said:
But... yes, the second two tracks would be a LOT more useful if, say, the RCA inputs could be used to feed 'em...
Click to expand...

....That's all that I'm sayin'!
 
The trick is to calibrate your mixer to the HVX/HPX with the gains set at "0" (12 o'clock), then switch the inputs so that the external audio is recorded on channels 3 and 4, and you can adjust the gain for the internal mics on tracks 1&2
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top