multiple recording tracks

Beat Takeshi

Two-Hip Shakur
Hi all,
I have a shoot coming up where im going to need 2 cameras. Im going to have both cameras with on board mics but im going to have 2 wireless mics on my hosts plus a boom mic. Whats the best cost efficient way to capture the wireless and boom so the cameras can go where they want and pick up single conversations. Meaning I want to have each mic on its on track. Im thinking im going to have to get DAT and mixer but im not sure how to handle that. I have a few ideas but if anyone has any similar experiences i would love to hear about them.
Thanks
Aram
 
do you need the on camera mics? 99% of the time you won't get anything useful from them. i'd connect the 2 receivers to one camera and the boom to another. you can use the on-camera too on that one if it makes you feel better. (or 1 wireless to each ch 1, one gets boom to ch2 and the other gets on-camera to ch2.) shoot something you can sync to at the start of each tape and don't stop rolling. (a slate is the obvious thing but a handclap will work fine.) then just sync the 2 cams in post and use whichever audio you want.
 
Use a Board

Use a Board

You could run all the outputs into a mixer, and as long as you have 4 busses, run two each to each camera, then pan them both right and left to get stereo, or something close. I assume this is voice, what you are looking for is the final product to have equal levels to both channels on both cameras. You can pick up a Behringer 4 buss at http://www.musiciansfriend.com fort 200.00 bucks that will do the job. This also gives you the added bonus of trimming the input levels down or up as needed for each input individually, thereby balancing all the levels. You can also eq them, etc, etc. Your DAT should have most of this, but probably NOT 4 busses! I find audio to be the worst PITA, worse than cinematography...but at least you can practice with what I described with stand ins. Hope this helps.
 
thanks for the replies. I have a Behringer 10 channel mixer already that I can use. I was wanting to use an on camera shotgun(thats what I meant when I said on board if there was any confusion) for when someone goes out of range of the boom so I didnt want to tie up the cameras with a wire to the mixer so they are free to roam. Like if 2 kids go off and have a conversation about the subject in another room one of the cameras can go with them. I wanted to lav them all but thats like 12 separate audio tracks to deal with and I dont know of any multi-track recorders.
 
this weekends auditions and test showed that we are going to need at least 2 booms and 4 wireless mics along with a shotgun on top of each camera to get the stragglers. going to be tough to get everything.
 
Back
Top