Testing our equipment

Knowing that we were getting very close to confirming a location for the filming of ‘April’, we thought it would be a good idea to loan out recording equipment from the University stores. After three years of studying Audio Production, I have become accustomed to using the majority of equipment they have to offer, however we still deemed it necessary to have a trial run to ensure we can use it both quickly and efficiently. The equipment we loaned out is as follows:
Marantz Solid State portable recorder – This is a stereo, 2 channel recorder with the ability to record in 24 bit depth and a 48khz sample rate, which is suited to our needs as these are the setting we will be using in Pro-Tools when it comes to mixing down. The Marantz is also powered by 4x AA batteries to use when on location; the battery life isn’t great, but will suffice as long as it is checked regularly.

Rode NTG-2 Shotgun Condenser Microphone – This microphone is designed or use mainly in film and television scenarios, as its highly directional polaroid pattern allow it to record dialogue without much less background noise from unwanted sources than an average condenser microphone.

Boom pole and XLR cables – We had a selection of boom poles to choose from, some newer than others, so we chose those that felt the most sturdy. The XLR cables are all very similar, but we ensured they were long enough, and that the connection pins were fully intact and solidly in place.

Beyerdynamic DT770m Headphones – These are my own headphones, originally bought because of their huge ambient noise attenuation (35 dBA). Although designed mainly for drummers and FOH monitoring, they also seem perfectly suited for location sound as even when turned up loud, they have very little spill, allowing monitoring to be loud without intruding on the recording.

Testing the equipment
We tested the equipment Andy’s house by recording his housemates, both male and female, reading off of a page from a magazine; I already knew that the voices from different sexes would have a profound effect on the levels and tone of the recording, and so this was a good way to start our tests.
When recording indoors, we noticed how easily the signal was effected by the distance the microphone was positioned above the head, especially when in a small room. We started by holding the boom about 3 feet above the persons head and about a foot in front of where they were facing. This caused a two main problems:
• The amount of reverb present was a lot more than expected. It had previously been apparent that smaller rooms will give short reverb times when recording, however I had never used a shotgun microphone in such a small room, and this seemed to exaggerate the reverb tail.
• The sound of the room was ‘boxy’ – Even when directing the microphone at the point in which the person’s dialogue was exerted, the signal still seemed to contain more of the room sound than that of the person speaking. I had expected the room to be more apparent with the microphone so far away, however the amount of tone from the room was much more than expected.

After realising the effects that the distance of the microphone from the source had on the signal, we experimented by slowly lowering the microphone until the signal sounded clear. We found that the microphone had to be roughly a foot above the persons head before it sounded clear and natural, which was surprisingly close considering how small and quiet the room was. This issue was very similar when recording the same speech outdoors, except the room noise was replaced with natural outdoor ambience.
Another issue we noticed when recording with the boom poles was the effect movement had on the signal. Any slight knocking of the pole or microphone had a massive effect on the level, causing the Marantz to clip quite often. We also noticed that the microphone clip on the end of the pole had to be secured very tightly in order to reduce any unwanted noise through the boom pole; slight knocking causes the recorder to pick up on the lower frequencies and this becomes very apparent in the recording.
Atmosphere recording
We used the same equipment to record some outdoor atmospheres, except replacing the shotgun microphone for an omnidirectional AKG C3000. When recording these atmosphere’s, we noticed that the gain must be on a reasonably low level to account for any sudden noises. We recorded a few atmospheres, one being a building site, to test the levels. The amount of headroom needed at first seemed too much, however when some noise from building site equipment effected the levels, we quickly realised that the headroom was needed.