Shotgun mic for Canon C100

Well I had the NTG1 and got rid of it as I didn't like its sound as it was very electret and lacking mid range, I now use thr AT875r as my std budget mic and have five of them!

I also have a panasonic AJ 700p mic on my cameras as a gen purpose fx grabbing mic.
 
guerriglia said:
Thanks guys for your precious and much appreciated help. However, I am starting to be a bit confused.
I don't want you to give me a crash course on sound, but I badly need some quick clarifications.
I am shooting a documentary outdoor, where I need ambient sound (are my C100 on-camera omnis good enough for that?) but also interviews (I am about to buy a Rode NTG-1 at this point; is it ok the capture a good sound without spending 2k?).
What is the issue about stereo or not?
PLEASE HELP! :)
Thank you!!!
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You really DO need a crash course in audio, no sin there.

OK, the onion peels a bit. Now you are doing interviews as well. If you want ambient to go with your interview, then record it before or after the interview, otherwise the ambient will include the speakers voice and you lose control. You cam mic will work ok for this. So a small recorder might be handy, it doesn't sound like you really need it for this.

You will find sound to be an entire craft and it will require you or a sound person to be involved to the same extent as your visuals, otherwise you will record crap. You don't need to spend 2k to catch ambient or do a simple interview, but it wouldn't be difficult to spend that on a basic audio kit. I certainly wouldn't spend that on just one mic, but a variety of kit including a few entry or mid-level mics, suspension, wind protection, pole, headphones, and possibly a mixer or external recorder. This list has produced many recommendations for basic kits, search is your friend, or we can all hash that out for your particular situation. Spending other folks money is always fun.

Unless you need it for some reason, I would keep your recording to mono until you need and understand when stereo is the right choice. That doesn't mean not recording two tracks when needed.

Choosing the right mic for your purposes is important, but with the exception of ambient, it is best to get the mic off the cam. There are many types of mics and each has a strength: cheap, suited to outdoors or indoors, size, isolation etc. So far, you have discussed purchasing a shotgun, and that is part of most any basic audio kit, especially for outdoors, and it may work ok indoors under the best circumstances. For rooms with bare walls, or rooms with echo, a shotgun will often fail badly, so other types of mics are used such as small condenser cardioid or variants with more or less directivity. For interviews, inside or out, lavalier mics are often used do to their proximity to the speaker and characteristics (dynamic mics in general) which provides more isolation from background noise. If you are working interviews solo, a lav can be your best friend since it is mounted on the talent so you get better proximity, but it does require some skill to use. Every mic requires some skill to use well.

The 875r is an economy shotgun which is very compact and forgiving (less directional) and hits above its weight. Can't speak much about the NTG1 or NTG2 except that the NTG2 has the option of being powered by an internal battery. Both Rode mics are very popular but are widely reported to have low outputs which can hurt you at times. The NTG3 is more money, but is a great mid-priced mic which is rugged and has a hotter output. I have found mine to be more forgiving indoors than my 875r.


Hope that helps a bit.

Grant

Edit: Better to get the mic off of the cam for ambient also. This comment was in regards to using the on cam mic for ambient.
 
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I don't know why you would use the camera's audio to record ambient sound anyway. Use a separate audio recorder - there's no need to record video at the same time so the camera is superfluous, really no need to even bring it to the recording session.
 
Steve, if you want ambient from the set, and you don't have a recorder or a sound staff, you just put the lens cap on and hit record. Easy.

Said laughing, you are thinking like a sound guy with a big kit.

Grant
 
ggrantly said:
Steve, if you want ambient from the set, and you don't have a recorder or a sound staff, you just put the lens cap on and hit record. Easy.

Said laughing, you are thinking like a sound guy with a big kit.

Grant
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No, not thinking like someone with a big kit, just thinking like someone who believes in acquiring the right tools for the job at hand. I don't think of ambiance as something you record on set between takes. It's more akin to SFX, recorded with the tools and at a time and place most favorable to getting a good, clean recording of the sounds you're trying to capture. You're trying to capture the sounds of a place and that's best done when cast and crew are gone and you can hear the uncluttered sounds of the location. Why lug a camera kit out for that when a nice audio-only recorder is easier to transport and will probably do a better job.
 
Steve, FWIW, the Canon C100 that the op uses is pretty compact, barely larger than a dslr. By most reports, it records decent sound. The op doesn't even have an audio kit and is just beginning to make talkies.

Grant
 
Disclaimer: I'm a video guy, not an audio guy... so I personally, I opt to bring on audio pros when budget allows, but I often shoot one-man-band style and have been forced to learn a little audio...

I also own a c100 and regularly use both on-board mic and external mic simultaneously, so yes it does work and I must say that on-board mics are fine for picking up ambient sound most of the time. Obviously, each persons definition of "fine" will be slightly different, but for capturing audio run & gun, ENG and documentary style, it's a great option. I use a combination of mics depending on the situation including sony wired and wireless lavs, and an Audio Technica AT-897. I'm definitely due for an upgrade on my wireless and shotgun mics, but it has served me well for the last three years.

Here are some samples captured with the c100 + 5DmkIII, Audio Technica AT-897 + On-board mics. http://hawaiishoots.com/blog/cb-hawaii/

Hope this helps
 
It Lives!.

