Recommendations for professional sound package for Canon T21

T

TrickMc1

Member
I am trying to find the right place to post this. I would like to purchase a sound package for my T2i to shoot a Tango documentary in Buenos Aires. I would like to spend about $1000. more if need be, less if possible. I will be shooting exterior and interior interviews and live action dance performances. I don't want to buy something that I will have to get rid of and upgrade because of inadequate performance.

I found some of these recommendations on some other theads.
Tascam DR-100 or HN4, too low end?
Sennheiser G2 wireless
Rhode blimp or similar for outdoors.
a SD MixPre and and H1 / DR07 or maybe a DV Promix3 or Tascam DR-100 and a slightly better Tascam 680 $800. recorder

Your advice will be appreciated.
 
Trick , this is very well covered material in these forums. a little time researching will give you lots of great options.

However for "Complete kit" I think your budget is not quite enough to get the performance and quality you say you want. unless you run into some seriously good deals on used gear.

but you may be able to squeeze in a great kit without the wireless expectation.

The Senny G2 is no longer and the G3 has replaced it and will eat up about $500 to $600 (new) of your budget not leaving you enough for the recorder, boom pole, blimp, shotgun mic, hyper mic, mic cables, headphones and the other goodies required.

probably in those restraints I would go with the Tascam over the Zoom for sure,

you dont mention if you already own part of an audio kit?

because youre missing a lot of parts to make a complete kit.
 
The Rode blimp is gargantuan and gets heavy really quick if you're booming. I find myself using my fuzzy a ton more in outdoor situations to the same end.

As others have said, 1000 is painfully low for a "professional" sound set up.
 
Thanks for responding. I have nothing but the T2i. Let me revise my wish list. I want to shoot acceptable quality sound on as low a budget as possible. I may shoot interviews in my yet to be located apartment in Buenos Aires, so there may be some outside noise to contend with. There is a well received documentary shot on the streets of New York called The Cruise. I would like the capability to do something similar, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9awJCyjt550&feature=fvw. I will probably be a one man crew most of the time, so I need something that I can manage easily.
You mentioned Tascam, do you mean the 100 or 680?
 
I'm a doc man myself( also a big fan of the cruise)

Get a wired lav for interviews (the Sony ecm44 is good for a low budget solution) and a rode ntg2 shotgun. Get a recorder with xlr inputs (both mics can be battery powered so phantom power isnt a must). People don't expect documentaries to be pristine, so you can take some liberties with equipment. Still, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try your hardest for the best sound, but if you've got a great story people will forgive you for much more than with most narratives (example: have you ever seen an IMDB "Goof" posted about a boom dipping into a shot in a documentary? Of course not.) if you're one-manning it and doing sit down interviews, rent a c stand with a boom holder and a boom kit. But if you're out in the field running around alone a boom pole will be of no use to you, same with a blimp.

An on camera light should be an investment for you soon too.
 
I would recommend looking into the audio forum here as you will get the most advice there (especially with a search). The first responders here are correct in their suggestions that your target budget is probably too low. I would suggest upping the budget to match your camera and lens budget since sound is at least half your video. :)

I went all in with audio and it really brought up my production value. I went with an SD302 as my core component and added to that as I could. I now have a 302, 702, Oktava, schoeps smc641 (oktava or the blueline are great alternatives) two sanken cos11 lavs (countryman EMW is a great entry level lav) and 12' gizo cf boom with k-tek kssm shockmount and bbg in case I go outside. If I am shooting a ton of outdoor interviews etc, I either use a lav or hire someone with a 416 and zeppelin. You need help to boom anyway, so hiring someone with their own stuff is a great option. The last thing we got was wireless. For indoor interviews I use the boom on a c-stand with boom cradle.
 
nicksnow said:
I'm a doc man myself( also a big fan of the cruise)

Get a wired lav for interviews (the Sony ecm44 is good for a low budget solution) and a rode ntg2 shotgun. Get a recorder with xlr inputs (both mics can be battery powered so phantom power isnt a must). People don't expect documentaries to be pristine, so you can take some liberties with equipment. Still, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try your hardest for the best sound, but if you've got a great story people will forgive you for much more than with most narratives (example: have you ever seen an IMDB "Goof" posted about a boom dipping into a shot in a documentary? Of course not.) if you're one-manning it and doing sit down interviews, rent a c stand with a boom holder and a boom kit. But if you're out in the field running around alone a boom pole will be of no use to you, same with a blimp.

