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A dedicated high-quality digital audio recorder is a great tool for expanding your audio-capture capabilities. You can record everything from ambient environmental audio to interviews intended for DVD extras or podcasts. The captured audio must then be digitized and brought into your computer for use under B-roll video footage. We've talked about some of these portable digital audio recording solutions in the past (see my review of the Sony PCM-D1 at digitalcontentproducer.com/fieldprod/revfeat/sony_pcmd). The challenge with some of these products, however, is their size and/or the awkward computer access to the recorded content.
United Kingdom-based HHB - which also makes the outstanding eight-channel 24-bit/96kHz Portadrive hard drive recorder - has created a product intended to solve these problems. Claimed to be "the world's first professional digital recording microphone," the HHB DRM85 FlashMic is an all-in-one solution for capturing great sound and, perhaps more importantly, getting it in to your NLE application easily for postproduction.
The FlashMic looks like just another wireless mic, but it's actually two products in one: a high-quality, omnidirectional condenser microphone made by Sennheiser and an internal digital audio recorder. HHB offers two FlashMic models: one omnidirectional (DRM85) and another with a cardioid pickup pattern (DRM85-C). With 1GB of flash memory, this recording microphone is able to capture an incredible 18 hours of audio (of course, at 128kbps, you probably won't be able to use the audio in a production, so you'll have to trade some hours for bit rate).
The FlashMic records industry-standard PCM WAV or MP2 files. Popular in broadcast applications, the MP2 format uses less data compression and processor power than MP3. Short for MPEG-1 Layer 2, MP2 is the native audio format captured in an HDV stream. The FlashMic records MP2 at 48kHz for 12 hours and 15 minutes of recording (192kbps), 44.1kHz for 14 hours and 40 minutes (160kbps), and 32kHz for 18 hours and 25 minutes (128kbps). It also records to PCM WAV at the same sample rates, but record time for the 1GB card ranges from only three hours to four-and-a-half hours for...