Hi folks

I'm looking at using a separate recording deck (mixer?) that the sound person can carry out in the field to record dialogues using a separate handheld boom mic.

What kind of deck (with meters) do you recommend?

Hello Norman,
MiniDisc units are popular and reasonably effective for this task. I have an HHb PortaDisc unit which is very good but perhaps a bit costly. Search around in this section of the forum for "minidisc" as many folks are using more compact and less expensive units.

Of course, DAT is always the top-of-the-line alternative, but an even costlier one.

Yup, we love our Akai's. They have as good a DAC as we've heard in cheap units, but the HHB is a better unit, better bottom, higher price.

There's always the Marantz PMD 670 for $800. The drag and drop file transfer is a good feature. A 1 gig mem card is $150 and will hold 3 hours of uncompressed digital at 48hz. MP2 at 192KBPS will give you 13 hours or 6.5 hours in stereo (384KBPS)

The 670 has the same basic front end as the PMD650 mini disk

http://www.d-mpro.com/users/folder.asp?FolderID=1582

http://www.d-mpro.com/users/getdownload.asp?DownloadID=182

Bryan, when recording to mp3 with the PMD 670, how do you later sync up video and sound in post? I'm assuming it's not manually done with clappers. Is there a cable that runs from the camera to the PMD 670 that keeps sync via timecode or something?