How Do You Prevent Audio Distortion When Taking A Video Recorder Into A Club?
Is there recorders out there designed for loud noise environments?
i realize once it records as a distorted audio format there is no hope saving it because it will never quite have that clarity, so any suggestions would be great. Thanks
Tags: Audio, Club, Distortion, Into, Prevent, Recorder, Taking, Video, When
November 19th, 2009 at 4:06 am
TiddiVisual is correct – but personally, I try not to use board mixes because the club engineers are too busy working… and EVERYTHING must be mic’d and mixed and sent as a discreet mix to your camcorder… which they may not want to do and may not have the cables to connect your camcorder. If everything is not mic’d then there may be something missing… for example, in a small club, the bass player and the guitar player and the drummer may make enough sound so they are not mic’d or run through a DI box to the board. That means they won’t come through the board very loud – but the vocalist will be mic’d and coming through the board and that is pretty much ALL you will hear coming into the camcorder…
The last time I used a board mix (a couple of months ago) was when I personally knew the club engineer, she was expecting me, I had all the right cables and I got to the club before the sound check – which was about 3 hours before the show – and she was recording the live show using a ProTools rig (which is what my camcorder was connected to – and THAT sounded AWESOME. EVERYTHING was mic’s or connected with a DI box to the board and into the ProTools set-up.
If the house mix is decent, then all you really need is a camcorder with manual audio control as the cheapest way to get the audio and video together. The next step up from that is to get a camcorder with an external mic connection and manual audio control – the built-in camcorder mics are not that great.
The least expensive camcorders – of which I am aware – with a mic jack and manual audio control are the Canon HV30 and the Sony HDR-HC9. You can check some of the Canon Flash memory camcorders on your own. I am not aware of any consumer camcorders with manual audio control but no mic jack – but there are a few with a mic jack, but no manual audio control. If you pick a camcorder, BEFORE you buy it, download its manual and make sure it has manual audio control – it will typically be a menu selection item to be in Auto or Manual audio mode. I do not recommend ANY hard drive based camcorders for loud environments because the vibration from the loud noise will park the hard drive heads and you won’t be able to record anything.
If you already have a camcorder (miniDV tape or flash memory), you can keep using it – and replace the audio with audio captured by a field recorder – like those from M-Audio, Zoom, Edirol and Sony – among others. Many of these (but not all) have built-in stereao mics. They can also add external mics if you want to go that route. They also have manual audio control. Just replace the audio captured to the video with the audio captured by the field recorder when you edit the video.
Be sure to pay attention to the audio levels – and don’t let them peak. That is when the audio saturates and sounds like mud. you can be around 3/4 and maybe a little more on the meter – this will allow for a little headroom for bursts of WAY loud…
November 19th, 2009 at 5:38 am
ask the club audio engrs. if they can
- spare a live audio connection from house to ur vcam or
- if they do audio recording, to spare a copy – then replace the orig audio from ur video file thru a video editing app