DAT or MiniDisc for Recording Film Sound?

[Gary Owens]

Well, I have decided to go with using a clapper board and record my sound with either DAT or MiniDisc. Then I suppose it's a matter of a little more involvement in editing. Does anyone have any experience with these two mediums? What kind of mic should I use? Thanks

 

[MarkG]

You should be fine with either DAT or minidisk: I've used both and they seemed to work just as well as each other. In theory DAT is better because it's uncompressed, but you'll be lucky to be recording sound anywhere with so little background noise that compression artifacts would ever matter.

As for mikes, use the best one you can get . I think we mostly used Sennheiser 416 mikes in the past, which were pretty good at eliminating the worst of the background noise and didn't cost much to hire.

In general there seem to be two schools of thought on sound recording: one that it's the most important part of the shoot since bad sound is far more annoying than bad picture, and the other that it's not so important as picture because you can re-record in post. Personally I'm in the former camp, I usually find that attempts at replacing dialog after you shoot sound pretty bad.

 

[Bryant Falk]

Sound on location

Sound on location

Recording good dialogue on location is what is crucial. Everything else is secondary from an audio standpoint. This is for a number of reasons...

1. Full sync shots are good to go if you can get the audio on location

2. The time saved in ADR and re-performance (your talent has to duplicate what they did, not only technically but emotionally) is invaluable.

3. The room reflections from cut to cut for the dialogue will be tight which is what an audience will usually notice is quirky if you've replaced sound.

 

[Audio Salve]

DAT is a dead medium. You will only find used machines available. Though some people are using Minidisk, it is very risky if your project will be edited and distributed because it uses a very lossy compression. Each time you transcode it to another digital format, it loses even more data. The same goes for MPEG recorders.

Wav file recorders are better. You can find them recording to Flash memory cards and mini hard drives.

Time code will be an issue. If your takes go beyond a couple of minutes each, you'll find the audio and video drifting apart in sync if they are not locked together.

 

[MarkG]

Though some people are using Minidisk, it is very risky if your project will be edited and distributed because it uses a very lossy compression

But that's basically irrelevant. Once the sound comes off the minidisk into your PC, it's uncompressed .wav files, just like DAT... and then it's mixed with a dozen more tracks for your final soundtrack. The minor loss of quality in the recording is not going to be noticed unless you're lucky enough to work in much less noisy environments than most movies I've worked on.

Sure, maybe if you recorded the same sound on a DAT and minidisk and did a side-by-side comparison you might notice a difference, but no-one is going to listen to your movie without knowing the hardware you used and say 'Oh my God, they recorded the sound on minidisk!'.

Certainly any difference in sound quality between DAT and minidisk will be far, far less than the difference between sound recorded by a decent sound recordist and sound recorded by a bad one.

 

[Audio Salve]

But we are not talking about noise, we are talking about data integrity. The WAV file will be an uncompressed file, but it is a transcoded copy of a compressed file.

It has been scientifically demonstrated that the data integrity of a minidisk or other compressed original track degrades each time it is transcoded due to the format changes of editing, mastering, distribution, etc.

 

[MarkG]

The WAV file wil be an uncompressed file, but it is a transcoded copy of a compressed file.

And? At worst you're looking at one more compression step for output to DVD, before which it will be mixed with numerous other tracks. You're just not going to see any problems with that.