MiniDV Sound

[IUPhilmMaker]

I'm getting ready to shoot my first movie that I wrote on MiniDV and the sound is less than fantastic, I mean I know it's not going to look ideal but the sound is kind of a necessity and I was wondering what kind of affordable alternatives would be available or what are some cost effective ways to improve sound when shooting on MiniDV.

Patrick Donohue

 

[MarkG]

Well, the actual MiniDV sound recording quality is pretty good: it's 48kHz 16-bit digital or 32kHz 12-bit digital depending on your camera and settings. The main thing you need to do is get a good external mike, since the on-camera mikes are usually pretty dire and you want to get it as close to the actors as possible.

If you really want to record seperately, MiniDisk is one cheap option that's not bad: it does use compression so there's a small quality loss there, but you'll be lucky if you're working in locations quiet enough for any such loss to be at all noticeable over background noise. There are also some fairly cheap DATs around (e.g. my DAT Walkman cost about $500 when I bought it a couple of years ago).