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Make It a Double

Wherein I get cranky about some newfangled contraptions…

Anyone who knows me and hasn’t yet run for the hills has accepted the fact that I’m crusty and cantankerous when it comes to sound. (If you haven’t yet, please go here and peruse the starter kit to my opinionatedness).

I ascend my soapbox and shake my fist at the heavens, but for good reason. In the age of “good enough” that affordable digital technology has enabled, compromises are necessary. Often, the results are perfectly fine, and the compromises reasonable, the best that can be made out of a combination of gig, location, and budget.

Occasionally, though, people get caught up, and, quite frankly, lazy. Specifically, I’m speaking about the Canon 5D. The camera swept the production world over the past couple years, offering a very cinematic luster at an accessible price point. All well and good, except for the fact that it was designed for photojournalists, who were assumed to be operating without a mixer when they would grab short video clips for web distro. If you’re shooting content that is primarily intended to be short form, and prioritized on imagery, then the included cam mic (or other after-market add-ons via the mic-level minijack) are good enough.

But now the people have gotten their hands on it, and users will always do just what they want, regardless of how a piece of tech was intended to be implemented. DV was meant to be a consumer format, to replace VHS; we all saw what happened there. Now, everyone wants that cinematic look for a segment of production that used to be the sole domain of 2/3” ENG/EFP cameras, from interviews to commercials. Again, all well and good.  The entry price is much lower, the production value per dollar is amplified, and the stuff looks great.

The kicker is this: there’s no audio return on the 5D. While the bigger cameras it is beginning to usurp were heavy and expensive, they featured full-sized XLR inputs and headphone jacks. You could send two balanced tracks of line-level audio and enjoy confidence monitoring, knowing what you were committing to the medium.

More and more often I’m getting calls from potential clients that insist on doing single-system with this camera. They either don’t want to pay for the record deck, or, worse, don’t want to have to “take all that time” to sync in post. This kind of thinking baffles me; somehow, taking 60-90 minutes to light a sit-down interview is par for the course, but taking 10 minutes to sync a day’s work with its high-quality audio tracks is too much to ask.

I bring this subject up due to a recent article over at mixonline.com, called Secrets of Audio Post Survival. In one paragraph, a mixer relates a story of catastrophic failure for a single-system project:

Because there was no return on the camera, however, they couldn’t hear what was being generated during production. “Imagine my surprise when we went into post after shooting the entire film with the camera and heard horrible broadband noise throughout the film’s entirety,” laments Taylor. Unfortunately, none of the audio was salvageable, and Taylor had to ADR the entire piece.

(Note: while they never mention the camera by name, it, along with the 7D, is one of the few I know of that lack headphone outputs.)

I’m fully aware of the adapter boxes that were made to provide XLR inputs for these cameras. While I’ve never used one myself, this kind of workaround fundamentally misses a key factor. As mentioned in the quote above, while these boxes provide headphone monitoring of the signal as it’s fed to the box’s inputs, there is still no way to monitor audio as it’s delivered to the camera itself.

I was once on a show where we rolled double-system with a feed on Comtek sent to a 5D. It wasn’t until the next day that the cam op informed me that there was no sound on the camera, as the input cable had gotten bumped just enough to lose the audio input signal, but not far enough to disengage that input jack and default back to the camera’s internal mic. With a proper headphone return, we’d have known and corrected the situation on the spot. (Luckily, this client had only asked for a reference mix to be sent to camera, and the project was able to be completed as planned.)

This is the kind of compromise that begins to feel excessive, penny-wise and pound-stupid. You would never ask a DP to “shoot blind”, without a monitor or viewfinder; he or she wouldn’t be able to guarantee that what they were recording was framed, focused and exposed properly. This is how it is for mixers in this kind of setup: with an adapter box, we can only gauge the quality of a signal to a certain point, then cross our fingers as to the final result. We would be mixing deaf. 

Cameras like this that lack proper audio monitoring are image acquisition devices, first and foremost. They should be treated as such, like film cameras, and rolled double-system with a proper slate at the head of each take. All of the adapting, the workarounds, and the great lengths that people go to in order to shoehorn pro tracks into these cameras would be better spent in properly recording audio separately and syncing after the fact, as we’ve been doing for more than 80 years.

[Steps off soapbox, squints at kids on lawn]

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