Mountain Climb

S

sshafer

Member
I am the sound person on a documentary video about cancer patients climbing a mountain in the NW. We are having problems getting good audio when the camera person and myself are tethered together via a mic cord. Also, when we climb (Mt. Adams) we wont be next to each other. We will be roped up on a glacier. My questions are:

1. Can we use a portable digital recorder to capture audio and which recorder should we use?
2. I have read that there are sync problems when you down load the audio and try to line it up with the video. We are shooting with pd150 and pd170 cameras. (sorry- no one had a 2nd dvx to use)
3. Do we need time code enabled recorder?
4. We are editing on FCP
5. Any words of wisdom are welcome, what am I not thinking of?

We are using several wireless Sennheiser lav microphones and one boom mic. we have two camera going on the climb. one with a wireless and camera mounted boom, one with boom pole and wireless. Should we break the cable connection with the second camera and rent a portable field recorder?

Thanks
 
Mt Adams? I hiked that about 10 years ago...would not look forward to packing my audio gear up there.

Is this a day trip or more? What is your budget? There are several options available for your situation depending on what your budget is.

By camera mounted boom do you mean a shotgun mounted on the camera?

When do you intend to get audio? Getting audio while hiking is pretty dangerous. Be careful. :)

Cheers
 
sshafer said:
when the camera person and myself are tethered together via a mic cord.
Click to expand...

I hope you're using rope aswell!! :D

sounds awesome!

sounds also like you want as little wired connection between you and the camera as possible. Thing is even if you had a timecode enabled recorder you aren't able to jam sync from to or from a pd170, so best you could do would be to free-run zeros at the beginning of a day/tape. which would drift anyway.

tell us how it goes.
 
Wanna' save money? M-Audio MicroTrack recorder... but if this was me I'd use a Sennheiser G2 set(s) and something like the Micro-Cat for the lavs... how many people need to be mic'ed?
 
i'll agree will mattin on the compact flash route. edirol makes one with xlr inputs as well. and if you really want to save money, check out iriver.

wouldn't worry so much about sycn. none of these devices will have noticable drift.

i'd also getty plenty of wildsound for post.

sounds like a great time.
 
Follow up Q's

Follow up Q's

Thanks for the help. We will be roped up on the upper part of the mountain. Most of the recording will be during the rest stops on the way up. We are doing the actual climb in one day but will be on the mountain for 4 days which includes snow training for the climbers. We have four lav mics and one camera mounted boom and one hand held boom. We would like to mic as many people as possible but with the 4 lavs we are limited. As far a budget there is not much, crew is all volunteer and the producer is seeking grant money but currently all out of pocket. We are thinking about renting but would purchase if the price wasn’t too high +/-1000$. So...no real budget. We have taped some of the training hikes and the camera person and I have a difficult time moving around when we are tethered together. Any specific suggestions are appreciated.
 
with regards to breaking the link between camera and sound op, there are two ways:

External recorder - in this route, you are looking at edirol and m-audio on the lower end of the scale, with sound devices and the nagra ares-bb+ on the upper end. Dont worry about drift, time code enabled recorders only exist so that you can use a digi slate to jam the two recorders (cam and audio) and enable easy sync in post. Basically what Im saying is, no time code, no problem - but take a clapper board to help with post syncing.

Wireless to camera - Slightly scary route unless you have REALLY good wireless - meaning lectro, zaxcom or dpa. so maybe this is out of your price range. BUT that doesnt mean it isnt an option sometimes - you just connect your mixer out to the transmitter of the wireless kit, and put the receiver (s) on the camera. Downsides - harder monitoring, dropouts affect all tracks going to the camera etc etc etc.

Cheers, good luck.
 
So.... I can go with just about any external recorder to record our audio and there will be some drift between the audio and video sync over time. BUT it is not going to be a BIG problem in post.

Is this something that is done a lot by the readers of this post. How is audio done in most cases where it is not practical to link the sound with the camera via a cable?
 
Again, several different ways. The classic is how films (as in not video) are usually shot; clapper using TC or clapper not using TC. The audio is then matched with video in post by either TC or using the clap sticks as reference.

The problem with this is it requires you to use the sticks EVERYTIME you start recording. For documentaries it is highly impractical.

The way I would approach your task is to have the TC audio recorder in the bag and send out a reference TC via a Comtek to both PD150 to be recorded on audio channel 1. This method will also allow you to sync the cameras together as well as the audio in post.

If you have takes that are over 10 minutes then you might get some drift but the drift is easily corrected in post with a simple cut.

You could also record time of day TC on the cameras (I don't remember if PD150 does this) and audio recorder. This will not give you frame accurate TC but will get you within a second or two of sync and then you have to do it all by hand. Very sloppy and time consuming but it has been done.

If you use a non-TC recorder and have the wireless to send audio from your bag to the cameras then you can do that and again sync by hand to the waveform. Still time consuming but less sloppy.

If you use the waveform off the on-camera mic to sync then remember to adjust the sync for the disance from the subject to the camera.

If you are based out of Seattle there are several places to rent a TC recorder and Comtek (and extra w/l if you need them).

Good luck.
 
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