recording multiple mics simultaneously

[Boyd Ostroff]

Originally Posted by John Nantz

I do have a question: What is a "frequency interview type video"?

I also wondered about that. Perhaps he meant "frequent interview type video"? :-)

[Richard Crowley]

Originally Posted by John Nantz

Just recently I did a dry run shoot of a piano recital practice and, lo and behold, found the recorder tracks were out of sync with the cam audio. Hmmm... upon inspection of everything I discovered the recorder was somehow set at 44.1k. Stopped by to read what anyone had to say about syncing.

Anyway, fortunately it was just a dry run and decided it wasn't worth the bother trying to sync; however, there were a lot of interesting replies to the original post.

"Sync" has NOTHING to do with Sample Rate. You likely would have had the same sync problems if you had recorded at 48KHz.

Assuming that by "out of sync" you mean that the audio and video drifted apart from each other after some (unstated) amount of time.

@Don Palomaki says that "Drift was an issue at one time". But even with improved clock accuracy in modern digital gear it is completely unreasonable to expect accuracy for more than a minute or two unless you are very lucky or you use genlock or very high-end pro gear.

[John Nantz]

Richard - mea culpa ... now that you mention it, I think that term and terminology was mentioned earlier in this thread ... but I'm not going back and read all the posts.

Well. Because the two tracks, audio and video, are off more than I've ever seen, maybe the two tracks got mixed up between two different takes? Its OBE for now because this was just a rehearsal practice session.

[Rick Reineke]

With some NLE/DAWs (Vegas Pro for instance), it does not matter what the audio sample rate is; one minute = one minute at 44.1, 48k or whatever. Others require re-sampling to 48kHz for video playback sync.

[John Murphy]

Sorry for the grave error. Zoom H6. Not h6n. Its still $350 bucks.

[David Peterson]

I'd rather recommend someone spends the little extra for a Zoom F4 or keep most of the money saved in the bank and get the Tascam DR60D if they must be super frugal. Assuming it is an aspiring PSM etc

[Peter Wu]

I ended up buying the tascam DR60mkii to replace my other two or three digital recorders.

There are several things I like about this solution:

- cheap; I paid $160 for the recorder, plus about 40 in adapters so I can use smartphone mics
- it uses even number of AA batteries (4); I hate 3-batteries devices since batteries are sold in packs of 4, 8, etc.
- I power it with a cellphone usb adapter with 4 AA inside as backup
- one recorder is much more convenient than two or three different ones
- the menu navigation is more pleasant to use because of the rotary knob compared to purely push button-based menu

In order to use 4 mics simutaneously, I need to split the 3.5mm sterero mic input to accept two smartphone lavalier mics. Tascam tech support couldn't tell me how to do it.The seller of the lav mics said they would send me a special Y cable to split the input but later told me they were having problem with amazon and couldn't. I ended up figuring out the pinouts and made a custom cable myself.

I haven't finished editing the video so I can't say how much the audio drift relative to my camcorder. But at least I don't have to worry about drifting between the different mics.

Thanks to all who responded.