One person shoot, need advice

[Gorilla King]

I'm actually on the post production side of things at my company though I used to do some production work (nothing very substantial) and I was hoping to get some advice that might make my job easier.

We are shooting a series of interviews (some indoor, some outdoor) and have a wireless lav, oktava and sennheiser ME66K shotgun. Now the problem is that our wireless is sometimes finicky depending on location. I think it's some sort of interference. What I was wondering is if we have two XLR inputs, and the oktava or shotgun must be mounted on the camera for mobility, what would be the best setup? Distance from the subject is usually 4-5 feet.

Thanks!

 

[Noiz2]

An Oktava, mounted on a camera 4-5 feet from the subject isn't going to get you much. Well that isn't true you will have some excellent recordings of the mechanics of the camera. And I'm sorry but "mobility" is a lame excuse for not getting decent recordings. I also am mostly post but I have done run and gun interviews on a number of doc's and a sound person with a boom pole doesn't impact your "mobility" unless they are semi incompetent, your tethered to the wireless anyway you can't get very "mobile".

Given the assumption that some idiot has decided this is the way you must do it the shotgun is probably your only choice since it has at least some chance of getting usable dialog. You should probably check your freq. on the wireless, it sounds like your not picking an open freq.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

You should probably check your freq. on the wireless, it sounds like your not picking an open freq.

Are there handheld devices out that people use to scan the band for available channels? I saw that some of the wireless mic manufacturers on their base stations have some sort of feature like that, but for those units that don't have such features, it seems that such a device would be good to be able to do a walkabout.

 

[Steve House]

Are there handheld devices out that people use to scan the band for available channels? I saw that some of the wireless mic manufacturers on their base stations have some sort of feature like that, but for those units that don't have such features, it seems that such a device would be good to be able to do a walkabout.

There are such critters .... they're called spectrum analyzers or frequency sweepers. One manufacturer of battery operated versions is Optoelectronics and you can peruse their units at their web site. The bad news is the cost of an entry level unit is going to be in the neighborhood of the cost of upgrading your wireless to a professional quality product that has the tool built into it anyway, so why bother. One of the common causes of problems with wireless is multipath distortion where signals from the tranmitter bouncing around the set eventually hitting the receiver interfere with its direct-path signals and there's nothing much in a band scan that will help that situation much anyway - fixing that is what diversity receivers are all about.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

There are such critters .... they're called spectrum analyzers or frequency sweepers. One manufacturer of battery operated versions is Optoelectronics and you can peruse their units at their web site. The bad news is the cost of an entry level unit is going to be in the neighborhood of the cost of upgrading your wireless to a professional quality product that has the tool built into it anyway, so why bother.

Well... sure I wasn't thinking of hauling out the old HP... but I was thinking of a handheld device.

So, I looked at the optoelectronics site... would such a device for $100 be 'useful', rather than the $1500 for one that has a spectrum display... (which didn't strike me as all that fine on resolution...), or even the $499 one that pretty much only gives a text output?

As for the builtin functions of the higher end wirless mic sets, do they give a hint on such things as multipath, or do they just have a signal strength indicator? Also I've seen a couple blurbs mentioning diversity, which is to say, multiple antennas and some form of processing to cancel multipath...