Re: NNG: Steam Railroading in the Fall season: Reading and Northern Style

Nice video Mike. My two favorites are the town scene and the start-up. Regarding the audio clipping, I feel your pain. Its the drawback of the super shotgun mike. They pick-up sound a long way but cannot handle the heavy sounds close-up. I have spent a lot on mics over the years and found that some of the cheaper ones worked better. A friend of mine has a $400.00 camera and his sound is excellant and I have never noticed any distortion. One thing I did when I got my first pro gear in 1986, was to buy a second mic. The old tube camera I bought had a shotgun mic made for that camera. Like we are discussing it couldn't handle crossing whistles or close-up whistles like inside a cab. In those days you had three pieces of equipment. The camera with the mounted mic, the recording deck with the long cable(3/4 inch tapes), and the tripod. The deck had XLR audio inputs and outputs, so channel two was always the camera mic. I decided to by an external mic, which was more of a voice mic, and plugged it into channel 1, and stuff it into a side pocked on the Porta-brace recorder case. This did two things....allowed to mix the audio on those distorted shots, and would provide somewhat of a stereo sound if you mixed them, although they were different. When I was shooting on the C&TS in 2014 I had a $300.00 Panasonic mic I bought years ago, and it worked really good. It had two settings, one for shotgun(they called it telescopic), and a more omni directional mic, which is the setting I used all the time. It no longer works however. I have a Sure VP-88 stereo mic(XLR Cables) that I used on my old Betacam-SP camera. It was $1000 retail. Anyone interested it can be for sale!!!
Greg

PS 425 sounded good. As for 2102, I saw it twice in the 70's. Once on a fantrip in northern Ohio, and another trip from Pittsburgh to Altoona over Horseshoe curve. Unfortunately the return at Gallitzin was ruined when they put a Conrail diesel on ahead of the 2102!!!