Alcove: Read blog but please help with mic advice!

The only budget hyper-cardioid I would recommend is the Oktava MK-012a, which is about $250. Make sure that if you decide to buy one that it is authentic; there are a lot of Chinese knock-offs out there that are definitely inferior.

Brilliant, thanks.

Does the hyper-cardioid need to be cued on the boom from actor to actor from just out of shot in the same way that a shotgun would? In other words, do I use them both with exactly the same technique, just different mics..?

Yes, you ALWAYS boom to keep the mic as close to the talent a possible.

Hey all, and especially Alcove,

I hate to do this to you, Alcove - I feel very conscious about recycling the same question to you every few weeks in different ways, but every few weeks, I get a little closer to shooting the project, and a little closer to actually understanding what I’m doing.

Ok – things I learnt this week..!

We shot a test in a shop using their NTG 2. It was ok. Sounded kinda warm to me, but it wasn’t ideal conditions.

Then last night, we hired an ME66, and that produced really nice results. I have to say I was quite happy with it. We recorded through the sound guys decent external soundcard on to his laptop, and it seemed a system that worked out pretty well for us.

The scene was a conversation in a two seater sports car. Now, if you see what I mean, I know the gear I would have liked to shoot the scene with, and I know the gear I had, and they weren’t the same thing at all, and we just said, ‘the hell with it, let’s just shoot it.’

We obviously couldn’t get a boom into the car, so gaffer-taped the mic between the actors legs, and pointed it up at their mouths. It sounds maybe a little ‘car interior’-like (do you know what I mean?) but I don’t yet know that that’s a problem – indeed, I don’t really know that I want it to sound of anything else! But I’ve still got to hear the audio over a decent system before I make any decisions.

So, I got to thinking – maybe the ME66 is worth thinking about? I understand it’s probably more widely used in the UK than the States? I guess at the moment, I’m really looking at 3 solutions;

1) Rode NTG-2 + Oktava MK-012
2) 2nd hand ME66 + Oktava MK-012
3) 2nd hand Sennheiser 416

What are your thoughts? Solution 2 is probably $80 more than solution 1 but I can stretch to that if it’s worth it. I don’t know that my tests with the NTG-2 are going to allow me to tell that much of a difference?

But if I got the 416 (which no one seems to have anything bad to say about) it means I can’t get a hyper-cardioid. Should I make this compromise, or are the NTG-2 and ME66 good enough rivals to make it more desirable to have the Oktava for the indoor stuff?

I suppose part of this question is more brutal and blunt: Is it possible to shoot release-quality audio on an NTG-2 or an ME66?

Cheers all