pcm-m10 recording classroom (thanks for any advices

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deleuze3

Well-known member
Hi, i would like to have a good sound for recording my teacher at 10 feet from me but i cant use lavalier (the teacher would not feel confortable.)

I tried several ways of recording him :
1) pcm-m10 built-in mic : the quality is just average since the built in mic is omni.
2) pcm with azden sgm-1x : the level is too low and the mic sound is not that good even compare to the built-in from pcm-m10
2) oympus-10 built-in mic : quality is slightly better since the built in mic is cardioid

AFTER THESE 3 TESTS, i feel perplex.

How can i upgrade for better quality ? buy a rode videomicpro or a NTG-2 that i can connect in the pcm-m10 ?
or maybe a shotgun that is very long so it can be better to take distant voice from my teacher ?

Thanks if you have any idea to help me, it would be greatly apprecitaed
 
Take this from a teacher who frequently shoots (and occasionally gets shot at) in classrooms.

There is not a satisfactory technical solution to getting clear sound of a lecturer in a reverberant classroom from ten feet away.

Your problem is basically a social and marketing one: convincing your teacher that the value of your project outweighs his or her discomfort in wearing the lavalier microphone. I wouldn't recommend this if you're not on good terms with the teacher, but you might want to present the only viable alternative as well, which is to hire somebody to follow the teacher around with a boom microphone held a few inches above their head. From my own experience, I can guarantee I would find that far more disruptive to managing the lesson and the classroom than wearing the mic!

Ten feet is just a long, long distance when it comes to microphone placement.

- Greg
 
Why does it have to be 10 feet away ? Does your teacher move around a lot ?

One of my gigs is to shoot medical lectures that are published to the web, and for this I use an Olympus LS-10 on a tiny fold-up table tripod that I place close to the person giving the lecture. ( usually within 5 feet of the person speaking )

When I bring my audio in to my editor I do a couple of things to make it sound better:

1- I use paragraphic EQ to boost the low frequencies around 150 and 300 Hz ( it's only about 3-4 dB of boost )

2- I then do several passes with the Sony Sound Forge Noise Reduction plug-in to try and remove as much room noise as I can

3- Next I use a compressor plug-in to even out the quiet and loud parts so they are much closer to together ( this also involves manually boosting or compressing sections of the audio myself )

4- I use the TimeWarp function in the cheapo GoldWave audio editor to adjust to the length of the audio track to exactly match the video track. It takes a bit of practice to figure this out, but it's very quick once you know what you're doing. ( less than 1 minute to fix 90 minutes of audio )

The finished result sounds pretty good, much much better than the original RAW audio track from the recorder.
 
all the steps you told me thedingo is not easy for me to do. I would need a course about the subject lol
 
deleuze3 said:
Hi, i would like to have a good sound for recording my teacher at 10 feet from me but i cant use lavalier (the teacher would not feel confortable.)

...
How can i upgrade for better quality ? buy a rode videomicpro or a NTG-2 that i can connect in the pcm-m10 ?
or maybe a shotgun that is very long so it can be better to take distant voice from my teacher ?

Thanks if you have any idea to help me, it would be greatly apprecitaed
Click to expand...
As the others have said. Note that a shotgun DOES NOT pull in distant sounds and make them louder. It's not like a telephoto lens magnifying distant scenes. All a shotgun does is REDUVE the pickup of sounds arriving at the mic from directions other than where the mic is pointed, helping the desired sound to stand out a little from the surrounding background buzz. But it does not make the desired sound, in this case the teacher's voice, any louder. The ultimate solution to your problem is to get the mic closer to the teacher so his voice IS louder at the microphone. Anything you can do to get the mic closer will help, halving the distance increases the level of the desired sound hitting the mic by a factor of 4. Ten feet will never work well ... even shotguns need to be less than about 24 inches from the speaker for nice clean pickup. If he's standing at a podium, just placing the recorder on the podium and using its internal mics should give you better results than you'd get using any brand of shotgun, no matter how pricey, from your present position.
 
deleuze3 said:
all the steps you told me thedingo is not easy for me to do. I would need a course about the subject lol
Click to expand...

You need to start anywhere, and figure this out for yourself. It's not as hard as you think it is, but it takes practice. Most of what I described can be done with the $19 GoldWave audio editor. ( not sure about it's noise reduction ability )
 
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