The sound kit in the camera bag is used when I’m doing shorter interviews, reportages and documentary style of work as one man band.
Update: The Røde Reporter have been replaced with a Sennheiser MD42 that also works withe the wireless XLR-adapter.
For interviews with more persons, short films, features, commercials etc, where there is a dedicated sound person do we have additional bags with more equipment.
The basic requirements for the sound equipment are:
Always in bag
Flexibility with microphones
Sound quality
Cost
This kit is, as the other kits we have, continuously evolving. The reasoning behind the choices we have done are as following.
On the on camera microphone for ambient sound is a Sony ECM-VG1. This shotgun microphone is not so expensive and short enough to work on camera with the 16-70/4 lens. The original cable was replaced with another cable with 90 connector to better fit mounted in the bag.
A new addition to the bag is a wireless Sennheiser XSD receiver & transmitter with ME-2 II lavallier and XLR- transmitter. This kit could also be used as a wireless snake into the camera from a separate sound recorder.
I have used a G3 in the past on the FS5, but bought a cheap XSD ENG set on sale a few weeks ago. An extra G4 kit would cost 3x as much so this was much bang for the buck.
The downside with this kit is that I can’t use the Sennheiser ME-4 cardioid lavalliers that I have for the G3’s in noisy environments.
The new Sony system was an option, but a dual transmitter and receiver & XLR combination is both more expensive and not available as a kit yet.
The Sony FS5 does not have a built in time code and we have therefore added a Tentacle Sync with XLR-cable and a BNC-cable to the cameras sound-kit. This means that if the sound guy is providing a sync signal via a BNC connector can we add a timecode to one track during the recording.
This works very well with our workflow in FCP/X, but we don’t use this if the editing will be done
with Premiere on a PC as the sync software is done for OS/X.
Be also beware of that you only have two XLR-inputs on the FS5 and FS7. You can choose two of the three sources; shotgun, wireless snake and TC.
Sennheiser MD42 is a handheld microphone with XLR-type connector used with the XSD XLR transmitter as an option instead of the lavallier. It is omni-directional and good for casual interviews. However, for noisy environments is a cardiod microphone better, i.e. MD46 instead.
I also have an extra ME-2 II microphone with a Sennheiser XLR adapter and 5 m XLR cable. This is when you need an extra lavalliere for a shot, or the wireless kit doesn’t work. This adapter fits very tight so I have a very short XLR-cable to attach it to the camera to avoid jamming.
My trustworty Sony 7506 headphones have been replaced by Sennheiser IE40 Pro in-ear headphones, as the former took up too much space in the bag.
What is omitted from the bag is a separate sound recorder and a boom microphone. The reason for this is that we have to limit size of weight of equipment for each role on set.
If the production need more other types of microphones, we use a separate sound recorder and have a sound guy to operate the equipment.