I have a shiny-new DVX100 and trying hard to improve my skills and results. Many thanks to all those who have shared advice on these pages!

I am looking to improve my audio results. After spending some hours on the "Now Hear This" forum, I think the concensus is that I need to buy some "real" mics, and get away from using the on-board mics. As I am just getting started, I am on a budget and would like to buy one or 2 mics that would be good (if not optimal) in a variety of situations. I do the usual wedding & event stuff, sports, school plays, and also some educational stuff. Output to all is DVD (or VHS if the customer insists).

Trying to summarize the Now Hear This advice, I have to get:
1. a wireless kit (Sennheiser e100 or e500 seem well thought of)
2. a decent shotgun mic (Audio Tecnica AT835b has many fans).

Can any fellow DVX users opine on this plan? And for the AT835b, do I need to get the AT shock mount (which one? AT 8415 or AT 8410A?) for good results? AT also sells a XLR cable (1.5ft; XLRM to XLRF rt angle) -- is this what I need?

Thanks in advance for any advice for this beginner! Jeff

Hi Jeff,
You are asking a question that I have been trying to ask for some time. I am looking at the following:

-Sennheiser Me66 (seems to be the most popular). Also read this link about shotgun mics. Lots of good info: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/review_shotgun_mics.html

-Sony 44b lav mics. This seems to be the best overall dollar wise and feature wise.

You want to get the ambient sound by using the shotgun on your DVX and dialogue by putting the lavs on your subjects.

What does everyone else have to say?

I would use the shotgun to pick up everything, put it on both channels one low one high to make sure you never clip.

If you have lav's and shotguns, it would already create a small mess on your camera so you would probally unload it off the camera anyways, so see if you can con someone into being your "sound guy" with a 4 channel mixer and get the shotgun and lavs into that recording onto minidisks and use the excellent onboard mics on the dvx as backup/ambient.

One advantage to running everything off the camera is that you can avoid the potentially poor(er) audio circuitry in the camera and send your good mics' signals to a better preamp/recorder combo (i.e. like the mini Mackie mixers, and maybe a nice tape or CDR or minidisk deck).

You can still get extra audio off the in-camera mics, and use that audio in post to help line up and sync the externally recorded audio. In one case on my last short, the in-camera audio was a bit better for the scene than the external mic audio, due to poor mic placement ... [looks innocent]

funny bruce, I worked on a feature last month with 2 dvx's, one taking the boom and one using internal; and just as you experienced at the end of the production the sound engineer picked the in camera mics quite a few times. We all know the DVX has arguablly the best on camera mic/circuit in the class but it still shocked me a little.

Thats why its good to have backup I imagine, as booming sound is an art in itself and if the director doesnt care or misses a bad pickup it's pretty hard to do a pickup just for sound sometimes.