Shotgun mic's for movies (on boom, on camera) and for recording plays...

sheeep

sheeep

Active member
Soooo. I need to get together a little audio setup.

The two main things the microphone(s) will be doing are recording audio for a movie/student news network, and recording audio in an auditorium.

For the movies my first instinct was to have an on camera shotgun and voila. After reading some stuff around here, off camera (on a boom) would probably be better, and give a few of my not-so-capable of acting friends something to do.

So, what about two mics? One shotgun on a boom, another left on camera. This will serve as a backup in case something wrong happens on either one. My only concern is that the on camera mic which would normally be picking up ambient background noises will be too focused. Simple solution would be to use the on camera mic and record ambient sound separately, just wondering if theres a better way. Or, would it be better to replace one of those mic's with another kind? An external multi-directional?

The news network will most likely be filmed with a shotgun mic, and any hosting/interviewing done with my sm58 handheld mic. Again the question of ambient sound comes in with the use of the handheld mic... Would it make more sense to have an multi-directional mic doing the ambient?

This post is already getting to be long, cluttered, and confusing, so I appreciate anyone reading this far.

The other thing I will be doing with the microphones is using them to record school plays. When I do this I am across the auditorium, all the way in the back, zooming in anywhere from 4x-10x. I cant give a distance estimate so hopefully that will help. What would be the best way to get the on stage audio? Two shotguns pointed at something like 45 deg. angles on each side of the stage? (I might've asked this before in an unrelated thread)

... Almost forgot. In terms of microphones I was trying to budget this and go for something along the lines of the Rode NTG-1

Thank you an enormous amount

-sheeep
 
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I'm just sorta confused. I honestly have never dabbled in anything in audio before. For all I know theres a way thats 10000x better for my purposes.
 
Don't forget that you need a boom, shockmount and wind protection.

Recording plays is tough (unless you get a house feed from all of the wireless mics. I have hung a cardioid over the stage (a little in front) and got something that didn't suck too bad, but it is all relative. There isn't a GOOD way
 
When you say plays, are these plays or musicals? Using a house feed will probably suck and god forbid they are using wireless mics. Wireless with few exceptions are AWFULL for theatre productions. They have become somewhat common in professional musicals and now every community theatre in the country thinks that if they have wireless they are "professional". There is two problems, one it's not easy to set up a wireless mic to work on the stage. It takes a light hand and placement is often tricky. Small theatres don't have people who know what they are doing in sound 90% of the time, bad mix. Second they also don't have the budget to get good stage wireless set ups. So they are using whatever FM wireless mic Radio Shack is selling today. The result is lousy quality badly mixed.
Rant off.

A stereo setup either in the house if you have to or just off the lip of the stage high (8-9 ft off the stage floor) and set to cross at center stage at about mouth level works pretty well. You want cardioid not shotguns, you need to cover the whole stage. If this is a proscenium stage and they are using house speakers for much of anything, ie wireless mics, then you have to move farther out to get the speakers in the field.
If it's not a fly house overhead mics can work but if the theatre has a fly loft overheads will pick up a huge echo from the fly loft. PXM's on the lip can work also but you need a lot to get coverage, and amateurs tend to step on them.

As someone else said there aren't any great choices.
 
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