The Indie Corner

Lately, I have had the good fortune to be a part of a few independent productions. They have mainly been student projects. Due to my impeccable good will for mankind (and the nausea bad sound creates within me) I feel it is important to try to convey some granule of knowledge about sound to these future directors.

It seems there are many horror stories of directors who just don’t care about sound. This always seemed odd to me considering that the film is a work of art as a whole, not just visually. (Sorry if I offend any auteurs out there.) If the costume designer just threw some T-shirts on everyone with their names scrawled in black across the front, the director would not be happy. However, some folks apparently have this view of sound, that "close enough" is good enough.

It has been encouraging to work with new members of the filmmaking community who challenge this image. They all seem to have a certain amount of respect for the audio. When I’ve asked what they might need for the project, their reply is unanimous, "I want good sound". Now, they may not always know what that will entail, but most have been willing to leave it to my judgment, a luxury many mixers don’t have.

For this article, I thought I would go over some of the things I’ve learned from some of indie films and student projects that I have worked on. Very few of these films have actually been shot on film. Most documentaries and indie films seem to be moving to videotape. Most of these cameras are either consumer grade devices or "pro-sumer". (Pro-sumer meaning, it has some cool features to sell for more money, but not enough to ultimately serve their intended purpose). This situation raises unique challenges to the sound guy or gal. I thought it might be helpful to discuss some of the twists and turns I’ve run into. So, pull your chairs a little bit closer, gather round. I have a story to tell…

The Novice Gets Advice

Being the swell man-about-town that I am, I get calls from folks pleading for my assistance. Well, okay, usually they want me to work for free and only need me one day, but who has to know that? While high-budget films are the most visible, there are scads of documentary and student films being created out of sheer love. As in life, the old cliché about love being free is true for filmmaking. You can work your butt off and still not ever see penny one. You have to respect the tenacity of these folks, who are usually attending college and trying to shoot an entire movie in a weekend. But, more on that later. Getting back to these phone calls I get, our first conversation is pretty much the same for many of them. It goes something like this:

"Hello, is this that exquisite sound man, Matt Hamilton?"

"Why, uh, yes it is, " I say, blushing in mock modesty.

"Well, I am making this student/independent film and was given your name by (choose one of the following) Festus P. Winklewrench, my teacher/a sound guy I know/a PA from another shoot/my uncle, and I wanted to ask your advice about sound."

"Ah, well free advice . . . people tell me I usually have plenty of that to give away, sure, what’s your question?"

"How do I do it?

 "Uh . . . do what?"

"Record sound."

I pause, thinking maybe I can ensnare them with my wit. I try a different tactic. "Ah, well, which part of recording sound do you need to know about, microphones, boompoles . . ."

"All of it."

"Uh . . . well, there’s a lot of possibilities." At this point, it is important to not turn on the macho sound guy attitude. Instead, I try to visualize a blue sky with me flying in it.

"Okay," I say, now that I know what I’m dealing with, "I’d say at the very least you’ll need a boom mic, a boom pole, and a DAT recorder of some kind."

"Well, I know we won’t need a DAT machine."

I feel the dagger going into my skull and start looking for the Ibuprofen. "Just out of curiosity, if you don’t know anything about sound, how do you know you won’t need a DAT machine? I thought you were asking me for advice on sound."

"I am, but I know we definitely don’t need a DAT machine."

"Okay, could you maybe just humor me, and tell me how you’ll be recording sound?"

"Because we’re recording straight to the camcorder’s audio tracks."

This is where I see myself placing a rather large, conical dunce cap on my head. "Ah! Okay. I see. Why didn’t you say so? Now we’re getting somewhere. So, what type of cables will you need?"

"Well, I don’t know, you’re the sound guy."

"No, I’m sorry. I mean, what type of audio inputs does it have?"

Long pause. "Uh . . . I don’t know."

"I tell you what, why don’t you just bring it by the shop and we’ll take a look at it."

