Boom Mic

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If you want to go ultra cheap for the boom, get a telescoping paint roller stick. Take a microphone clip normally used on a microphone stand and secure it to the stick. Use cloth gloves to reduce hand noise. And now for the more professional advise.
The ME80 series one of the finest microphones ever built. True the AA battery for a 66 is more readily available, but the 80 gives a richer or warmer sound and I too get my replacement batteries from Radio Shack. In docs, I use the 80 with a Sennheiser blimp. If shooting outdoors you may want to get a fur wind screen (good discussion in the B-roll archives). Take your boom into a portable mixer such as a Sure FP series mentioned above. I rarely use a hard wired connection to the camera. Get yourself a decent wireless kit. This will give you and your brother freedom to move around and not worry about the microphone cable. Be sure to set tone levels between the mixer and camera. On boom handling, low booming is less fatiguing than high or overhead booming, so when ever possible low boom.
 
If you are very short on a budget, there is always the Azden shotguns. I think they have two versions. One uses a mini phone plug and is actually made for home video. The other has XLR and is about $200. It uses a single AA battery and a friend of mine has one. It sounds pretty good! I like the ME80 better.

As for the dummy battery, I thought so! The only thing I could find at B&H was a complete power supply that cost another $250! Anyone know where I can find the dummy battery? I have emailed Sennheiser THREE times with no reply...
 
thanks for all the input. How vital is a mixer? Wouldn't the sound being monitored in the camera be more important since this is the sound going to tape? What mixers would you reccomend and how much do they go for? And finally, While I would love wireless this would add a lot to the budget. How difficult is the xlr dance that my brother and I would have to perfect, and how long a cable would you suggest?
 
i'd use an 8-10 footer, but i'd make sure i was careful that it had some slack so and XLR jack doesn't get ripped out of the camera. maybe use a caribiner to hook it to your belt loop before it goes to the cam with a coiled cable? i dunno - thinkin' out loud here....

maybe something like this for your brother? no meters, but....

http://www.audioimplements.com/100%20page.htm#m3

and someone makes an xlr 'pass-thru' adapter. a male XLR on one end - a female XLR on the other (so it just fits in-line) and then has a jack for a mini-plug in the middle - where you could plug in a set of phones to monitor. don't know what kind of gain you'd get out of it.....(I can't find it on the internet right now...thought it was GKC as well, but don't see it there)
 
or - on that same GKC page - the 401 or the 403. again...no meters, but at least he can hear it as long as you're watching the meters on the cam....
 
Look into the Sanken CS1 short shotgun. Its a great little mic for around $600-700. Look for an article by Glenn Trew about this mic.
 
Originally posted by Terry E. Toller:
As for the dummy battery, I thought so! The only thing I could find at B&H was a complete power supply that cost another $250! Anyone know where I can find the dummy battery? I have emailed Sennheiser THREE times with no reply...
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Terry, have you tried running your ME-80's on phantom power WITHOUT the battery? Mine runs fine without a dummy battery.
 
Originally posted by phillypulse:
quote: Originally posted by Terry E. Toller:
As for the dummy battery, I thought so! The only thing I could find at B&H was a complete power supply that cost another $250! Anyone know where I can find the dummy battery? I have emailed Sennheiser THREE times with no reply...
Click to expand...
Terry, have you tried running your ME-80's on phantom power WITHOUT the battery? Mine runs fine without a dummy battery.
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Some did, some didn't. Some of the early K3 series power supplies needed a jumper to complete the circuit. The later ones didn't. Mine works just fine without it, but an old beat-up one that I once used didn't.

For the ones that still need the dummy, I believe there is actually a modification you can make that will make it unnecessary. An engineer at one of my stations once described having to open up all their ME80s and solder something together to allow them to run off phantom. I think Sennheiser will perform this same minor surgery if you don't have an engineer who knows about this (except Terry, because Sennheiser ignores him).
 
videahead, you have a lot to learn about audio basics. A good mixer will take mic level into a clean pre amp and send it out line level to the recorder.. or camera with a very low noise floor.

I think this string is deprived of practical significanse.
 
Originally posted by circle7:
videahead, you have a lot to learn about audio basics. A good mixer will take mic level into a clean pre amp and send it out line level to the recorder.. or camera with a very low noise floor.
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I don't think that was the intent of his question. I suspect he was asking whether he should be monitoring the camera rather than the mixer, since the mixer could conceivably be putting out a good signal that isn't being recorded in the camera. He's worried that if there's something wrong with the camera, or if it isn't set up right, he'll be smiling all day at the great sound he hears from his mixer, only to find the audio tracks overmodulated on the tape, or perhaps not there at all.

You can avoid that problem to some degree by setting up your tracks and level in the camera with tone from the mixer at the beginning of the day. If your mixer and camera are set to the same levels, you can be somewhat confident that the levels you see on the mixer's meter will match the meter on the camera. If you've set up and verified the channel inputs on the camera with tone, you can be fairly confident that the sound is going where it's supposed to go. Then, as was mentioned earlier, you also have your camera operator monitoring the camera sound as a last line of defense.

If you don't trust your camera op, you can always plug in and spot check every now and then to make sure. Or you can spend the money on a wireless headphone set, but that's probably overkill. There is also a foldback box and cable set that a lot of film sound mixers use to allow their boom operators to monitor the recorder, but that, too is probably overkill.

When we used Nagras to record film sound, we were always taught to monitor the playback signal off the heads instead of the signal coming from the mixer, in order to verify the actual sound on the tape. Videohead was thinking the same way, which probably isn't a bad thing.
 
Whodathunkit??? Thank you! I had absolutely no idea that this mic would work on phantom power without an adaptor!!! THANK YOU! My ME80 that dates back to the early 70s does not work without a battery but the one that is about 8 years old works.

You guys rock! I love this business. I have been shooting for 33 years this month and every day I learn something new. Thanks again. Now, I am so happy, I want to go out and shoot something...

[ September 16, 2004, 08:10 AM: Message edited by: Terry E. Toller ]
 
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