The Sound Room

Alan H. Chang

Alan H. Chang

Veteran
12:10AM Tuesday Morning Pacific Time

Is the Sound Room site down or is internet down? I really need those mics in before this coming weekend. Is anyone experiencing the same problem as I am having?

Thanks! :)

Alan
 
Works fine for me. If you really need the Oktava by this weekend then I might be able to lend you mine. I'm in Berkeley right now.
 
hey,

I got through the website! :)
No wonder it didn't work, I keep on being redirected to the customer page.

Do you have the Hyper/Omni? or How long did they ship them to you?

Alan
 
Alan H. Chang said:
Do you have the Hyper/Omni? or How long did they ship them to you?

Alan
Click to expand...

They shipped mine the entire time... right until I got them!

I don't want to influence other replies but I RARELY find any use for an omni... dynamic ENG mics and lavs are the only omnis I own at this point. Even if you think you want to hear everything you will realize that you want some control once you put on the headphones. I'd forget the omni cap.
 
Hey Matt,

Thanks for dropping by. Reason why I mentioned Omni was because I was intending of recording the locations for their ambient tone. Then I thought to myself about getting a pair of mics to record them in a 180/180 polar. I'm still talking with the Director whether he wants his film to be produced in surround or not. Since my editor has only a few experience with post-editing (not a good thing), I am pushing to use a studio where they have a surround setup. I have another engineer with me who is going to be doing sound design/foley/adr is a sound editor for Digidesign. So he has network to a studio from a friend of his. I'm waiting for their replies right at this moment to see if working in surround is okay. So having multiple mics recording at fixed angles will certainly give me better results than a single mic. Yet, nobody has a big enough board to run all those channels nor a recorder to record all those individually. Within the past several weeks, we have been trying to find the right boom op because our experienced boom op is on another production. I can boom, but I'm disliking my height. haha!

Since I have my own "okay" kit, my director wants more people to help out in the sound crew. All of the shootings will have access to power. So I'm thinking of going for a big board to run all those channels. This short film is not dialogue heavy. It mostly consists of sound effects and music.

So I'm guessing the shipping would take about 3 to 4 business days to arrive.
 
Alan H. Chang said:
Reason why I mentioned Omni was because I was intending of recording the locations for their ambient tone.
Click to expand...

I'm a fan of ORTF, and even that uses two Cardioids (or even Hypercardioids), not Omnis. A stereo recording using two Omni mics defeats the purpose somewhat.
 
Shipping depends on your location... I think 3 or 4 days would be optomistic from east coast to west coast... if you really need this for this weekend I think you're going to have to upgrade the shipping or contact the other member.

I'm not going to say that somebody on here may not use and like an omni, but in many cases I'll use a cardioid in that same situation... there is usually an audible sweet spot for any location recording... and it will sound like full surround. I strongly doubt that ANYBODY can hear the difference between a cardioid or omni in an ambient situation... people don't know what they're not missing... and you don't realize how often it's as much about what you DON'T hear as it is about what you DO hear!

It is rare to truly want to hear everything... there is usually traffic, a stream, ac units, dogs barking, a room echo... I could go on and on... there is almost ALWAYS something that you don't want to control the audio... and if you have an omni and you want to capture the ambience of a particular place... and there's some sound that you don't like and can't control... you are screwed. Heck it could even be leaves blowing through the trees... or since you're on the coast let's say crashing surf... and you think "yeah I WANT to hear that" but then you get there and it's ALL you can hear and no matter where you point the mic it's STILL all you can here. If you have a cardioid you can point it away from the surf in various degrees and dial the crashing surf in and out of the ambience until it sounds like what you experience when you stand there and listen with your own ears.

If you could have an omni connected to a computer that laid out a volume slider for various sounds... so that you could dial different things out while still capturing the omni's sense of space... you wouldn't be all that far from a cardioid. Draw a circle with a dot at the center... that is the omni pickup... now take a big 1/3 slice out of that pie... what you have left is a cardioid and this will allow you to decide who or what doesn't get a slice of your location audio.
 
vidled said:
I'm a fan of ORTF, and even that uses two Cardioids (or even Hypercardioids), not Omnis. A stereo recording using two Omni mics defeats the purpose somewhat.
Click to expand...

True. First thought was having the omni. Then I thought to myself that having only an omni or two wouldn't give me the results I am looking for. ORTF would best be used in this situation, but all depending if the final format is surround or not. So getting 5 more mics, adding a bigger board since most shots are interier, getting a bigger recording interface coul yield a bigger result. It's just making things complicated.

I'm going to be using 2 shotguns, 2 pzm, either 2 or 5 cardiod for ambient recording, 2 wireless if I can get a hold of them. All brings down to at least 4 or 5 mics at once.
 
I assume you're using a 4 channel recorder? If you don't keep those mic electronically seperated the ENTIRE TIME then you're defeating the point anyway. How ever many discreet channels you want to have is how many you HAVE to have... man you're talking about a seriously complex setup for anything on even a significant budget. If you mix those mics down to two channels then there wasn't any point in setting all that up anyway.

I would guess that most DVXusers are accomplishing impressive surround effects in the NLE rather then on location.

A good buddy of mine makes me want to pull my hair out... he ALWAYS finds the hardest way to do something and he ALWAYS fails at it. Then I get this story about how frustrating do a wedding video is... he says he doesn't want to do it anymore... and all I can ask is why the heck doesn't he do this sh*t like the other 99% of the planet. (local STL guy)

If you want to impress your friend with your abilities by setting up location sound for 4 discreet channels and you can pull that off... you have the most controlled set I've ever heard of... I strongly doubt that approach is used much even in top level productions... it's too much to control... but please feel free to try this and prove me wrong.
 
