Final Snowboard Session

With the issues surrounding the microphone noise apparently addressed it was time to get back out onto the mountain with the snowboard and onto the road with the bike. First up was the snowboard session. This time on the mountain the weather was completely different from the blue skies and windless day that had greeted us previously. 60 mph gusts of wind and low cloud made riding and recording conditions extremely difficult. The spindrift (snow whipped around by wind) was getting everywhere and made visibility difficult. These conditions, although testing, would hopefully add some exiting atmosphere to the recordings as well as give the viewer a sense of how harsh it can be on Scottish mountains.

This short video shows the microphone mounted on the rucksack...wind and spindrift

Untitled from Colin Gunning on Vimeo.

Despite the high winds the construction of the microphone and Rycote windshield coped with ease. There was evidence in the final recording of extremely high gusts of wind displacing the diaphragm but only in a few instances. The resultant recordings from the snowboard session were really clean an clear with very little evidence of the problems encountered previously. The foam padding inside the shock mount and windshield had done its job.

The binaural microphone set up had also coped extremely well with the conditions. Being pressure sensitive microphones they can typically cope with frequencies down to as low as 20Hz. Similar microphone capsules are used in lavalier or 'tie clip' microphones used for recording speech, for example, in an interview situation where plosives can be troublesome due to the proximity of the microphone to the mouth.

Having managed to successfully capture b-format and binaural audio the snowboard material could go forward to the post-production stages. These stages will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent posts.

Here is a short example of the final snowboard sequences...

Clip 1 is a binaural recording. This is a little more susceptible to the wind noise due to the lack of protection, however, the periphony offered is better than the M-S recording in clip 2. Some filtering of frequencies below 100Hz was applied to counter the strong winds

Clip 1 - Binaural

Untitled from Colin Gunning on Vimeo.

Clip 2 Mid-Side derived from the B-format audio.

Untitled from Colin Gunning on Vimeo.