deal on a nice mic for temp ADR

Woot’s got refurbs of the Blue Yeti USB mic for $59 today. That’s a solid condenser mic with a nice full sound when used well. We recorded a ton of temp ADR on The Man with the Iron Fists using a Blue Yeti (and at least one of those temp recordings is in the finished film). My recommendation: Set this mic to its cardioid pattern (the others are useless for this purpose and pick up additional background noise), move it a few feet further from your CPU fans than is convenient, and then place it within a foot of the performer’s mouth (unless they’re yelling).

My configuration of recording equipment didn’t look sane, but worked well. Because the A/D converters are all inside the mic, the device to which it is connected has no bearing on the quality of the recorded audio. For the sake of mobility and because the device is fanless, I recorded using the mic connected to an iPad. –But the Yeti draws just enough power over USB to cause an iPad to disconnect and complain. So I connected the Yeti to one of those split USB cables that come with portable hard drives; One end of the split cable went to the Yeti, the other split end went into a USB battery pack to provide additional power, and then finally that cable was connected to a USB mini hub which was connected to the iPad using the iPad Camera Connection kit. The free iTalk app was used to start, stop, monitor, and transfer recordings.