Yesterday Ian Preece came over to do a sound test on my new Canon 600D HD-DSLR. Although the new wave of DSLRs capable of shooting full HD video are extremely popular with filmmakers these days, they are designed primarily for taking photographs, which can cause some problems for those more interested in motion pictures. The biggest one is sound.
As far as I know all the HD-DSLRs on the market have a microphone socket and some, like the 600D, allow you to manually adjust the recording level. But where they fall down is that none of them have a headphone socket, so there’s no way of monitoring the sound when you’re recording. If your lapel mic rustles on the interviewee’s jacket, or a gust of wind causes some rumbling, or the cable has been damaged and the sound is intermittently cutting out, you’ll be completely unaware until you play back the shot.
By far the best way to overcome this problem is dual system sound. This means, like shooting on film, you record the sound on a separate device and sync it to the picture later. (Typically with a clapperboard, but software like Plural Eyes can automate the process.) This is all well and good for drama shoots, but if you’re a one-man crew shooting a simple corporate or vlog, having to operate two devices and then spend the time in post syncing the footage is not ideal.
When researching my camera prior to purchase, I found that some people out there had discovered a way to monitor the sound being recorded to it. However, after receiving the camera and trying out this method, I discovered I couldn’t do it. It involved connecting a headphone amplifier to the AV out socket via a special cable. The problem is, as soon as you connect anything to that socket, the camera’s screen shuts off (since it assumes you’ve just plugged it into a TV). There is a firmware hack called Magic Lantern which prevents the screen from shutting off, but a full version is not yet available for the 600D (a relatively new model) and even when it is, I’m not sure I will want to risk it permanently damaging the camera.
(Note: Many DSLR filmmakers don’t care if their screen shuts off, because they’re using an external HDMI monitor as a viewfinder anyway. I’m not doing that, because the 600D has a flip-out screen, and when combined with a simple magnifying viewfinder attachment it becomes the perfect viewfinder.)
So I purchased a Beach Box, since these have a headphone socket. Okay, you’re not monitoring what the camera’s recording but you’re pretty close to it, and if you set it up correctly and keep checking the playback you should theoretically have no problems. Unfortunately, yesterday’s test with Ian did not go well. We tried first without the Beach Box, since he has a mixer with a headphone socket anyway. When this gave strange and unuseable results we turned to the Beach Box, which didn’t work either. Several weird things were going on, but the main one was that when we connected a mic to one stereo channel it came in incredibly loud and distorted, no matter how low we set the recording level, and on the other channel (which should have been silent) there was a very quiet, hissy version of the same audio.
It wasn’t long before we were forced to admit defeat. The Beach Box is going back whence it came, and I’m going to purchase a portable audio recorder and use dual system at all times. I’ll let you know how I get on with that in the coming weeks.
That’s all for now. Next time I’ll discuss the shoulder rig.