It has been said that if you were to ask 300 professionals to describe their idea of a perfect production cart, you would get at least 500 different answers!
News & Whatever
TASCAM DR60 4-track recorder
I recently acquired one of the new TASCAM DR-60d portable digital recorders for DSLR and video production. Lately, Teac TASCAM (now owned by Gibson guitars) has been slow in coming out with fresh products that are new solutions to old problems (their 8+2 multi-track field recorder was their last major innovation) -- but I believe that they hit the nail on the head with this new recorder.
Review of Shotgun Mics for Film & Video
This is a brief explanation of some of the most commonly used shotgun microphones for film & video production. For details of each specific model, you can click on the link and go to the manufacturer’s respective website. However, I felt that it would be very useful to organize these microphones by their application, rather than by brand or by price, in order to help you understand the right mic for the right situation.
Note that both Audio Technica and Sennheiser offer microphones of similar characteristics. I like to think of them as Lexus compared to BMW – both are great cars, just that one is Japanese and the other is German. Sennheiser has been around longer and is the “CocaCola” of shotgun microphones to which everything else is compared. But Sennheiser is also considerably more expensive, and may or may not be the best sounding or most practical mic to use (of course, that is a matter of opinion, and there are those out there who would argue the merits of either brand, or dislike them both and opt for Sanken, Neumann, Schoeps, or one of the other exotic choices).