Question about mike for wide two shots, adjusting levels while recording and DAT lev

[Thomas Berg Petersen]

Dear forum,
Thank you so much for your previous advice. I really appreciate it!!
As you know I am a newbie production sound recordist. I recently relocated, and here it is impossible to find any production sound recordist, unless you have big bucks to pay which the production rarely have. So I have been a de facto recordist on many smaller production on many productions. And I am still learning.

Anyways, since I am not involved in dialogue editing or sound design, I am not really sure what kind of sound I have recorded. Although one of my stipulations when doing a gig, is to talk to the dialogue editor and sound designer to get feed back. Often is it your mistakes you really learn from.

Now to the questions.
I have been on several shoots where two or three actors are close together in a wide two or three shot, but the only equipment beside mixer is wireless lavs, a great shot gun and boom, so I am having a difficult time picking up good clean dialogue on those wide two or three shots, especially if the actors are talking at big different levels. I do what I can and usually point the boom to the one that are talking but some times that is not possible especially if they are far away from each other. But when the camera punch in I usually get great sound for each actor which I hope can also be used in post for the wider shots where the sound perhaps isn’t as great as I would have liked.

But I am looking for a mike which I can use to pick up sound on wide two or three shots. Which types of mikes can you recommend?

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My second question is that most of the times I am facing relative wide two shots where one actor is talking very loud and the other actor is talking very low. When the wireless lavs are working there are no problem. But I usually experience problems with clothes noise or if they are moving too much around. I have been adjusting the lavs on a 1000 different places, and it is still very difficult. So I prefer to boom. Some sound people tell me never to adjust levels up and down during a take. Then of course the problem is that the actor talking loud gets great sound, but the actor talking very softly gets not so good sound. Other sound people says that just get the cleanest dialogue if that takes to adjust on a fly, do it.

What are your view points on this. Since if you raise the levels, the background noise level will also be raised. Most of the time I have relied on picking good clean dialogue when the camera moves closer to single shots or at least so I can get as close to the actors as possible. Any comments?

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My third question. I was on my gig here the other day where I had a DAT with TC generator. I had no idea how to operate the TC generator so I just used the DAT. But oddly enough, when I recorded 1Kz tone and adjusted recording levels. The levels on the DAT would never exceed the 1KHz level. So I had to raise this level as high as possible to 10db. Normally I would set the 1KHz tone at 20db but since I experienced when the mixer read 6db, the DAT levels would never go beyond the 1Khz tone level. This cannot be normal, can it?
Perhaps I oversaw an input limiter on the DAT that kicked in?

Thanks a lot
Thomas