Can you hear me now?
Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.
And like I’d hoped, I managed to buy my audio gear today. I wound up not going with the highest priced gear, and instead saved myself several hundred dollars by going a step lower here or there.
I purchased the Audio-Technica AT8410A Shock Mount, the Audio-Technica AT897 Microphone, and the K-Tek KE-110CCR aluminum boompole with coiled cable.
The damning thing is I didn’t wind up buying an adapter cable for my audio recorder. Unfortunately, my audio recorder (a Zoom H2) only accepts 1/8″ mic plugs, which is what your standard MP3 player headphones use, but most professional equipment tends to use 1/4″ plugs, and the shotgun mic I bought uses an even better XLR plug, so now I have to find a good 3-pin XLR Female to 1/8″ adapter, which sounds easy, but apparently it’s one big pain in the ass, and from what I’m hearing on the internet, unless I want to have 4 adapters hooked up just to make this work I can expect to pay 30+ bucks for a fucking four-foot cable. Seems pretty crazy if you ask me, but whatever. Once I get all the equipment I pretty much plan on just going to radio shack or finding an A/V store of some sort and seeing if I can’t find something that’ll work. Not a big deal.
Went with aluminum rather than graphite, which I’m sure is exactly the kind of exciting technical detail you want to read about on my blog (though it’s probably the kind of nonsense you’re used to reading here). Suffice it to say, the aluminum boompole is about 5 inches longer, weighs about half a pound more, and isn’t quite as durable as the graphite, but it’s cheaper by more than 150 dollars. Seems like the smarter decision, especially for somebody who isn’t exactly rich over here.
This is all a bunch of technical nonsense that even I don’t really understand (which is why it’s all been dumbed down on the explanation), but suffice it to say, I spent the last week researching this shit in detail and that’s what I came up with. Time will tell if I made the right decision here.
Now with this out of the way, I’m shooting for around the end of March to buy the video camera. Right now I’m looking at the Canon XH A1, which runs for about 3,250 - 3,500 depending on where you look (they can actually get significantly higher than that). It seems to be about the best camera you can get for the money, but I haven’t really put in a ton of time researching them as a result of being so poor. If I buy that camera it’ll be the biggest purchase I’ve ever made in my life, by a factor of three. I was looking at the Panasonic DVX100B, which is a thousand dollars cheaper, but I’m kind of sold on the High-Definition of the XH A1.
Who knows, maybe by the time I get around to buying this one an even better one will come out, or maybe it’ll drop in price. That’d be nice.
In other words, I’ve turned off comments for my website-blog. So if you want to respond you can pretty much only do it on my livejournal-blog. I mean, technically you can post them on the other one, but the comments have to be approved, and I seriously doubt I’ll ever pay attention enough to realize any need to be approved.