Camcorder Microphone question?

You did not tell us which camcorder you have. Most consumer camcorders under about $900 do not have a mic jack. If they do - like the Canon FS series, Canon HV series and Canon HF series... and Kodak Zi8, they use a 1/8" (3.5mm) stereo audio input - but probably won't have any manual audio control. The Canon HV40 and HF S series do have manual audio control. Next, the 1/8" jack will be on a skinny, non-shielded, cable that will be pretty short - the expectation is that you will mount the mic on the camcorder. But you won't because you will be mounting the mic on a boom stand. In this case, you can either be wireless so the base station connects to the mic with a 1/8" connector, but this can be expensive - good wireless gear costs - I use Sennheiser portable wireless gear that has a module that plugs into any XLR mic. Your other option is to use a "real" shotgun mic that has an XLR connector so you can use good, shielded and balanced cabling - but then you need to get a XLR adapter (juicedLink or BeachTek - there are others). DO NOT use a 1/8" - XLR cable tail directly into the camcorder unless you are planning for the connector to break in the camcorder and you don't care if that happens (and that will cause bigger headaches). Balanced, shielded cables can have long cable runs - I've connected multiple XLR cables together to get to about 150 feet - I know if I had done that with non-shielded cabling, there would have been all sorts of interference picked up (because it is basically a big antenna to pcick up Radio Frequency and Electro Magnetic iInterference - RFI; EMI) and ruin the audio... By the way, you will be connecting the mic to the camcorder's audio INPUT, not the output... If you connect the mic to the camcorder's audio output, the mic won't push any audio into the camcorder.

Most any high quality microphone can be hooked to your camera. You just need the right mixer and cables to hook it all together. I can give you ideas, but go visit your local music store, the one that sells drum kits and guitars and such, they are audio experts. They might have a rental program. My setup uses the following http://www.asimplelife.ca/boss.html although at the bottom of the page is a link to a smaller, need no power, mixer I own. You don't necessarily need a digital audio recorder, although you may not want that audio cable plugged into your camcorder at times. A recorder allows you to add audio in your editing program. But get a small mixer, monitor (earphones) all audio going in to recorder or camera, you would get a better video that way. One thing that big audio recorder does do is convert the audio file into a file my computer understands, make sure any audio recorder you get does the same, makes life so much easier.