Looking for a compact on camera mic

[Eric Coughlin]

I have four Audio Technica AT-875s and two Audio Technica AT-897s for on-camera use, the latter can be battery powered so I use them with my C300 Mark IIs into the non-phantom powered 1/8" port for channels 3 & 4 on my C300 Mark IIs and I use the shorter phantom powered AT-875s on my Amiras via the 5-pin XLR port (leaving the two more standard 3-pin XLR ports open). I like them. Rode has an internal battery powered shotgun mic, but I prefer AA since it's easier to change out a battery than plug the microphone into power.

I'm editing a short film now where we did some pickup shots with a small crew, and for example there's a car scene we had to shoot in less than five minutes with no dialog which we didn't throw our PA/Sound guy with my Sound Devices Mix-Pre into the car, so we've just got on-camera ambiance for the driving, which in the edit is set to low volume with music over it, so I imagine the difference between the on-camera mic and the Mix-Pre with a Schoeps mic is minimal. There are a few other times in this edit where we ended up using the on-camera mic, such as for someone screaming where the camera mic was close to the talent and the sound mixer forgot to press record.

People often put down on-camera mics, but in reality, if you say have the same on-camera mic as the boom mic on a boom pole, and the on-camera mic is positioned in an ideal location close to talent, audio mixer pre-amps aside, you'd be getting pretty much the same results as the mic on the boom pole, at which point, it's perfectly acceptable to use the on-camera mic (if there's a reason to). More often the camera is further from talent, but there are cases where the camera mic can be closer to talent than the boom pole mic, let's say for example a complex Steadicam shot where the boom op had trouble keeping up for a section.

I know. It was kind of rhetorical. My audio guys love me, because I actually "get" audio and it's probably why I own ~$50K+ in audio gear, as a camera guy. And yes, it cracks me up to see these guys with $50K-$100K camera packages that try to get by with $200 worth of Amazon audio gear.

Audio guys often seem to like me a lot for similar reasons. I have closer to $10k of audio gear which is more than most video guys have, but I also yearn to upgrade my audio gear so will often talk to the audio guys I hire about things like Zaxcom vs Sound Devices, what mics they use, etc., and I think they appreciate working with a camera guy who appreciates good audio gear and knows audio pretty well as well.

 

[Noiz2]

I know. It was kind of rhetorical. My audio guys love me, because I actually "get" audio and it's probably why I own ~$50K+ in audio gear, as a camera guy. And yes, it cracks me up to see these guys with $50K-$100K camera packages that try to get by with $200 worth of Amazon audio gear.

A discussion in this vein came up a few months ago with an audio guy I work with through a client and another camera guy/friend of mine. The audio guy said, "We're cheap. We hate spending money on gear. If that stuff really worked, don't you think we'd be buying it and using it, but there's a reason we're all using the expensive stuff."

And the really funny part is the "cheap" people have no problem spending a pile on cameras and lenses, they only get cheap when it comes to sound. And lets be honest you can get a Zoom F4 for a small fraction of what most of them are shooting on. You can get a decent sound set up for not a lot over $1k. It will be pretty minimal at that point but in the right hands you can get very respectable tracks.
And it's not just your low budget directors. I was on a shoot for a huge entertainment company and they had speced one mic and a recorder, no wireless. Well it was a reality shoot and on location so I brought everything I could get my hands on and we used it all. The DP showed up with a full grip truck and a couple of hundred thousand in camera and lenses. They had under speced that also but neither of us believed them. They had the budget and they were not trying to be cheap they were just clueless.

 

[MartinF]

So for everyone still interested, I ordered a Sanken CS-M1. Hope to get it next week and really looking forward to using it.
As I often work alone, as director and camera person and sound person, I don't have the luxury of a boom op and to be honest, very often I don't want anyone else but me with the people I make films with. And I respectfully disagree with people telling me I can't get good sound without a boom. You just have to get close enough, mentally and physically Go watch the documentary Fuocoammare (Fire at sea), winner of the Berlin Film Festival, Oscar nominated, by Gian Franco Rosi, working all by himself...

cheers and thank you again for all the helpful input!

btw: just got a zoom f6, wonderful piece of kit if you don't have crew. I hope 32bit float audio will find it's way into cameras though.