Input for voiceover tool??

Well, how bad is a battery powered directional mic patched directly into the G5 inline?

Will it record voice alright?

I did it and ended up with a 4.5 MB AAC wav file for a 2 minute sound clip.

The volume was okay, but there was a bit of noise in the recording when I reduced the size of the file to 450 k ... kind of like static. I did this on a Vaio.

Is it the mic (Sennheiser camera mic) or is it the fact that there was no pre-amplification inbetween?

<<<simple battery powered mic-to-line amp.>>>

You left out "All I need is:" or the alternate "I just need:"

I have an FP24. It's small, but it wasn't cheap.

Anybody with four resisters and a soldering iron can create tiny microphone level from the much higher line level. Going the other direction is serious magic.

<<<simple battery powered mic-to-line amp.>>>

No such thing, or alternately, you probably wouldn't want it if there was. What. Oh yes . We've been down this pathway.

You probably want a power switch to save the batteries, right? Good, and a way to tell if the batteries are OK, so we need to include a little light--usually green. We'll want to supply phantom power to the Sennheiser microphone inside our furry animal on a long stick, and there are at least two different common ways to supply phantom power, so we'll need to add that plus a switch to turn it on and off and to pick which one.

We'll need at least two diffferent output connectors because DAT uses one and my PowerBook uses the other. There is a third, but I'll be kind and pretend it doesn't exist. Enough recording equipment is missing built-in monitoring that you'd probably need to include a little headphone amplifier in there plus a volume control and connector.

The talent has decided to yell into his Shure SM-58 microphone which is overloading the little amplifier, so we need a way to adjust the level. There are ways to do this automatically, but most of them don't sound very good, so we'll be adding a manual level control.

We love Audacity for recording because it has great on-screen metering. If you don't use Audacity, the software level meters usually suck to the point of unusability, so we'll need some method of setting the microphone level in real time. It Is Nessary not to overload the digital channel. You can get away with, say three little lights for that, but you'd probably want a few more.

So you can see effortless feature creep and in no time, you're looking at one of these:

[www.sounddevices.com]
[www.shure.com]

Or something similar. Microphone amplifiers are not set and forget devices. Those shooters that think so usually come back later wanting us to cure low level, noisy audio, greatly overloaded and clipped tracks, or sound levels that seem to wander by themselves.

Koz

<<<Well, how bad is a battery powered directional mic patched directly into the G5 inline?
Will it record voice alright? >>>

We didn't think so. The Line In of a G5 is aggressively high level. If you sit right on top of a self-powered microphone you might get enough level to go with, but it will take some serious boosting after it got to Final Cut, and if your moons and stars don't line up, you may overload the mic itself. There is an amplifier inside there.

We need to provide microphone level services with a G-something else (maybe a G4). We're juggling using a USB headset or an external microphone/amplifier of some sort. We, too, are hoping not to have to spend hundreds of dollars to make this work.

Koz