Less than perfect sound is something that can make even a good movie unsellable. I know you don't have much money, but if you don't spend as much time and money on sound as you do picture you are really doing a disservice to your audience.

And to you as a movie maker.

That Canon will give you a good picture - now you SHOULD record excellent sound. You're going to need a good shotgun mic and a boom pole to get that mic close to the actors. You can hook into the camera and record directly to the tape. But you need a good mic.

And they aren't cheep.

You aren't going to like my suggestion, but I'll give it anyway: You and your friends should wait another couple of months. Save up enough money among yourselves to buy a nice Sennheiser. You can make a decent boom pole for under $20.

But if you MUST shoot before you have the proper equipment, there are other, cheep mic's you can use. I made this exact same mistake on my first feature. The movie was good, but I couldn't enter in any festivals because the sound wasn't up to par, and it never sold because the distributor didn't want to get stuck with paying to fix the sound.

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

Do you have a specific Sennheiser mic in mind? And what would you suggest recording the output to?

The Sennheiser K6 range is the defacto standard for independent film sound recording.

If you're using these with the Canon XL series, you also need to get your hands on an XLR adaptor, which turns the camera's crappy composite audio ins, to useful XLR ins.

Ben C.

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Please note the opinions expressed here are those of the author only and do not constitute legal advice. The author cannot accept and liability whatsoever for inaccurate or outdated information contained within.
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i make shorts so i bought a AT897, which is about 90% the mic the Seinheisser is, but significantly cheaper... i usually just record into a minidisc player, but there are cheap DATs on ebay that you could use too.

but those are shorts... if you're going to make a feature, i wouldn't mess around with expensive consumer models, but rent a top of the line pro microphone instead. you can't mess around with the sound quality, and you have to make sure everything is on the up and up. wherever you rent should have stuff for you to record into too.

www.maketradefair.com
www.thehungersite.com
www.oxfam.ca

Based on the comments posted here on the importance of sound quality, I did a little splurging on eBay and purchased a Sennheiser ME88 microphone as well as a 4-track Sony mini-disc recorder to record on. Thoughts?