Posts
Last night I gave a talk on Microphones, Recording and Mixing pertaining mostly to video to the DV/FX group in Fairfax. I made a PowerPoint presentation that you can find here. It focuses more on recording sound for music. I also made a couple of handouts of random thoughts. For your technical enjoyment they are below.
Erich's Random Thoughts on Mics and Video
- Use a small diaphragm (1/2 inch or smaller) mic on video cameras.
- Omni to pick up the entire room, directional to isolate sound source, shotgun or hyper cardioid to mic from a distance and isolate the sound source.
- Condenser mics usually require power.
- Lavaliere mics work well on the chest.
- UHS is preferable to VHS wireless receivers. Either is better than FM.
- You can use a small mixing board to record to sound sources into the camera or you can record the sources to the L and R tracks and set levels in FCP.
- Always listen with headphones as you record. A computer in the room that you can't hear could be all that the camera picks up.
- When recording to analog media (cassette tape) try and record it loud as you can. This eliminates hiss. Over saturating an analog tape sounds like distortion.
- When recording to digital (DV tape) leave some headroom. Over saturating a digital recording is a horrible sound.
- XLR connectors are better sound quality that mini jacks.
Some words about mix down.
- You can make someone sound louder without raising the volume by using a compressor. TV commercials use this technique.
- Reverb/delay adds depth. Reverb/delay sounds different in headphones. After listening to reverb/delay for a few minutes you may want to add more. Don't.
- When you eq, it's better to remove a bad frequency than to try and boost a good one. Try this approach when trying to make to voices balance.
- It's a good idea to record backup audio from a different source.
Know how many tracks you can record on and make a plan before the shoot.
EQ
- Before you change the EQ decide what you want to improve.
- Raising one vocal subject at 3 kHz can add clarity to that vocal to help it move to the front. You can lower the background vocals at that range to make them fall back. You can boost or raise eq or both but be selective.
- Presence to vocal is at 4-5 kHz
- Vocal sounds such as 'm', 'b', 'v' can get lost if 2-4 kHz are boosted too high.
- Don't over boost at 1-4 kHz It can strain the ear.
- Control sibilance at the 5-16 kHz range.
- Sibilance and brightness may be found at the 6 kHz range. Open up the sound or reduce sibilance.
- Add power to a vocal around 80 but start looking at 60-125. Too much of this area can also make things sound muddy.
- Speech fundamentals occur between about 125 and 250 Hz. This is where you can add warmth. If you are looking for a powerful vocal don't add much here and boost around 80.
- The character of the voice is 300-1 kHz
- To make a telephone or radio speaker voice boost in the 1 kHz area.
- Vocals to harsh? Cut at 1 - 2 kHz
- Roll off vocals below 60 Hz. Anything below that are probably not vocals.
