Hey guys! Ryle here in the FilmLab and I’m in kind of the weird shoot today because we’re shooting using mirrors. So, you can see me and the camera can see me, I can see myself and I can see the camera and the camera can see both me and itself. This is a camera but it’s also the camera, it’s camera that’s responsible for the shoot that you’re actually watching now. And how were shooting it is the camera can see itself through the mirrors and as result it can see me also.
We’re doing this because we going to show these meters here on the side of the camera and the reason we want to show you this meters is because we’re kicking off our new series of sound recording by teaching you an important fundamental first step. See the range of sound that excess in the world that the human ear can hear is absolutely, enormous. Especially compared to the range of sound that our camera’s sound recorded can hear which is called the Dynamic Range.
Dynamic Range: The ratio between the smallest and largest possible values of a changeable quantity, ie. sound.
As is with this camera, if the sounds too quite it doesn’t get recorded at all and if the sounds too loud and then it causes the recorder to go and end up over load and it sounds like crap. Luckily the camera’s got some control nubs here that allow you to adjust the sound levels manually. This way you can make the quit sounds a little bit louder and more noticeable or the loud sounds less loud and less distorted. Now, here is the important part, when you recording a sounds say, well I don’t know a dialogue you want to recorded as loud as you possibly can without distorting so that you give your sound editor some option in post production.
See, for reason is that will explain in a later video. If your sound editor has sounds that are too quite, he or she can’t do much with them. Whereas if the sounds you give are loud and clear, they can do whatever they want with them with little problems or difficulties.
So, what you will do with camera like this is you’ve set the sound levels so that my voice as its loudest is picking at just above minus 12 decibels, which is this black square right here. Now, that gives me a bit of a caution from minus 12 decibels to 0 decibels in case I freak out and you know get a little bit loud every once in a while.
Interestingly, analogue sound recorders like the Negra, which nobody really use this anymore have an advantage over digital sound recorders like our camera. Because of the way tape works, analogue overload distortion doesn’t sound not bad. So you can record dialogue at a higher level on an analogue recorder than you can on a digital sound recorder, neat. So don’t forget to record your sound as loudly and clearly as you can without getting it all distorted. Next time will talk about microphones until then, bye.