help. need a good pre amped mixer, that is kinda inexpensive?

[burning holmes films]

shooting an indie and im shooting on a canon 7d , yeahg i know the juiced link 454t is good. but i worked on a big budget film today MACINE GUN PREACHER and i chewed the ear of on the sound guy for an hour ,great guy. bottom line is he said i need to have a decent mike which i got sen me66 and a decent pre amped mixer which i dont have and decent digitial recorder, highly thinking the zoom h49? independent sound is the way to go he says. yeah the editing is gonna be harder. oh well. at least ill have great sound. soooo im looking for a decent pre amped mixer? any thoughts. and whats your take on the h49? thanks love input and allis greatly appreciated.

 

[KnoxHotch]

Well others can chime in here, but it all depends on your needs. The Zoom H4n is a popular low budget recorder but there are many others of varying quality and capabilities. When it comes to a mixer, number of inputs, outputs, options, and budget dictate what kind you need. For 2 inputs, take a look at the popular Sound Devices Mixpre, or it's bigger brother, the 302 will last you a long time, and the preamps in both are superb.

 

[Noiz2]

I'm not going to stand on a soapbox and shout but equipment does not make for "great sound", though bad equipment can hurt.

You also need someone who knows how to use it.

That said if push comes to shove you could go directly into the h4n.

You might still be better off getting someone. The lowish end of what you want will run around $1K. And you probably need more than you realize. Do you have a boom pole? and cables, good headphones, a zeppelin? Not trying to be discouraging but the equipment can be $$$. I do only a small amount of production work. I don't own any wireless. I don't even have a really decent shotgun setup right now. But for field work I have around $12K that gets carried around, depending. The studio stuff is completely separate and we won't go there because it makes me woozy ;~). My wife is always pushing, when times are slow, to do more production work. I figure I need another $15k - $20K to actually be marketable. I do a select few things that I am set up for, but to actually be able to meet the needs with out having to rent myself into the poor house that's what it would take.

So when folks on this list who do this for a living tell directors to hire someone it's not just that we would like to see more work, it's that realistically you really don't want to spend the kind of money that would bring you up to entry level work. If you get a real sound person (not that musician who "knows how to record" but a REAL film sound person) you get experience AND $20K-$60K of equipment. THat person you hesitate to pay (a generic you, not a personal one) is sometimes bringing in more equipment than your entire budget.

OK if you need to be mobile then the SD MixPre is probably the best choice for a single (or two) mics. If you can sit the mixer on a table and get AC power to it then an old Mackie 1202 will work for a lot less.