Super 8 sync sound - again and again

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Originally posted by Alex:
Which Nizo are you using? Are you saying that the quiet Nizo's are 100 times louder than your mini-dv camera? The 3056 Nizo is a super-quiet camera, no?

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<font size="2" face="verdana, sans-serif">Yes, the 3056 is a very quiet camera, much better than my Nizo 136XL. But my video camera is a Sony TRV900. Yes, the TRV900 has a little motor noise, but it is a more or less constant hum that is easy to get rid of. I film at 24 fps and the clicking of the nizo claw is very very noticable. It is certainly the quietest Super 8 cam I've come across but still, realistically, 5-10x louder than the hum of the sony DV cam (yeah, so maybe not 100x, but you get the point).

I have a 10 band graphic equalizer and over the years I have found that those constant hum sounds you speak of are found on more than one frequency.

If you use Sound Forge you can probably sample the click sound and remove it perhaps as easy as the humm sound of your camera.

I've been wanting to do a test about this very issue and hope to do one in the near future.

I was working on a documentary with my Nizo and TRV900. I had a sound person using the TRV900 to capture wild sound while I shot with the nizo. We were shooting in an outside environment, with cars, etc. I captured a small audio sample of that shoot, and you can download it here:

http://www.3dmovies.net/audio/mtc.wav

(file is about 3 meg...)

You can BARELY hear the nizo whirring in the background. At about 14 seconds you hear a loud click, which is the sound the nizo makes when it stops. So you can compare the sound with the nizo running and not running after the click.

I know this is a bad comparison because the audio is very dirty. There is a lot of ambient noise...cars, talking, etc. Also keep in mind I was about 3-4 feet away from the TRV900, so you can imagine what it would sound like if the mic was mounted directly to the nizo.

You can't really use filters to filter out the nizo sound, because it varies so much. I tried to do that on some stuff I shot with my Nizo 136XL and sound in a similar fashion with my Sony TRV9. It didn't work AT ALL, and yes, I was using Sound Forge with that noise reduction plugin. The Nizo 3056 is about 2-3 times quieter than the 136XL.

Thanks for the sound bite. I was trying to follow what was going on, were you being kicked out of a location?

You have raised the bar by keeping the film mike ON THE CAMERA. Most film productions that I know of don't keep the mike on the camera. How does you Nizo compare with 16mm and 35mm motion picture cameras in terms of camera noise?

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Originally posted by Alex:
Thanks for the sound bite. I was trying to follow what was going on, were you being kicked out of a location?

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<font size="2" face="verdana, sans-serif">No, I was just interviewing some guys, but I didn't want them to know I was really interviewing them, that's why I said I was just playing with my video cameras. I know, not really ethical but considering the subject matter...which I won't go into here...

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You have raised the bar by keeping the film mike ON THE CAMERA. Most film productions that I know of don't keep the mike on the camera. How does you Nizo compare with 16mm and 35mm motion picture cameras in terms of camera noise?

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<font size="2" face="verdana, sans-serif">I've only used 16mm cameras in film school. Not sure about 35mm cameras, as I've never used one. I used a 16mm arri back in the day, and as I recall, I'd say the Nizo 3056 is just about as quiet as that Arri (sorry, don't remember the model...it was 5 years ago). We were shooting sync sound with the arri so it couldn't have been that loud.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ August 23, 2003 11:58 AM: Message edited by: nahie ]</font>

But when you shot with the ARRI, the mike was not on the camera, right?

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Originally posted by Alex:
But when you shot with the ARRI, the mike was not on the camera, right?

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<font size="2" face="verdana, sans-serif">No it wasn't. We were using a boom mike with a nagra. I don't know how it sounded on the soundtrack because I never saw a finished project (it was a student film I was helping with that I don't think ever got finished...). But I was surprised at how quiet the arri was.

It sounds to me like your Super-8 camera is a combination "quiet like a 16 Arri" and "small like a digital camera".

But when you try and combine those two features together, (which would make your Super-8 camera an "uber cam"), the Super-8 camera can't quite achieve both results at the same time. Meaning it isn't as quiet a Digital, nor the quality of a 16mm Arri.

On the other hand, the fact that your Nizo is as silent as an Arri and small like a digital camera is very cool. I hope to use my Nizo in sound recording situations, and soon. [img]tongue.gif[/img]