Cheapest idea for narration recording?

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Psychovideo

Member
I'm looking for a very easy or inexpensive way to do voice layovers for a documentary I'm working on. I have a 0 budget, producing/funding the whole thing myself & cannot afford to go to have a studio record the narration. At this point, I cannot even afford a new program to do any recording or editing. I do have a Marantz CDR 310 available to me which can record my voice but I'm not sure I can hook up a field mixer to it. It can record my voice & put it onto a CDR. I do have a friend who uses Pro Tools who does some sound recording from his home studio for his band.

Does anyone know if this would work or have any other cheap solutions for a super low budget documentary?
 
Short answer: you can record VO on any system that has a mic and a recording device. That could include your camera or the CD recorder.

Long answer(s):

First, yes you can hook up a field mixer to the CD recorder. Most field mixers have a 1/8" stereo tape out, and a Y-cable that splits to dual RCA will connect easily to the RCA line ins on the CDR310. That said, your CD recorder has XLR mic ins with phantom power. I don't know how clean the pre-amps are in that particualr machine, but it gives you the option.

Second, if you have a ProTools suite available to you, there you go. The CD recorder will work just fine, but in ProTools you can record at the native DV audio rate of 16-bit/48kHz. Plus, if it's a recording studio, chances are that there is some sort of treatment on the walls or a proper recording room separate from the control room. This is your best bet, since coustic treatment is crucial for recording good, clean VO. And since it is a recording studio, he's probably got at least a half-decent mic cabinet.

Last, what mics are available to you? Mic selection can impact your VO. No one mic can cover every voice, either. So try a few different mics on your narrator to find the one that works best (based on both the voice and the room).

Honestly, use the best resource you have available to you. In this case, the ProTools suite.
 
Thanks, man! I have some good wired Audio Technica Lav mic's. the guys studio isnt a recording studio. They actually record in a studio but he mixes it from home so i would have to try to duplicate a clean area with no echo. I was going to get a bunch of egg foams & line a closet although the lav mics are pretty good. they might actually cut through the echo of almost any room I sit in but just to be on the safe side I thought i'd try to shelter myself in the padded closet. I know this is a striaght up a ghetto azz set up but in this economy I have a choice. Put a great lil movie aside till i can work up some money or I can do what i gotta do to enter it in a particular film fest I was invited to in September wich is kind of an honor for me so I dont wanna sit around on my duff in NYC.

I'm broke as a joke so I'm calling in favors from Buddies & giving them full credits in the movie & all but man is it tuff to be an Indy movie maker in this day & age.
 
Psychovideo said:
Thanks, man! I have some good wired Audio Technica Lav mic's. the guys studio isnt a recording studio. They actually record in a studio but he mixes it from home so i would have to try to duplicate a clean area with no echo. I was going to get a bunch of egg foams & line a closet although the lav mics are pretty good. they might actually cut through the echo of almost any room I sit in but just to be on the safe side I thought i'd try to shelter myself in the padded closet. I know this is a striaght up a ghetto azz set up but in this economy I have a choice. Put a great lil movie aside till i can work up some money or I can do what i gotta do to enter it in a particular film fest I was invited to in September wich is kind of an honor for me so I dont wanna sit around on my duff in NYC.

I'm broke as a joke so I'm calling in favors from Buddies & giving them full credits in the movie & all but man is it tuff to be an Indy movie maker in this day & age.
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Don't count the PT studio out just because it's a mixing studio. It still has to be treated. Just turn the monitors off and listen through headphones while recording. He's got to have some stuff there for tracking vocals. Again, I'd go with that first.

And the lavs are your worst option. No mic "cuts through" the reflections of a room. It might reject well from most directions, or it might have a lowered sensitivity that doesn't pick up much past a couple feet. If you are in a poorly-treated room, try a dynamic mic.
 
Can you not just use the camera mic? If you don't have a shotgun mic, etc., but all you're interested in is the audio, put the camera up close to your mouth but not in front of it, and record your narration.

Alternatively, if you have a DVR, you can get little windscreen and/or noise cancelling mics that you could try recording with and pulling the audio from that. It's not great sound, but I did that on a couple of my earliest efforts and it worked surprisingly well for what it was.
 
The PT setup is probably not your best option. If he's not recording it might be a way too noisy environment. Also the camera to the mouth is a bad choice, you will be picking up the camcorders motors etc. A lav as a VO mic is also not a great choice. If you friend has a band he probably has a SM58 laying around, that would be a much better mic for VO. The egg-crate foam covered walls will be very dead. You might want to get some packing blankets from U-Haul and put them on the walls first. The foam kills the echo but sound still bounces off the wall and back through the foam so you get some room sound. The blanket foam combo gives a very neutral dead space that is very god for VO and Foley recording.
I would go SM58 direct to the recorder, that I would put outside the closet.
 
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