After doing several videos now with the car and still having a stock exhaust, I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy a lavalier mic or some other mic to record the sound of the engine because all the camera gets now is wind noise.

What do you think would be the best place to mount a mic? I was originally thinking in the rear spare tire well by the exhaust, because that'd get the tone of the stock exhaust. Recently I've been trying to think of a place where I could mount it near the engine/in the engine bay so I could get all the turbo noises as well. Do you think mounting it by the fuse box would get good sound? Or would there still be to much noise/rattling?

 

Tape a cotton ball or gauze pad over the microphone to effectivley reduce, if not eliminate almost all wind noise.

 

I don't have your answer, but I too have this problem. I have an external camera, and since I use that I had to add an external microphone (for the line in to the camera setup). It's got a long wire and could go almost anywhere. Depending on the camera view, I may want different sounds. Filming a wheel/suspension at work I think I'd want tire sound. Looking out the front, a spooling turbo makes a good sound. Rear view, exhaust. For now I've been putting it down on the floor in the back seat, not much wind and plenty of spool and exhaust. My car is quite loud (on both ends) so I don't have any problem picking up noise. It would be fun to spend a day (track?) moving the microphone around the car and taking different sound clips!

Be careful when purchasing the mic, I went to Radio Shack and the stuff those guys sold me would not work (both powered and un powered). http://www.chasecam.com/ had the kit I needed to patch in to my Sony Hi-8 cam for about $20.

 

Thanks for the info Dan. I was about to buy one of the cheapo ones on ebay but I'll go to that site and get it there.

But yeah, same situation here for trying to figure out where to mount my mike. At least you have an aftermarket exhaust - the stock one is so damn quiet I can barely hear it myself over the wind noise when I was driving. On the highway the tire noise with windows up is louder than the exhaust.


And thanks for the suggestion on the cotton Techno - I was going to do this before my last filming session but was in a rush when I left so I forgot to grab some tape and cotton *****.