[spookymulder]

Hi,





we have a number of sony minidv camcorders including a PC9E, PC120 and PC8 and e have been using them to make some basic student films with. the basic built in mic is not much use so we bought a pro Boom microphone with carbon pole and windshield to plug into the microphone port.





this is when our troubles started. the mic works fine on its own when tested on other equipment. however, I plug the mic into the mic port and plug some headphones into the camera's headphone socket to check the sound levels. I can hear the sound fine thru the headphones.





but when we later plug the camera into a monitor or mac to see what we've recorded there is usually no sound!!





sometimes we get just a hiss. sometimes we actually get some sound although not very good quality and sometimes we get nothing at all - this happens with all our Sony cameras.





Yesterday the most bizarre thing of all happened. we recorded about 30mins of video using the mic and checking the sound using headphones (all seemed well). yet when we rewound the tape and plugged it into a mac we found the following result:





the first 20mins of video just has hiss. then suddenly the sound that should have been on the start of the tape begins!! how is this possible? its as if the soundtrack got shifted 20 minutes further along the tape than the video.





this is killing our students' enthusiasm for their work and all we want to do is to get some reasonable quality sound into our video work.





does anyone know how to get this mic to work properly with our sony camcorders?





I am a novice so perhaps someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong?





thanx

[tr]

first off, why do you have so much space between your sentences? it makes your post a page long!

i don't know about the time shifted audio, that's just weird.

have you tried the mic in other devices, dat recorders, a vcr maybe, an external mixer, some other audio recording device? is the mic powered? does it need phantom power? what kind of connector is at the end of it, 1/8" stereo or mono?

give some more details on the mic, and maybe that can shed some light on the subject.

tr

[konakazi]

I've had some very frustrating experiences with sound on playback as well.

Playback through the camera was fine, but when the tape was played on other equipment I had sound dropouts intermittenly.

I found that it was solved by changed the audio record mode from 12bit to 16bit.

12bit leaves a channel open for additional audio to be recorded but makes it unstable when played back on other equipment.

16bit should be used for any professional recording.

[spookymulder]

Originally posted by tr:
first off, why do you have so much space between your sentences? it makes your post a page long!

i don't know about the time shifted audio, that's just weird.

have you tried the mic in other devices, dat recorders, a vcr maybe, an external mixer, some other audio recording device? is the mic powered? does it need phantom power? what kind of connector is at the end of it, 1/8" stereo or mono?

give some more details on the mic, and maybe that can shed some light on the subject.

tr

hi tr,

I've tried the mic with other gear ( a mixing desk, editing suite and it checks out fine! The mic is a beyerdynamic MC86 shotgun mic and it is currently battery powered. other than that I don't know a whole lot about it - our purchasing department gets all the orders first then they take the docs out and we only ever receive the item itself.


I've checked (as mentioned by konankazi) and we definitely stick with 16 bit for everything!


apologies for the spaces! I have no idea how that came about!

does this shed any light?