The op is probably not watching this thread almost a year after the last post.

But?

What I found interesting looking at the thread is that as often happens when asking advice people answer based on what they would do with out paying much attention to what the actual situation the poster has said they are in.

You see lots of answers sometimes that are really not at all connected to what was asked. Or ones that make weird assumptions. And as always in sound plenty of "this is the only right way to do it".

On the flip side there are plenty of "this is great I do it all the time" and if you actually look at any of their work the sound is awful.

Then there are the OP's who either don't understand or don't want to accept that what they want to do is just not a good idea.
I have seen plenty of (well, the equivalent of) "what is the best way to shoot myself in the eye with a 45 and not get hurt".

I try, and sometimes even succeed, to figure out what they really want and need, and to give advice for their situation and not my situation.

But posters also will need to vet answers and try to figure out IF they are applicable to what YOU want to do. And you need to accept that if you are asking here you may have very wrong ideas about how sound works and so you may not get the kind of answer you thought you wanted.
It's a challenge for both.
 
One other point.
Room tone is fairly specific, sound recorded with the same gear as close as possible to when the scene it is to be used in was shot. As in immediately after the take.

Ambience, and Backgrounds are somewhat changeable. Doc. folks and ENG use the terms, and one I really don't like "nat sound" to mean the sound of the place where they did the interview etc. It is recorded generally about the same time as the dialog and it is used almost like room tone.

Sound folks though mean something different by Ambient and Background sounds. They are recordings that will be layered up to create the world that the story takes place in and are almost always recorded away from the set, often very far away. They are somewhat interchangeable but ambience is generally sounds that have very few specifics in them. A cricket bed or wind, or maybe rain. Backgrounds tend to be things with a lot of character. Street sounds with people talking, a busy cafe or bar.

These sounds are almost always recorded in stereo, almost never with a shotgun microphone and almost always by a sound person into an audio recorder.

The ENG versions are often grabbed on blank video, maybe with whatever mic is handy and are almost always done by the cameraman.
 
Noiz2 said:
Doc. folks and ENG use the terms, and one I really don't like "nat sound" to mean the sound of the place where they did the interview etc. It is recorded generally about the same time as the dialog and it is used almost like room tone.
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Interesting. I've worked in news, and I have worked in cable network TV (lifestyle programming), and for all the years I have heard - and used - the term "nat sound" I have never understood it to be analogous or even closely related to room tone. Nat sound is what comes in with b-roll, often (esp. in news) from the on-camera mic. On the cable shows I've worked over the years, I was always running my boom and often the Lectro units when the photog was shooting b-roll, and those shots called for sounds of the action and not for dialog. If there was chit-chat among the people on-cam at that point, I recorded it, but it was used in the mix under VO and sometimes brought forward between reads or between sound bites from interviews.

We'd always roll proper room tone at the end of an interview, by the way.

And my understanding of nat sound is that it is different from ambient sound beds. Whereas nat sound is the b-roll of sound, ambient beds are built/reconstructed in post and recorded separately from primary photography.
 
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Anyone compared the internal mic to a Rode Videomic Pro? Been meaning to do so myself, but haven't gotten around to it.
 
wgtwo said:
Anyone compared the internal mic to a Rode Videomic Pro? Been meaning to do so myself, but haven't gotten around to it.
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I haven't stumbled onto such a comparison yet. I've thought about the Rode VPro as an option, though. But then I'd probably be tempted to leave the handle/xlr unit off the body of the C100, but without the xlr inputs I wouldn't be able to plug in a wireless lav, which is an option I like to have for the stuff I work on.

I like the sound from my NTG-3 and would like to use it more, but I was never satisfied having it mounted on my FS100 mic holder. It didn't fit well and it got in the way. So I used the stock Sony mic. I'm wondering if maybe it'll miraculously work better with the C100.
 
I would bow to your greater knowledge RE: "Nat Sound". The times I have heard it used were in reference to sound from the location and yes B roll, which maybe I wasn't clear on including in my description.

And I was probably not specific enough on the "used like room tone". In narrative films, that have a real sound post, you could mute the dialog tracks and other than flapping lips and no dialog it would sound complete and filled. Room tone is used by the dialog editors to fill holes in the dialog track.
ENG and docs tend to use non sync sounds in the same way. They fill holes in the narrative and almost never, unless they do a real sound post, to create the "world" that the film takes place in. That is not the way ambiences and backgrounds are used in narrative films, it's much closer to how "room tone" is used. But I didn't mean to imply that they were the same thing just that from a post sound persons perspective they are used in a similar way.

I have done a far number of documentaries but very little ENG, and pretty much all of that as a production person not a post person.

My bigger point was that when a ENG person says that they use a camera and onboard mics for recording ambiences they are really talking about something very different from what a sound post person would be talking about. For what most ENG and Doc. filmmakers are going to use that "ambient track" for it's probably fine. For a post sound person it's somewhere between maybe useful to a total waste.

The only time (99%) I would use ambiences recorded that way are if they contained something very unique that I couldn't find a way to replace. The 1% is for the very rare case where someone who really understood what they were doing managed to get a spectacular recording.

Now if I were knocking out a news segment on insanely short deadlines on a daily basis I would probably be all over it.
 
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