i was in a way waiting for an audio section to be made at sumea, but its kinda funny how quickly and quietly it happened :P so in light of souri opening up a new section i thought id start it off with something i might need to know pretty soon.
When recording sound on the move (by that i mean like outside a studio) predominantly for effects what kind of equipment/rig do people suggest? ive heard that MDs are actually really good quality but ive also heard some people just use a DV cam and cut out the audio from it which works good enough, and i allready own a DV cam. thoughts?
I have no argument with that pb [:)] For recording most game sounds (i.e. not at marshall stack volume) a high quality capacitance mic is the best choice- they capture every last tiny detail. They are expensive [:(] Dynamic mics are much cheaper, and can handle high volume. They don't catch the same amount of detail though.
Also pick the right type of directionality mic, they come in omni, cardioid, and super/hyper cardioid. An omni directional mic picks up sound in every direction (perfect for environment recording), the different cardioid types just get more and more directional i.e. a hyper cardioid mic basically picks up things it is pointing directly at (ideal for recoding speech or an individual instrument).
Then there are techniques for stereo mics, which this thread isn't the right place to discuss.
RECORDING DEVICE
I'd go for something like a iRiver H120 or H140. 20 or 40 gig HD audio jukebox similar to iPods. However these wee beasties can record UNCOMPRESSED WAV at 44.1kHz stereo as well as MP3 VBR! They act as an external USB2.0 hard drive to boot! They'll set you back a good $600 AUS for one here.
If you must use a DV Cam, make sure you can use a cable mic. DON'T use the internal crud on the camera. All you'll get is motor whine through all your recordings. Also make sure the sample rate is set to 44.1 or 48kHz rather than the default 32kHZ that is preset on most cameras.
MD is useful for a cheap recording tool. Don't use any LONGPLAY feature. Always use short play. Minidiscs do compress the sound, so doing too much pitch shifting or audio compression on the sounds will bring out the worst of the compression. Also make sure you have a nice longish cable so you don't pick up the tic tic tick of the disk writing!
MICROPHONES
For Microphones it depends what you are recording.
1) For Ambiences, stereo matched pair condenser mics is what you'll need. Or a single condenser stereo mic.
2) For SFX recording, you can't go past a good condenser. Something like a Rode NT3 or AKG C1000s are both affordable and both have 9V internal battery options so you don't need any power source.
3) Shotgun mic.. something like a Rode NTG1 is affordable. This will help spot your target sound better and cut out side noise.
Really I'd go with choice 2 above to start with. If you do any vocal recordings with a microphone, invest in a mic stand and a pop shield.
Hope that helps.
People interested in portable recorders should have a look at http://www.core-sound.com/ they do high sample-rate/bit-depth cards for PDAs running windows and linux.
and these binaural mics would imho be wonderfull for abience recording http://www.core-sound.com/lcmics.html though of course the high-end binaurals would be better http://www.core-sound.com/mics.html .
Binaural recording is a technique of 3-dimensional recording on 2 channels with 2 mics. It sounds best when listened through headphones, but is perfectly fine over speakers too. The 3d sound in games comes from faking this sort of recording (the faking is called an HRTF- head related transfer function).
quote:Originally posted by groovyone
RECORDING DEVICE
I'd go for something like a iRiver H120 or H140. 20 or 40 gig HD audio jukebox similar to iPods. However these wee beasties can record UNCOMPRESSED WAV at 44.1kHz stereo as well as MP3 VBR! They act as an external USB2.0 hard drive to boot! They'll set you back a good $600 AUS for one here.
Hmmm.. do you know anything about the H340? I bought one - fantastic player, and a colleague is getting one to do audio recording for this exact purpose. ~$550, and can play OGG Vorbis and even movies too ;) http://shop.centre.net.au/index.html?cat=0008F60008F70008FD&it=product&…
MD is non-professional, it uses lossy compression (like jpeg compression except for sound, mp3, ogg and plenty of others are lossy).
That said, if you aren't planning to do much to the sounds after recording them MD is likely to be fine.
Pro people use portable DAT, which has no compression at all.
I don't know much about DVCam, except that video-wise it is not a pro format, I suspect it uses lossy compression for audio too.