An on camera light should be an investment for you soon too.
Click to expand...

Second this. I'm also a one-man crew. Just remember this.... for interviews the best footage in the world doesn't mean squat without good audio. With that in mind, always shoot for multiple recordings. (Never use on-board mic).
If you can control the external noise a bit, the Zoom H4N's internal mics are usable (assuming you can set up fairly close to your subject). Get a shotgun mic plugged into the Zoom H4n, record in 4-track mode, and you've got your shotgun feed and your zoom's built-in mic feed. Throw in a wired lav into a different external recorder (Zoom H1) and you've got another good option. (sony ecm44 is more than enough).

Good luck.
 
I know I'm probably going to get blasted for mentioning this (again), but if you're using wireless lav mics and aren't afraid of the Magic Lantern hack, you can get totally usable audio for your purposes with the camera's input and not require any additional recorders or sync in post.

I use the Sennheiser wireless g3 lav system directly into the camera's input, with AGC off, digital gain off, and analog gain up about 10 using ML, and the results sound just as good for documentary style shooting as my DVX inputs used to.

Here's a guy with an identical setup to mine, and you can hear the onboard audio recording is just great with the lav:
http://vimeo.com/18489831

Have the Zoom is great for other kinds of production work, but personally I found that for this sort of filming it is not necessary. I'd recommend you get the lav system (since you need it anyway) and try it out first. If you are not happy with the sound, then invest in the zoom or other external recorder. Otherwise, you might just save yourself another purchase (and another step syncing in post!).

There's a lot of negativity towards using in camera audio on these forums, but it can totally be done.
 
dishe said:
I know I'm probably going to get blasted for mentioning this (again), but if you're using wireless lav mics and aren't afraid of the Magic Lantern hack, you can get totally usable audio for your purposes with the camera's input and not require any additional recorders or sync in post.

I use the Sennheiser wireless g3 lav system directly into the camera's input, with AGC off, digital gain off, and analog gain up about 10 using ML, and the results sound just as good for documentary style shooting as my DVX inputs used to.

Here's a guy with an identical setup to mine, and you can hear the onboard audio recording is just great with the lav:
http://vimeo.com/18489831

Have the Zoom is great for other kinds of production work, but personally I found that for this sort of filming it is not necessary. I'd recommend you get the lav system (since you need it anyway) and try it out first. If you are not happy with the sound, then invest in the zoom or other external recorder. Otherwise, you might just save yourself another purchase (and another step syncing in post!).

There's a lot of negativity towards using in camera audio on these forums, but it can totally be done.
Click to expand...

I'm all about it. (But, like you said, everyone looks down on it like you're using a plastic toy cam for a paid gig). One-man/small crews get it. Big studio guys w/ sound techs w/ boom poles and editing crews laugh. Whatevs.
 
The way I see it, sound is in many ways like ISO, and takes much more precision to work with as the budgets get lower. With film, film is expensive, but the trade-off is that it seems you can have a lot of freedom with film noise - it looks more cinematic than not. But with digital, ISO noise looks very ugly and never really fits a purpose unless it's an incredibly gritty film, so while the digital camera itself is cheap, digital puts more focus on lighting the location better to reduce noise (and to reduce the strength between windows/light sources). But even with digital, there's no reason to spend what you'd have spent on film for lighting instead, there are plenty of professional examples of film scenes shot on digital that only were lit by windows and one or two bright panels bought at home depot or such, effectively keeping the lighting budget probably way less than $500, with a few trade offs here and there that are acceptable among indie productions - overexposed windows, flatter looks, ect ect - Bad Is Bad is a great example of what I'm talking about, and I personally think that it'll be a tremendously good micro-budget project that really will shine light on what can be done with such small amounts of money.

