Just wanted to mention that I've started putting together surround-sound pieces from the choir footage I shot in Austria last July. One of the events was the Cantus Festival in Salzburg, where our kid's choir performed on stage, followed by several other choirs from around the world.
One of the choirs was the Mercedes College Select Choir from Australia, and they did a very nice song with piano accompaniment. Can't remember the name of the piece, but it ran about 8 minutes and was basically themed about one's love for their Australian homeland (it ends on a "Waltzing Matilda" theme).
I shot the choir video from front-row center of the balcony with a VX2000. My rig has one stereo microphone pointing forward, and a second stereo microphone facing aft and upwards about 30 degrees. The rear audio was recorded to Minidisc.
Anyway, listening to the choir with just the front two channels was very nice, but when I threw in the rear two channels, the effect was remarkable.
Adding surround to the entire documentary is going to be labor-intensive, but I'm committed to doing it for this project. The first hassle was in shooting; there were times I forgot to arm the rear channel recorder, making the shot useless. Secondly, Minidisc doesn't record timecode, so even though the takes are individually marked on the Minidisc, they play back continuously, so I need to bring them over to the Vegas timeline manually, putting in a marker every time the Minidisc counter counts down to 0:00. Finally, since there is no timecode, I will need to manually sync up the surround audio for each and every clip in the finished project. Ouch.
As for the sound quality, Minidisc is plenty good for my needs. It uses compression, but that compression is much better than the very-good mp3 format which has become commonplace. Also, transfer to hard disk has to be via analog in realtime. Still, I think engineers would have killed to get this kind of quality and performance 30 years ago, so I guess it's all relative.
One of the choirs was the Mercedes College Select Choir from Australia, and they did a very nice song with piano accompaniment. Can't remember the name of the piece, but it ran about 8 minutes and was basically themed about one's love for their Australian homeland (it ends on a "Waltzing Matilda" theme).
I shot the choir video from front-row center of the balcony with a VX2000. My rig has one stereo microphone pointing forward, and a second stereo microphone facing aft and upwards about 30 degrees. The rear audio was recorded to Minidisc.
Anyway, listening to the choir with just the front two channels was very nice, but when I threw in the rear two channels, the effect was remarkable.
Adding surround to the entire documentary is going to be labor-intensive, but I'm committed to doing it for this project. The first hassle was in shooting; there were times I forgot to arm the rear channel recorder, making the shot useless. Secondly, Minidisc doesn't record timecode, so even though the takes are individually marked on the Minidisc, they play back continuously, so I need to bring them over to the Vegas timeline manually, putting in a marker every time the Minidisc counter counts down to 0:00. Finally, since there is no timecode, I will need to manually sync up the surround audio for each and every clip in the finished project. Ouch.
As for the sound quality, Minidisc is plenty good for my needs. It uses compression, but that compression is much better than the very-good mp3 format which has become commonplace. Also, transfer to hard disk has to be via analog in realtime. Still, I think engineers would have killed to get this kind of quality and performance 30 years ago, so I guess it's all relative.