Coltimar

About the same, Minneapolis or a couple (film schools) in Iowa. Sorry for my 'quick and dirty' approach to sound. I know that is probably offensive to a professional. I have about 3 1/2 months to get this figured out so I am trying to get a decent understanding of how what we have will best work together. We have no money, but a good deal of enthusiasm. We don't have career aspirations (although hopefully some of the kids we work with will be inspired by out little projects) and we don't stand to make any money from this project but we want to learn some stuff and make the best film that we can, having fun along the way.

Thanks studiomprd, I'm in a remote part of South Dakota. I checked into renting some stuff but didn't find much outside of Minneapolis (about 5 hours away). Still a consideration but money is an issue :/ I actually have Making Great Sound my Jay Rose but it was one of those books that zipped right by me when I tried to read it. Maybe picking it up now, with a moniker of experience, will make it more useful to me. Thanks for the good advice.

Hello! I was recommended here by a very helpful video guy on the filmmaking.net forums. I work with groups of teenagers in our area and every year or so we make a short film. We have tried to increase our scope each year making better, longer films. On our last project I realized that audio quality was a major problem. I know very little beyond what I've picked up or read on places like this. For our last project we ran a condenser mic on a boom pole and an old ld studio mic on a stand into a cheap Behringer mixer. From the mixer I ran the audio back into one of the two Panasonic HD Camcorders we were using. The quality was pretty bad and this time we want to do better. Our budget is basically what I can personally fork over. Most of our project have come in around $300-500, lol. Here are our assets: Canon XL-2 standard definition miniDV camcorder JVC GZ-HD6 camcorder (not sure how these two will work together :/) An old 8 port powered portable mixer amp (previously used for live sound, a few ports don't work and it can be a bit cantankerous) AudioTechnica ATR-55 condenser mic A handful of Shure live sound handheld mics 3 Telex/AT bodypack lavalier microphone systems 1 old AKG LD studio condenser mic Toshiba Qosmio gaming laptop wtih USB, Firewire and standard 1/8" audio interface Sound Sound Forge 9 (all of our editing will be done on Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10) My thoughts at this point are to either get another cheap mixer (the other one was so bad it died about a week after we were done shooting) or to get a USB Audio Interface. I don't know much about them but I assume that using an AI would require me to do the 'mixing' in Sound Forge in post production. That and buying one of these pretty much shoots our whole budget! Our little story is a character-driven piece and clear, audible dialog will really be the key. Is that feasible with what we have to work with? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to reply, Jack