I am in pre-production on a short. We will be using a Sennheiser shotgun mic. I was wondering which would be better to use...a DAT, or should we go with mini-disc? Is there really any difference? Pros? Cons? Someone enlighten me please.
Go with a DAT. I haven't heard much about em, and I've used a mini disc before (but im not sure about how they get the audio into post). The mini disc was easy to use on set but from what I've heard DAT gives the best quality.
To be honest, for a typical low-budget production you won't hear any difference between them (assuming they're decks of a similar quality level). Mini-disk compression isn't perfect, but you're going to have to live with so many limitations on your sound recording that compression will be a minor issue.
One issue, however, with mini-disk is that some decks will always start recording at the start of the disk unless you press a button to tell it to carry on recording at the end. So either get one that doesn't, or get a sound recordist who remembers to press the button every time so they don't record over earlier takes!
