Hey,
Im filming a small short this weekend and as money is very short i bought a ?20 camcorder condenser mic from Maplins thinking anything has got to be better than the on-board piece of turd on my camera.
In short, the sound is much better but instead of a whiny motor noise from the camera i am now faced with a low hum which i assume is interference as the cable is not balanced.
I am using the mic to record dialogue which is all indoors and the only thing i can think of to reduce this hum to a minimal is to place the mic as close to the actor(s) as possible without it being in shot.
Can anyone offer any further advice as to how i can minimise this annoying hum noise??
Thank you.
Camera noise tends to be in a fairly narrow frequency band, so you may just be able to remove it from the audio afterwards.
I know 'Cool Edit' (an old sound editing program from the 90s) had a feature that would let you give it a segment of camera noise and it would work out what frequencies it covered and reduce them in the rest of the audio track. I presume other sound editing programs would have similar features, or you could just manually try to find the appropriate frequency; I've had surprisingly good results with removing wind noise from old VHS camera tapes in Avid using their pretty basic audio tools.
Edit: sorry, you're probably talking about mains hum... I'd guess that should be even easier to remove with a filter at some multiple of 50Hz or 60Hz, provided it doesn't coincide too much with the dialog frequencies.