"Yeah, that would be a good idea."

The Diplomacy Lesson

Now, this was not a stupid person. I’m exaggerating for effect. They could drive a car. They were in college. What it comes down to is the whole division of labor thing. Just like you would not expect the props guy to be directing, you shouldn’t expect the cameraperson to be running sound.

Unfortunately, I run into two trains of thought for very small, low budget shoots. Either the person thinks, "Hey, I just gotta throw a mike out in the room. How hard can that be? Even a trained monkey could do that." Or they think, "Oh, God! How will I do sound? It’s an impossible dark art that only a master, trained for years in a secret sect of underground disciples, can hope to perform." (Honestly, there are times I think the latter is true.) Neither one is true. I don’t have a clue what the lighting guys are really doing most of the time. That’s a dark art to me. It is all relative.

It is sometimes difficult, as a professional, to remember what it was like when you knew nothing. (Of course, that is probably much easier for me than it is for others.) It wasn’t because you were stupid and inherently flawed in the noggin. No, you just hadn’t read the same books and had the same experiences as the sound people.

Directors very often don’t have a clue when it comes to sound. It is the rare director indeed who not only cares about sound, but actually spends time learning about the art of it. The film schools are not always too helpful with this, either. I was shocked to find out that the film school this person had attended did not offer any audio classes. None! Bearing that in mind, my attitude changed quite a bit.

Anyway, back to our story.

I Can Drive an Automatic, But Not a Manual

Once this person arrived at the shop, things got more interesting. He brought the camera and the manual (oh blessed day!). Now the camera could be placed under the scrutiny of my razor sharp skills of deduction. It was right there in front of me. I felt my power growing. All was well with the world. Then I opened the manual.

Now, if you’ve ever tried to set the clock on a VCR or build a kid’s bike, you know that consumer manuals are not for the meek. They can even send a professional to his knees.

I opened the index and found the audio section. "Great," I thought, "This’ll be a piece of cake." Upon arriving to said section, I found a cartoon of some character that I think was in the Pokemon movie, but I’m not sure. He/she/it was smiling as it pointed out that you don’t need to worry about your audio, since it is being taken care of already by a swank new, exclusive feature called "auto-gain". It had a little arrow showing where the auto-gain button was. Next to that was a close-up of the microphone molded into the camera describing it as a "professional quality" stereo microphone that allowed an "accurate" representation of the sound. Then, it went on for 25 pages describing how to change the camera filters and do various cool visual effects (i.e. the swirling scene change made popular in the Batman TV show of the ’70’s) and set timers and so on. I suddenly felt a strong desire to lie down for a very long time.

Looking at the camera for a detail that might provide some rapid escape from this impasse, I saw a knob that looked like it might be a volume control. Flipping to the pages for "volume" I found that this knob only controlled the playback level when you wanted to review your footage via the headphone jack, or use it as a VCR for playback. In my mind’s eye, I began doing terrible things to that little cartoon character, with its taunting smile.

In desperation, I flipped to the specs in the back of the manual. Maybe I could at least get some idea of the quality of the audio being recorded. Finally! There it told me that the audio input was a stereo mini-jack, that the audio track was 12 bits and that there was some kind of weird voltage on the jack to power their exclusive electret mic. Now I had something to work with. After both of us searched the streamlined shell of the camera, we finally found a cleverly concealed rubber piece that popped open to expose an even more cleverly concealed secret door, which covered an even more cleverly concealed stereo mini-jack. Apparently they really didn’t want you to get any dirt or dust in the jack.