And comparing this to sound noise, it's really no different. The way I understand AGC, is that it's much like the Auto-ISO option on the camera. When the camera detects that the sound levels are lower than what human ears like to hear, it bursts up the sound gain - this is exactly how sound should indeed work for recognizing voices, but the problem is that when the camera hears nothing, it boosts the noise even higher, creating a high level of fuzz. Even with manual audio, you have the option of simply adjusting the gain - a low gain will have no noise, but the voices will barely be audible. A middle gain will give you a full voice, but the noise will be recognizable. A high gain will give you a thick noise that blows voice level out of proportion. That's simple sound properties it seems. So how do you combat the noise in a middle gain, when you want a full voice but little noise? That's where I'm guessing you use a directional/shot-gun mic to point the sound in one direct direction, making the sound it hears in that direction louder, while being able to use a much lower sound gain. The problem is, with that, it seems users report some of their right-purpose microphones becoming noisy when plugged into the cameras jack, which now calls the need for a separate sound recorder - it seems you can find them for $200. With the sound recorder, the same still applies - you use the right-purpose mic so that you can keep gain levels low, as well as keeping sound production values in mind (a room sounding full of echo or distance as opposed to a rich, clear voice that sounds separated from everything.). All in all, I would not say that any of this should really cost you more than $500 to collect, same as a minimal light set, a good all-purpose lens, a decent shoulder rig, a tripod-dolly set, ect ect. $500 is really the maximum I think that any newbie should spend on each department of filmmaking, and the rest of the education should be learning how to work trade-offs in a way that work for your production.

For example, my priority with learning sound techniques probably would be to first focus on finding the simple type of microphone that gives you the sound production you want - beyond noise, there's a major difference in the way mics pick up voices, and to me, this is what I notice most. A persons voice, to me, should not sound like it's coming from inside a device, but it shouldn't sound too distant from the camera either. I also don't seem to like microphones that seclude the voice apart from everything else, but I also don't like mics that pic up a car from 5 miles away more than the voice right in front of it, or mics that make a voice sound rounded or down syndrome-y. I think a great priority is finding the right type of mic that works for what sound production styles you like, then worrying about gain and noise later - especially with documentaries or interviews, I'd think noise would be a bit more forgiving!

I'm always off providing examples of how his work turns out really well, but here's a scene from Harmony Korine's camcorder film Trash Humpers, and just one of the many things I like about the film is how good the sound is on the camcorder that he used (yes, he used actual VHS camcorders for the whole thing, it wasn't some sort of million dollar secret studio stage with 14 directional lights and 7 microphones, it was all filmed and sound recorded on a simple VHS tape and camera) - and the reality is that the sound is surprisingly devoid of a bit of gain or noise, sounds clear, only naturally sharp, and understandable, and also fits the purpose highly. While it's not something you'd hear on Tron or even any sort of credible interview, I think it gives a perfect example of how sound, just like anything, can sometimes be overestimated. The sound in this scene just does not "suck." :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr_5D817HS0

It doesn't sound noisy, rounded, mute, fluffy, too sharp, too punchy, weak, distant, close up, ect ect - it literally sounds perfect for the type of scene it is, it's very fitting, and there's not one distracting thing about it. The truth is that DSLR on-board mics aren't good at that sort of thing though, I agree that separate mics sound 10x better and more natural for natural purposes, but still, I've heard work that would sound excellent for a budget interview or even an actual scene prodution all recorded on a less than $500 sound set-up, so I wouldn't let a big-budget attitude scare you. Everything has it's place in cinema, and if you're not off making a blockbuster, chances are you don't need it to look or sound exactly like a blockbuster. There are some sound choices that are awful and would never be used, but there are also sound choices that simply give character that is acceptable in budget work.
 
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Snapper123 said:
The way I see it, sound is in many ways like ISO, and takes much more precision to work with as the budgets get lower. With film, film is expensive, but the trade-off is that it seems you can have a lot of freedom with film noise - it looks more cinematic than not. But with digital, ISO noise looks very ugly and never really fits a purpose unless it's an incredibly gritty film, so while the digital camera itself is cheap, digital puts more focus on lighting the location better to reduce noise (and to reduce the strength between windows/light sources). But even with digital, there's no reason to spend what you'd have spent on film for lighting instead, there are plenty of professional examples of film scenes shot on digital that only were lit by windows and one or two bright panels bought at home depot or such, effectively keeping the lighting budget probably way less than $500, with a few trade offs here and there that are acceptable among indie productions - overexposed windows, flatter looks, ect ect - Bad Is Bad is a great example of what I'm talking about, and I personally think that it'll be a tremendously good micro-budget project that really will shine light on what can be done with such small amounts of money.

