Camera Hum, Audio, Microphones

[jwcelement]

I have an DCR-TRV 19 camera, and whenever I record using the internal mic I get nasty camera hum. Is there a way to cleanly reduce this hum in the editing process without losing ambience and dialogue?

Also, if this is not possible, what are some good microphone options for this camera? should i get a mounted camera, or an external all together, or would a robert rodriguez approach be good (very low budge movie im working on) with a tape recorder and microphone?

Thanks

[miker]

It sounds like you need to earth your camera, or use an off-camera mic.

Is the hum there when it's running off mains power and is it also just as apparent when it's running off batteries?

I used to have to earth one of my old camcorders. I used crocodile clips and a length of wire and ran it from the tripod mount-point to somewhere like a metal radiator. YMMV.

[jwcelement]

its the motor and tape running which is what i hear.

What is earthing?

[sn-films]

Originally posted by JwcElement:
its the motor and tape running which is what i hear.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Your best bet to get around this is an external mic. External mics come up from time to time so just do a search on this forum for some specific reccomendations on microphones.

A last resort is to use noise reduction plugins. You can do some slick stuff with these to salvage audio, but the results will never be perfect and they are not cheap. Basically, you can identify offending patterns and then the plugin will subtract that pattern through the audio clip.

For example, we shot a movie a while back and we had a limited window of opportunity at a particular location. We were having some technical problems with our mic when we got to the location, so we ended up usiung the built-in mic on the camera (*shudder*). In post, I used Sony's noise reduction plugin to strip out the sound of the camera motor.

Here's a sample.
sample

The first half of the MP3 is the audio straight off the tape. The second half has Noise Reduction, Noise Gate, a Track Compressor, Reverb, and some EQ applied. If you turn the volume all the way up, you can still hear some elements of the camera motor on the tail end of each character's dialog, but its much less noticable.

[miker]

What he said. You don't need to earth your camera.

If your cam has a minijack for an external mic you could do a lot lot worse than invest in a Sennhesier MKE300. And it's probably cheaper than a NR plugin.

[curtinparloe]

I got a buzz off mine, but it was only noticeable when I exported to a mov. I'll check the footage to make sure, but I think I had the same problem with the external mic.