I won't even try. We're not using a 4 channel mixer but a 3 channel sum down to 2 outs. That's why I was thinking of adding another board for extra bus and subgroups. Or have a board that has direct outs. I'm planning to use this board here at home plus on-location when things get bigger. I think i'm used to doing live sound reinforcement which makes me push a bit too much in this case. I usually handle about 20 to 30 channels of inputs at live events. This then gets sent elsewhere where the recording board is riding the final volume for post.

There will be lots of live interactions during many scenes, but no dialogue. Such as soldiers walking across desert sand during combat. This would include all the footsteps, breathing, guns and packs rattling, and clothes shuffling. What I'm thinking is to record the close-up sounds with a hyper/shotgun and have several other mics recording the ambient noise of the character's actions. It'll give a very wide stereo image of the scenes. There will also be scenes where the husband and wife makiing love. I guess we can do all the foley work later, but there are so much sound effects involved. It's all shot on the HVX200s which makes me worry about timecode syncing. From all the equipments combined within the sound crew, we have no equipments that will timecode sync with those cameras.
 
Alan H. Chang said:
There will be lots of live interactions during many scenes, but no dialogue. Such as soldiers walking across desert sand during combat. This would include all the footsteps, breathing, guns and packs rattling, and clothes shuffling. What I'm thinking is to record the close-up sounds with a hyper/shotgun and have several other mics recording the ambient noise of the character's actions. It'll give a very wide stereo image of the scenes. There will also be scenes where the husband and wife makiing love. I guess we can do all the foley work later, but there are so much sound effects involved. It's all shot on the HVX200s which makes me worry about timecode syncing. From all the equipments combined within the sound crew, we have no equipments that will timecode sync with those cameras.
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It's cool that you are trying to record as much production FX as possible, but keep in mind, if it's not good, it's going to get replaced in post with foley.

That being said. I love it when I get good productin FX. It makes my live so much easier. Good production FX sound natural, because they are the real thing, and it's always something weird that isn't in a library. For instance, the horror short I did a while back had a scene where a girl was trying to use her keys to get into her apartment, but the door wasn't opening. She was rattling the keys as well as kind of banging on the door. Whereas that doesn't sound like a big deal to foley, it was nice that the production guys to the time took make sure the got the sound of all that to save me the hassle. Of course, there was another scene that they shot completely MOS...those bastards.

-Dave
 
Dave,

I am planning so much for the production especially with sound design. I'm the director/manager for my crew so I have to keep everybody constant. I've pre-planned several things with the director and cinematographer already. I'm going to be on set, off set helping the editors, and after shooting re-recording any additional foley/ADR/sound effects. So I'm guiding the crew all the way to it's final master. Oh yeah, it's going to be 5.1 for sure. After all the shootings are done, the four of us (crew) will be working together extensively with sound design and foley. I do want to take the opportunity to get the right sound during the first time so it will be much easier in post and it'll sound more natural.
 
It's kinda odd but when I ordered from sound room there was only one shipping option (3-5) days. I'm guessing you might be able to upgrade that if you ask but if you like to borrow mine then I have the hyper cap.
 
vidled said:
A stereo recording using two Omni mics defeats the purpose somewhat.
Click to expand...


Oh! Oh! Oh! C'mon guys!

For lots of things, spaced omni stereo works out much better than coincident/near coincident techniques. And the Oktava omni caps actually sound better than the others. These are often my first choice for stereo recording; for other techniques, I don't use the Oktavas unless I'm forced to...

Again, this isn't typical production work, and you're right that for that, you often want more directivity. But don't rule out the omnis, and DEFINITELY don't call 'em crap! For stereo recordings of music, or in any fairly controlled environment, they're the BEST of the Oktava caps.
 
Talking about Omnis; anyone have experience with the T.H.E. Audio CR-6 (or CR-5 in Cardioid)? These are now unibody construction. Matt you have the modular version, yes?
 
I've got a matched trio of T.H.E. KR-1Fs.. I can tell you about these, but they're not the same as the unibodies... there was a cover article recently in Recording magazine on the new ones...

Anyway, as you might guess, I bought these primarily for use in a Decca tree. At first I bought the KR-1Ds, as I wanted to try 'em, and my typical application was on the edge of what I'd call the diffuse field. However, the 1Ds proved to have way too much high-frequency emphasis, and a special talent for amplifying annoying incidental noises. Sniffles, floor creaks, page turns, breathing, you name it... if it WASN'T what you wanted to record, these mics really got it!

So, I traded them in for the 1Fs (as you all probably already know, Sound Room service is excellent!). These have some similar characteristics, but much less pronounced. As a result, they are suitable for a range of situations much narrower than that of, say, the Oktava omnis - but when they do work out, they are magnificently detailed and precise, and produce a beautiful image.

So: I wouldn't recommend them as someone's only omnis. I certainly wouldn't carry them alone into an unfamiliar recording situation. I don't know that I'd recommend them to a beginner - they're not easy to work with. But If you are looking to up your game when possible, and are able to determine when they're NOT working, they can really provide some occasional magic...

Most of the articles I've read and people I've spoken to have heaped praise upon the cardioids, and not tried or spoken much about the omnis. (So few of us omni-lovers in the world?)... so I imagine the cards may be a little less finicky and flattering to more applications.

Has anyone tried the "Wide Cardioid" capsule? I was thinking of giving those a shot...
 
P.S., the Recording Mag review is here: http://www.theaudio.com/downloads/recmag_1006.pdf

In the section on guitars, they seem to be reporting some of the same difficulties I've described for the KR-1 mics... so, you're best bet, as always, is to try some out in something like your typical situations and see what you think!
 
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