And comparing this to sound noise, it's really no different. The way I understand AGC, is that it's much like the Auto-ISO option on the camera. When the camera detects that the sound levels are lower than what human ears like to hear, it bursts up the sound gain - this is exactly how sound should indeed work for recognizing voices, but the problem is that when the camera hears nothing, it boosts the noise even higher, creating a high level of fuzz. Even with manual audio, you have the option of simply adjusting the gain - a low gain will have no noise, but the voices will barely be audible. A middle gain will give you a full voice, but the noise will be recognizable. A high gain will give you a thick noise that blows voice level out of proportion. That's simple sound properties it seems. So how do you combat the noise in a middle gain, when you want a full voice but little noise? That's where I'm guessing you use a directional/shot-gun mic to point the sound in one direct direction, making the sound it hears in that direction louder, while being able to use a much lower sound gain. The problem is, with that, it seems users report some of their right-purpose microphones becoming noisy when plugged into the cameras jack, which now calls the need for a separate sound recorder - it seems you can find them for $200. With the sound recorder, the same still applies - you use the right-purpose mic so that you can keep gain levels low, as well as keeping sound production values in mind (a room sounding full of echo or distance as opposed to a rich, clear voice that sounds separated from everything.). All in all, I would not say that any of this should really cost you more than $500 to collect, same as a minimal light set, a good all-purpose lens, a decent shoulder rig, a tripod-dolly set, ect ect. $500 is really the maximum I think that any newbie should spend on each department of filmmaking, and the rest of the education should be learning how to work trade-offs in a way that work for your production.
Click to expand...

Well put, except for the part about the camera jack always being too noisy. The preamp on the camera is kind of weak, that much I'll agree with. However, the idea here is to leave the gain on the camera relatively low (but high enough to separate it from the sound floor- I found the sweet spot for me is around 10) while feeding it hot audio line from the mic. That way, most of the pre-amp work is actually being done externally by the reciever, in my case a sennheiser wireless lav receiver. I should add that this is only really possible with the Magic Lantern hack (the 60D has manual audio, but does not give precise control over the analog gain which would leave the audio level low and close to the noise floor, creating a slight hiss in the background. It also won't natively allow for live headphone monitoring, which is dangerous to record without).

The reason I can't recommend an external recorder in good faith here, is that not only will it likely NOT add much (if any) production value to documentary/interview style recording, it will also require more work in post to sync audio and video.
I say work with the internal audio when you can, go with an external recorder when you need something more. I just don't agree with everyone saying you need it all the time.
 
Well, your recommendation requires the user to "Hack their camera" which might be OK with you , but may not be OK with OP ,but I find it more trouble than just doing it properly with an external recorder.

Not every one wants to or is willing to "hack" their camera. remember OP has a T2i not a D60.\

not to mention all the trouble to just have OK audio...
 
Nothing in this life is "ready to go" straight from the box. I'm a full believer in embracing your inner engineer and making stuff do things they weren't designed to do. I mean, that's likely how we all ended up with DSLR cameras doing video work!

If you don't have that mindset, the DSLR workflow probably isn't for you!
 
Dont get me wrong here, to a large extent I agree, Im an engineer.. but I chose not to modify my camera in order to get access to $.29 pre amps, why? because I know better, and I own a good audio kit already...

and I think a large portion of the noobs that picked up a T2i did so because of the hype for one, and also seeing what a skilled person can do with it right out of the box, visually.
all the early test beauty shots had music backgrounds and little to no dialog. So most had proof that this little $800 camera could fulfill their dreams of creating a very good looking movie (which it can) because previously to achieve the same looks it took a vid cam and a 35mm adapter (which could get pretty pricey for the better ones, even still having to flip the immages). so to them the DSLR solution is a whole lot closer to an out of the box solution, there was just no disclaimer on the box saying "oh BTW audio on this camera sux" .
however then the issue of audio comes up as people start learning about the process of film making and realize just how important good sound actually is to a film, which leads them to wonder and ask how they can achieve great audio.

And BTW separate audio IS how its done in Hollywood , therefore the DSLR workflow IS what they are trying to emulate or reverse engineer.

I think the difference is whether they want to make a film or short versus capturing ENG material, both having obviously different standards as to what is acceptable audio.

and not everyone who loves film and wants to make movies is an engineer,

I am a full believer in using the proper tool for the job, if you have to hack it to make it work.. well then you're using the wrong tool.

with the T2i for film making, it is only part of a kit not the complete solution, which should include an audio rig along with it, at least.
 
I could imagine that the cheap Zoom H1 is just right for your purpose, or do you want to record dialogue as well?
 
Recordingwhiz - why are you so averse to magic lantern? I agree with you that it's all about the right tool for the job, but ML is a safe way to transform your camera into a different tool, with features that typically come with a higher price tag. I bought the t2i before ML, loved it and now I love it even more with ML. I upgraded my camera for free, I don't know why you'd deny yourself a useful tool just because it's called a "hack". Should we really put some much faith in canon to give us what we want??
 
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