The Technical Bits

I addressed the 12 bits of audio first. Since the machine recorded at 44.1kHz and 12 bits, the sound would not be as good as it would be on a DAT machine (at 44.1kHz and 16 bits). Of course, this difference to 2 bits did not sound like much to this director until I explained it would be the difference between 4,096 bytes of information and 65,536 bytes of information. Roughly, the tracks on the camera are capturing about 1/4th the audio at about 1/4th the quality as would be captured on a DAT tape at 44.1kHz/16 bits. This information is hard to convey to someone without some background in digital audio, or audio period. So, I just argued a lot that the sound would be unimaginably awful. Now, true, for just recording voice, it could have probably gotten by. However, they were going to be using a lot of the location sound for their final tracks, and were depending on a lot of the sound effects to be from the location as well. I felt full frequency range would be much more pertinent for this.

The Value of Doing Your Homework

There are a number of excellent articles I’ve seen on the subject of recording audio directly to pro-sumer camcorders and interfacing them with pro gear. You can find them on the Internet with a little effort (which is about the amount of effort I’m good at). From what I have seen, here is a brief overview of some points to remember:

1. Stick with auto-gain. I know I gave it hell earlier, but the headroom on these cameras is non-existent. There is no easy way to manually ride the gain and run the camera. Besides, you run into the whole camera-guy-running-sound problem. The gain controls are usually not a dedicated set of dials and must be accessed via a few button pushes and menu changes. This is just not practical for dynamic gain riding. Add to this the fact that some of these cameras default to auto-gain whenever the machine is switched off. So, you may as well plan on using it.
2. If you use auto-gain (were you paying attention in step 1?) be sure to send the same signal to both the left and right channels. Auto-gain is not dedicated to just one channel. If you have one channel with audio and another with nothing, the auto-gain is going to bring the non-audio channel up as loud as it can. So you’ll basically have circuit noise recorded full throttle on the non-audio channel. This hiss can cross-talk and cause problems later in the production process. This is easily solved by using a mono XLR to stereo mini-plug adapter cable. Of course, you still have that pesky weird voltage to deal with.
3. This powering voltage is common on certain pro-sumer camcorders. Since most consumers aren’t going to be plugging in a Sennheiser MKH60 to record their child being born (unless you’re a sound guy), there is usually a little electret stereo condenser mic built on the camera or attached to it. There is usually a separate audio input jack. Sometimes the cable to the onboard stereo mic is removable and can be unplugged to allow other types of mics to be input. The 3 to 6 volts on this connector gives the electret mike the power it needs to work. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near 48 volts, and it can cause problems on pro mics. Sometimes you’ll hear a hum, or get an unusually low level, or hiss. Sometimes it won’t affect your mic at all. It just depends. There are cables you can get to block this voltage and rid you of any potential problems. (In fact, we make some). There is a capacitor in-line in one of the connectors to block the DC voltage. Since there isn’t phantom power on the audio jack, it would need to be supplied somehow. You can either use a microphone like the Sennheiser K6 with an ME66 capsule that can be powered with a AA battery, or use one of Denecke’s little PS-1 portable phantom power supplies. It runs on a 9-volt and clips conveniently to your belt.
4. Apparently, from what I’ve read, the Sony VX-1000 is a special animal. The input is not only mic level, but needs a 15 dB pad to prevent distortion with the usual condenser mic (i.e. Sennheiser MKH60).

Concluding Commentary

All of the aforementioned "trickiness" can be avoided by simply using a DAT machine. Most portable DAT machines would be capable of supplying the phantom power (with the exception of the Sony TCD-D10 Pro II. Please! Would someone tell these guys to correct that? You’d think they would have done their homework). Of course, there is no DC voltage blocking required, no special cables, no weird pads and no (shudder) auto-gain. When I explained this and the problem with 12-bit audio to my client, it swayed them to the DAT side of the force.

After the shoot, they said they were glad they had gone with the DAT machine. Their big concern was that the film not "sound like a student film". The fact that this phrase has meaning to just about anyone (sound person or not), who has seen a student film, speaks volumes about a need for more audio training in film schools. After all, how can we expect a director to care about sound if that concern for audio fidelity is not being cultured in a film degree program? Luckily, I was able to work with someone who appreciated the need for quality audio.