Recommendation please for a light mic for location recording.

[rafael_macia]

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I want to go to Coney Island amusement park and capture sound alongside my clips.

The sound of the rides ... the roller coaster ... etc.

Anyone have any recommendations for a good light mic?

Is the onboard mic enough.

 

I have never done sound when shooting clips. Please let me know any settings which are good to use.

 

thank you in advance for any help

rafael

 

[scott kirkpatrick]

I haven't mastered sound to any significant degree, but I can recommend Curtis Judd's site, https://www.learnlightandsound.com/ as a reliable source.  The mikes on the camera will get crowd noise, ambient machinery noise, traffic noise, and your own breathing in some hard to control combination.  And to get clean sound with the SL (or most other mirrorless cameras) you need a pre-amp to boost a mike's output above the camera's noise floor.  I have two nice-sounding old AudioTechnica mikes, one omni and one cardiod, which worked well with a passive mixer (Beachtek) and an MD tape video camera ten years ago.  The passive mixer didn't give me a sufficiently strong signal for use with the quieter of the two mikes and my SL.  It did handle line input from a stage sound system, and did the task of taking shielded XLR  cable input from two sources, producing an unbalanced output to a 3.5mm male plug, which then goes into the SL's special audio input connector (have you bought that?).  The absolute best small mixer-preamp seems to be the Sound Devices Mix Pre-3, just announced.  It's cheaper than the previous champion Mix-Pre-D, and records as well as mixing (you just put a chip in the back).  Go back to sometime late last year and review Judd's surveys of mixers and another video of mikes to get some ideas.  There is a Rode hypercardioid mike with its own power and preamp built-in that may be the smallest solution of all.  

 

It seems like good sound alone will cost $500-1000 (or higher, of course).  And external recording of 10 bit video to a recording monitor with an audio preamp included starts at about $1000 in extra gear.  And it is definitely worth a trip to B&H (if you are close to NYC) to try out some of the different options and see which sounds you prefer.

 

scott