Sound Monitoring on DSLR

I

iConquer

Active member
Hi,
Newbie question here.
We are in the process of shooting an "on the go" kinda show. with a lot of moving around, running, etc.. it's one host, and one camera person only. We plan on using a 5D II and a lavalier mic.
Can someone tell me how I can set this up so that the camera person can monitor the audio from the host so that they can cut and reshoot if the audio is muffled etc?
I also have a Zoom H4N if that helps with the set up.

Thanks
 
If you have a sound person running alongside the camera, just go second-system and don't worry about recording to camera. Use the lav and the H4n. You'll get a better recording, and the sound person will have complete control over levels, recording, and monitoring. It also means that sound is not tethered to the camera and has more freedom of movement.

You otherwise won't have a monitoring option without some workarounds and a little extra hardware. Unless you've put something like Magic Lantern onto your 5D, you're up against AGC. Magic Lantern can defeat the AGC and add manual audio level controls, but external monitoring still requires extra hardware. So again, if you have a dedicated sound person, keep the audio separate.

Just be sure to slate every time the camera/sound recording stops and starts, and to keep very detailed notes in the field, so that you can match them up in post.
 
c2v, 5d mkII has manual audio controls. but still no real way of monitoring whats getting recorded. even with juicedlink devices you only monitor what happens before it gets recorded. so yeah, you can hear if wireless gets dropouts or things like that but you really don't know what it sounds like unless you play it back on a computer or camera hooked to an HDMI monitor with speakers(you can kinda get ok results with playback on camera but its a tiny speaker).
 
As has been pointed out, there's no way to monitor what is actually getting into the camera as you shoot; the closest you can come is to monitor what is being sent to the camera by feeding it with a mixer that includes monitoring provisions. The new Sound Devices MixPre-D would be an example that looks especially interesting for DSLR shooters as it has an unbalanced stereo mic level output purpose built to match the levels and impedance your camera's external mic input expects.
 
WOW. I hadn't seen thew MixPre-D (I'm in the middle of a cross country move...) This looks GREAT. I'm a big MixPre fan but there are things that have always been problematic and it looks like they addressed pretty much all of them, actually some I didn't have on the list. Now if they only offered a trade in allowance... Hint.
 
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