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MillimeterShoot Expertise: Camera Mics
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Barry Braverman
Sound advice for shooters.
For many of us shooters these days, we have met the sound recordist, and he is us.
I admit I'm a shooter, born and raised. It's what I do — like breathing.
So after almost three decades of crashing a viewfinder to my face, I think I've developed an intimate relationship with my craft — one built on the power of my images to tell visually compelling stories.
Ironically, the truth is that the impact of my images is largely dependent on sound. No matter how great my leading lady or the Mafioso capo from Staten Island might look, the lack of clean, intelligible audio will subvert the storytelling and drive the audience from the scene. Every shooter must be keenly aware: Audiences will tolerate bad picture, but never bad sound.
The Sennheiser MKE 400 offers very solid performance at an economical street price of around $200.
A sound priority
Many shooters expect good audio as something that just happens. When shopping for a camera, we investigate every little feature that could help produce better pictures, from resolution and imager characteristics to the most arcane gamma and matrix settings. Few of us actually listen to a camera's audio section — especially its preamps and gain dials, which can be objectionably noisy, particularly in lower-end camcorders. The popular Sony DSR-PD150 earned its reputation as an industry workhorse despite the notoriously loud preamps that impacted the quality of its audio.
Fortunately, the audio sections in the latest generation of camcorders have improved considerably, but there's also a bit of bad news for shooters to go with it: the recording of crisp, clean sound for news and documentaries is increasingly becoming our responsibility. A few years ago, I was hired to shoot several episodes for The History Channel series Sworn to Secrecy. Flying up to Spokane, Wash., to interview a half-dozen Air Force pilots engaged in prisoner-of-war training, I quickly realized there was no soundman assigned to the crew, and that I was, in fact, responsible for capturing the interview and all other audio.
When I mentioned there was no soundman to the freshly minted 22-year-old director, he looked at me quizzically then broke out laughing. “But I have a cameraman!” he says.
And so that's the way it is today, as distracting as it is: We shooters need to acquire the skills and gear of a sound recordist. And that includes a basic kit with several microphones.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
