 Welcome to the Crimson Engine, my name is Rebedium. Today we are talking about sound. Now, sound is often described as the Achilles' heel of the independent filmmaker, and that was definitely true on the last short film that I made, Neon Noir. I had a couple of very cheap, older, wireless labs and a Sennheiser mic that I got years ago, and very quickly the lab stopped working, we didn't have a boom pole, we ended up doing all the sound on the film with the Sennheiser tape to a light stand with gaffer tape, and it was just sort of a nightmare. After that experience, I made the decision to educate myself more about sound, and that's what I want to pass on today. I also built up a bit of a kit of sound gear. It's not the, you know, professional level stuff that you'll see on a Hollywood movie set, but I didn't really want to pay for that since I'm not a sound person, and a lot of the time when I'm shooting commercials, I'm hiring a sound person who brings their own stuff. This was going to be things that I could shoot for my own independent and personal projects so that if I could bring someone along or even pay someone a little bit of money for the day, I could sit them down, give them a quick class about how to use the stuff and get professional sounding audio with not that much trouble. There are two main ways on set that we record dialogue. The first is a shotgun microphone. The second are lavalier microphones. Now the shotgun is usually operated by the sand mixer on the end of a boom pole. He or she keeps it as close to the mouth of the speaker as possible without getting into frame, and often the sand mixer or the boom operator on set will coordinate with the camera operator to find out where his frame is, meaning how tight is he, what lens is he on, how close can he get the microphone into the top of the frame without being seen. Like I said, I do have a Sennheiser mic that I use for a lot of my jobs, but it's older. It's kind of fraying a little bit. I think I've taken it out of the studio more, so I went around looking for a microphone that I could basically take into the field that I would get good sound quality from that had a modern wiring that was reliable, but wasn't too expensive. I found this one. It comes in two varieties, a long and a short. The long has a battery in it, so it doesn't need phantom power. This is the short, which gets phantom power through an XLR cable from your camera or your recorder. For something that's less than $200, it has absolutely brilliant sound. It's really resilient. It's really small and transportable. Basically works really well for what it is. The sound coming out of it matches really well with my $650 plus Sennheiser, and so now if I need two shotgun mics on set, I can use both of these without feeling like they're not going to match. So there are two ways to record audio on set. One is to go straight into the camera with an XLR or with a wireless transmitter. The second way is to record into a portable recorder like this Zune H4n Pro. This gives off phantom power, so it will power the mic. And if you have the mic on the end of a boom, you can adjust the levels as you go with this. So the mic can be at the end of the boom, and this can be next to the sound recorder, so you can see how loud or quiet the people are talking. And if your dialogue is in that sweet spot between minus 12 and minus 6 decibels, which is where you sort of want to be recording your voices. So there are two ways to record audio on set. One is into a mixer, one is to go straight into the camera. I actually like to do both, which means that if any one of those two things fails, you have the second one as a backup. So I like to do my wireless labs right into the camera, and I like to do my shotgun on a boom held by the sound mixer into an independent recorder. And I use Premiere to sync them up afterwards through the waveforms. So I don't mess around with timecode. If I'm doing a single camera shoot, pretty easy to keep them in sync. Speaking of boom poles, this is the Aure CFP512R. It is a carbon fiber boom pole that has the XLR at one end and an XLR output at the other end, and has the cable threaded through the pole itself. It's really light. It extends really far. It is much easier than using a light stand gaffer taped with the legs together. And generally is going to add to your professionalism on set and add to your ability to get the mic where you want it to get. Because it's carbon fiber is much, much easier to hold. There is a thing when recording audio called the proximity effect. If you get the mic too close to the person's mouth, you end up getting that radio announcer voice, that very deep rumble. If you keep it sort of at arm's reach, you still manage to preserve those that crisp high end, especially the female voices. And it sounds a lot more natural rather than the bass boosted Larry King's proximity effect. So that is the shotgun. What about the lavalier? If you've noticed that the audio has changed, it's because I've changed over to this wireless lavalier setup. It is also made by Senol. This is the AWS 2000 transmitter pack combined with the UTM86 lavalier microphone. And as you can hear, it is a really nice audio as well. It's different. You're just going to get a different sound from a lav than you're going to get with a shotgun. That's why it's great to do both not just for fault tolerance and for safety. Some voices and some locations sound better on a shotgun. Some voices and some locations sound better on a lavalier. When you have both, you're able to choose between the two of them and decide which one you like better for which scene and which voice. The other time you really need to use a lavalier is when you're in a really wide shot and you can't hide or get the mic close enough to the actors. Lavaliers also give a lot more freedom to move around, though you do have to hide them in the person's wardrobe. So if you've got actors who aren't wearing any clothes, that can be really hard. The mic comes with a variety of mounting options and clips, including this really brilliant one, which is a magnet. So you don't have to bunch up the person who's talking shirt. You just put the piece of metal on one side and the mic on the other and it sticks there. If you're shooting to camera, it's always good to get a third and an environmental sound for your audio. This can be sound that you can use for your Foley track. It can be used for the soundtrack of the film or it can generally just be a reference. If things get really crazy and both the shotgun and your lavaliers either peek out or something goes wrong, that means you have a third good quality audio track that you can use in the mix and maybe save the audio from the performance. This is an on-camera video mic. It's the Senel SCS98. It comes with a shock mount that goes into a cold shoe, runs on batteries. You can boost the levels or reduce the levels. You can turn it on and off and you can do a low cut as well to take out any hum. I tend to use this on set on my behind-the-scenes camera where I don't want to use a separate shotgun mic, but at the same time I don't want to go with the mic that's internal to the camera, which is almost always unusable. This can get me audio of people on set. That's not necessarily studio quality, but definitely good enough to use on a behind-the-scenes YouTube. That is my new audio setup, three new mics and a new transmitter and a new boom pole that I'm able to hopefully take my audio recording to the next level. In the next video of this series we're going to look at post-production audio and the things that I've learned in using the audio once it's been shot to add them and get them the best quality possible for your short film if you're not a professional audio person. If you're just a writer-director producer like me but you don't have the budget or the availability of a specialist sound mixer, you can actually go 90% of the way there if you just learn a few quick things and have a few quick tools to get your movies and your productions sounding awesome. Check the description for links and prices of all this gear. Also check the link for the second part of this mixing audio in post. Thanks very much for watching guys, I will see you next time.