recorded with 'mic' setting from a mixer output

[Baluardo]

hello,

after having shot a talk show episode as operator, i went checking the audio mixer connection. There were 6 lavs wired to the mixer, and the 2 output channels went into one of the three dvx100 we were using.
The audio operator looked pretty inexperienced with the dvx100 and he recorded the whole show with the 2 inputs set at 'mic' rather than 'line' (which is probably what you need if you are wired to a mixer. The levels were ok on the dvx lcd VU meters though. He was keeping the master volume of the mixer extremely low.

Now i wonder: was that very bad using the 'mic' setting rather than 'line'? does that affect the noise, as i guess?

thx,
Andrea

 

[khmuse]

As long as you didn't overload (clip) the DVXs internal mic preamplifier's with the output of the mixer, you should be OK (other than a much higher noise floor than would be typical). If you notice that the sound is poor, then you did likely experience an overload.

Sounds like you may have got lucky despite the inexperienced operator.

 

[Baluardo]

well apparently no clipping, levels were at the right point.
there was quite a bit of bg noise in the headphones though (nothing more than the normal crappy quality of the monitor audio output of the dvx), and quite a bit of reverb (even if using lavs and setup looked good to me which is weird), but i guess that depends on something else

Andrea

 

[Oleg 2]

some mixers ( not eng ) have mike out - 40-50 db attenuation on the output

the level was low -probably the mixer has vu scale which show much lower the ppm

 

[TyFord]

hello,

The audio operator looked pretty inexperienced with the dvx100 and he recorded the whole show with the 2 inputs set at 'mic' rather than 'line' (which is probably what you need if you are wired to a mixer. The levels were ok on the dvx lcd VU meters though. He was keeping the master volume of the mixer extremely low.

Now i wonder: was that very bad using the 'mic' setting rather than 'line'? does that affect the noise, as i guess?

thx,
Andrea

Um, well you need to set the input of the dvx 100 to whatever the output of the mixer is set to. The last DVX100 I saw had both mic and line inputs.

Some mixers have switches for mic, -10 and line. Others just mic, line and some just line OR mic.

Sounds like he might have been feeding line level to a mic level input. He might have gotten lucky, but there are simple rules that let you calibrate the output of the mixer to the input of the camera.

You DO have to pay attention. I was showing a friend of mine my mixer just last week. We fed line input tone to his DVX100 and set tone. Everything looked right.

Good mixers have "camera returns." a jack into which you plug the headphone output from the camera into. You toggle a switch on the mixer to hear the mixer output or the return from the camera headphone.

So I toggle the switch and YEOW!! one channel is distorted. Turns out he had the DVX inputs set to mic and I was sending line level on one of my channels. We switched the DVX inputs to line and made sure both mixer outputs were set to line. We sent tone from the mixer to the DVX again and reset levels. Everything was fine.

So the take away story here is ALWAYS listen ALL the time. Even though the camera record levels could be set by the tone, they were dead wrong because of the mic line mismatch.

I have a lot of other good location stuff in my little book. Check it out on my site. It makes a great stocking stuffer.

Regards,

Ty Ford