My mates are setting up a comedy tv show based in they're flat, I've been asked to help out with recording sound. But I have no idea what I am doing! It will mainly be interviews and sketches in the flat itself with a few outside sketches.. my question is, what mics to use? clip ons or shotguns? or both? Are there any good/cheap mics out there that people can recommend?

Our budget is more Wayne's World than T4..

Any advice would be great!

I'd suggest looking around

http://www.ips.org.uk/

Their old Line Up magazine had plenty of articles about capturing sound in all sorts of situations.

Rode seem to have a pretty good range of cost effective mics for location recording although Sennheiser seem to be favoured if you have the budget. Consider hiring gear if you are only shooting over a few days.

James.

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JRP Music - Audio Mastering and Restoration.
http://www.jrpmusic.net

What camera(s) will you be using?

Thanks James, I'll look on there.. I'll find out about camera now..

A couple of cheap shotgun mics would probably be a reasonable compromise between cost and quality, and more versatile than clip-on mics. The Rode NTG range is a good place to start, but you'll find plenty of othersa round. To a degree, the choice will depend on the rest of the equipment, connections, power supplies, preamp gains, mixer and the operating crew.

The IPS website is aimed at film and TV professionals and is probably aimed at those with far higher budgets and technical expectations than your application.

Hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Ask Adam and Joe what they used! It sounds very similar to how they got going.

http://www.adamandjoe.com/contact/

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http://soundcloud.com/richie-royale
http://www.mixcrate.com/richieroyale

The most straight forward way would probably be clip on radio mics into a small mixer with output going into the cameras. This would save any hassle of syncing up audio to video later on.
A cheap as chips option if only using 2 mics would be output of each mic reciever could going straight into one of the cameras, most decent cameras will have the facility of 2 mic level inputs - only problem is then you will have limited control of gain and no control of eq.

I'm with High on the shotguns although I would probably question the plural. If you're going to be there when they're shooting then spend the money on a pole to put it on and a good pair of close-backed cans to listen with. With a bit of practice a hand-swung boom will give you the most flexible and reliable results in the vast majority of situations.

If you go down the clip-on route then I'd give serious thought to wired rather than wireless ones. It really depeneds on what the performers will be doing and where your locations are but generally there's not much to be gained from wireless unless you need really long shots or there's going to be a lot of running around. Wired means less batteries, less chance of your perfect take being ruined by an unexpected mincab/bingo caller/whatever and less things in the chain to go wrong.

Chances are that in a flat or on location, the ambient noise will be way higher than the noise floor of the preamps so you can give yourself plenty of headroom and avoid having to muck about with mixers.

Matt.