C300: C300 mkI sound question

[New_Zealand]

I start filming in May - New Zealand and China. I have a professional sound guy who owns his own gear working n the project. Since I'm traveling a long ways and can't return to China easily to do pick up sounds or get talents to do ADR in case something happens to our audio - I need to cover my butt so I'm going to have a mic hook up to the camera as my backup.

I'm not a sound guy so I'm looking at the audio setup and wanted some ideas on the best setting for recording my backup audio. Thanks

 

[indiawilds]

1) The best is if you ask the audio guy to give you a feed from his mixer and plug that XLR to your camera top monitor xlr input and record that to your camera directly. So you don't need to have a microphone on top of your camera.
2) In some situations tethered shooting may be an issue. In that situation get a wireless out from his mixer to yours.

3) If the above two doesn't work, then have an on camera mic, like a MKH 416, which I always use. There is an option for Mic/Line in the LCD and toggle it based on whether your using the feed from mixer or your own mic.

4) The sound files won't be way too large. While backing up the camera files, you can also backup the sound.

 

[bluedisk]

My sound guy always backs up his audio to an SD or CF card depending on which mixer he is using. Its really up to him to back up audio this way. Then at the end of each day when I'm copying camera cards its no drama to back up audio onto the field footage drive as well.

I have been using a software product called Hedge which is a great tool for queuing up and verifying multi copies at the end of the day. Makes copying a bit less of a hassle at the end of a long shoot day in the field.

I use a compact size Sony camera mike off an old ENG camera on my C300 MK1 and it works fine if I want get a few shots on my own with just general sound.

 

[IronFilm]

My sound guy always backs up his audio to an SD or CF card depending on which mixer he is using. Its really up to him to back up audio this way. Then at the end of each day when I'm copying camera cards its no drama to back up audio onto the field footage drive as well.

Yes, plus it is normal for all professional soundies to be recording to more than one media at once, so he is creating a back up along the way.

But sure, as an extra final layer of "protection" (but really, it serves as a second line of defense for syncing, after using timecode of course which as you've got a C300 you should be using) you can send the boom across as on a camera hop. (or wired with a snake any time there isn't too much movement on set)