Making a film in Tokyo!

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 8:29 am

Hi all,

I'm off to Tokyo in November to record the sound for a documentary film focusing on the underground music scene in Tokyo. It's going to involve the filming and recording of several concerts of artists with very different setups, performing in several different venues. I'm guessing these won't be very big places (minimal sound gear?).

Being in charge of getting the sound to 'tape', I've worked out the following setup/basic technique; bearing in mind that I want to get as much seperation as possible, and not have to lumber a huge setup around.

I will be using laptop to record into, not sure whether Mac or PC yet. I will be using an external sound card with hopefully 8 to 10 seperate inputs, recording 8 to 10 tracks simultaneously into the laptop.
Hoping to get as much seperation as possible, I will route from the Sound engineer's mixing desk to the sound card.
I will be using a Sennheiser NKH 418 S to capture the ambient sound.
I guess the 'unknown factor' is how much seperation I can get from the house mixing desk, depending on what Outs it has on it.

I have worked on recording gigs for folks films before, and it always involved the line output from the desk going to a harddisk recorder or whatever, and the ambient sounds being captured by mics mounted on the cameras around the room. This means that by the time you get to post-prod, not only do you have to line all the tracks up and solve or put up with a load of phasing, but the stereo image and general balance of the sound is severely lacking in coherence.

Therefore, it seems to me that A) recording everything to the same machine and B) effectively using the "concert mics" + just 1 other ambient mics is the simplest and most effective way to get this done.

Any comments? Cheers everyone!

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 9:24 am

If I had to do this, I'd have a stereo mic to record the room ambience in addition to the board's outputs; sometimes those don't sound too good for one reason or another-- ask any collctor of bootlegs for a specific band.

Also, if you havn't seen many documentaries on this type of thing, "American Hardcore: a history of Punk in America" may be a good rental for you.

Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2007 7:48 am

You are never going to get good isolation in a concert venue unless you are the one making the decisions as to where to place the microphones and the complete absence of monitor and house sound speakers.

Take a typical concert. You have 5 to 15 microphones all of which are feeding into an audio console. You also have live on stage monitors that are at ear splitting volumes. So what you wind up with is some of everything in every microphone. Yes you will get some more presence on the vocal microphones but they will still be picking up the drums and anything else that is playing live on stage including the guitar amps and bass amps. They will also be picking up the sound of the house sound speakers and the monitor speakers.

This is all normal but if you want to isolate one instrument or singer to do something with editing - good luck.

We use Tracktion from Mackie on a P4 laptop to do multichannel recording and it works well with our firewire equipped Mackie audio boards. The sound is good and I have not had any complaints from any of the artist that we record in regards to the "sound quality" The way we always did live sound was to take a feed from each of the microphone pre-amps plus the two channel or mono main house sound output and record them all on the multi-track. The house mix as a guide track and all the other microphones to do the multichannel recording. On the cameras we use the stereo microphone built in to the cameras also as a guide track when we are doing post.

You probably want something less than a Mackie to take along and some of the new rack mounted stuff from PreSonus looks good and should be easy to carry and the sound quality is excellent.

Best of luck and let us know how it turns out.

Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2007 10:06 am

Oh, and dont forget voltage requuirements in Japan:

Voltage in the country is 100V not 110/120

Western Japan is 60Hz
Eastern Japan is 50Hz (Tokyo)

You can always buy adapters there, but you should check on buying them here.

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