Good Sound - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 118

What to Use

There are four levels of equipment quality and confi guration to choose from. You should obviously choose
the highest level of quality that your production and resources will comfortably support.

The lowest level of quality is a simple PC microphone connected to the microphone input of your computer.
Depending on how picky you are prepared to be (or not), the sound gathered from this setup may be good
enough. Although I have heard some surprisingly “not bad” recordings done with a simple PC mic, most
likely it will produce a fairly noisy, low quality result.

The next step up would be to purchase or borrow some lower end “phantom power” microphone equip-
ment. These microphones are signifi cantly better in sensitivity and quality than the ones that plug directly
into your PC, but they require an external power source. Usually a powered mic will fi rst plug into the power
source (often a powered mixer), then into the line input source on your computer's sound card. Due to other
projects I have worked on, I already owned a powered microphone and power source, which you can see in
Figure 8.1. The microphone at the bottom left is an MXL brand condenser mic, and the power source/mix-
ing board on the right is the Behringer
Eurorack UB1002. Both were obtained
for less than $150 total. They are not
truly professional quality, but they are not
entirely out of bounds regarding cost.

The next level of quality would be
obtained by not recording directly into
the computer. Depending on the sensitiv-
ity of the microphone you use, the sounds
of the computer's fan and electrical inter-
ference from the power supply can intro-
duce additional noise into the recorded
signal. Using a quiet laptop can coun-
ter the sound problem, and obtaining an
external sound card such as the Audigy 2
NX from Creative Labs can eliminate electrical interference. Once again, due to other projects, I already owned
a direct digital recorder that can be used without a computer. Figure 8.1 shows the device in the upper left,
called the iKEY, which can be obtained for around $80 online. This device takes analog audio inputs and saves
them in WAV or MP3 formats directly to an attached USB device such as a USB memory stick or hard drive.
There are certainly more expensive digital recorders that perform the same job, but I found this device to be a
good mix of price and performance.

Figure 8.1 The recording equipment used on The Beast

The highest level of quality, and one in which you are not likely to invest, is the true top-of-the-line record-
ing equipment: Sennheiser and Shure microphones, Allen & Heath mixers, and Sony and Yamaha digital
recorders. This equipment costs thousands of dollars and will almost certainly outstrip your meager recording
skills in its ability to produce great sounding dialog.