For future night-based or indoor-based documentaries, unless you can afford to take lights with you, I recommend avoiding HDV and HD, like the plague. The reason for this is simple physics. HDV and HD cameras cram more sensors, on the same size chipset, than an SD camera, which is normally a 1/3” chipset, unless you get into a much higher price range. More sensors on the same size chipset mean that each sensor is tinier and therefore needs MORE light. This is very much the way photographic film works, where ISO 100 film, which has tiny grains, requires the most light, whereas ISO 400 film, which has much larger grains, requires much less light. A good SD documentary camera like the DVX100B can finesse some very decent footage, from fairly low-light situations. Plus, it’s actually a little cheaper than the consumer-styled HDR-FX1 and includes actual XLR jacks for shotgun mics, rather than a mini jack that requires an adapter.
Additionally, because SD footage is not compressed the way HDV footage is, you can actually add more stylistic filters, after the fact, without the footage degrading. (And, in the case of the DVX100B, its 24AP style actually records a true 24 fps after the pulldown, rather than a pseudo 24 fps like in Sony’s cameras.)
For future documentaries, I would strongly encourage new documentary filmmakers, like Mr. Urbanic, to look into getting Anthony Q. Artis’ book: The Shut Up and Shoot Documentary Guide as it has a huge amount of helpful tips for low budget documentaries; from fundraising to shooting to audio issues. (We reviewed this in October and you can read that review here.)
Use of Audio
The overall audio could be understood without making your ears bleed, which is a good thing in the documentary world, where a hundred and one things can seriously mess with your audio.
Unfortunately, a shotgun mic wasn’t employed to record dialogue, so most of the dialogue in the film was recorded with the onboard camera mic on the HDR-FX1. (Lavalier mics were used in certain circumstances, but they weren’t terribly high quality, which caused the voices to be a little on the tinny side.) Therefore, this created lots of camera noise including the sound of the zoom lens. In addition to the sound of the camera, many shots had a huge amount of extra noise like refrigerators, background noise, and street noise.
For future films, most of these issues can be decreased by doing a few things things:
1) Use a shotgun mic like a Sennheiser ME-66 or ME-67, mounted off the camera, via a boom pole or at least a riser mount on the camera. (You can get these sorts of mics for less than $400 on Ebay. For more info on audio production for low-budget filmmaking, check out our article on this subject.)
2) Listen to the environment you are in and turn off any noisemaking devices you can. (This can include, but is not limited to: Air conditioners, refrigerators, fans, ice machines, etc.) For street scenes, ask your interview subject to face you in a way that your mic can be aimed toward them and AWAY from traffic or other unalterable background noises.
3) Read our article "Audio
Tips That Every Microfilmmaker Needs" which outlines things like mic placement, audio monitoring, and other useful things.
With the audio as it is now, running the audio through Bias’ Sound Soap or similar noise reduction software could help improve the audio. Unfortunately, the fact that it was recorded in HDV format provides challenges. Unlike SD or true HD, the HDV format compresses all recorded audio to a special MPEG-2 stream, which is actually a little lower quality than high quality MP3 compression. This means that when you run noise reduction and other filters on it, it is far more likely to break apart than uncompressed audio. This doesn’t make it unsalvageable, just more difficult.
