Every once in awhile, I pull out the old Griffin iMic to record some quick voiceover. Because I do it so infrequently, I always forget how to set it up to get rid of the terrible buzz. Here's how to get a pretty quiet signal out of the iMic:
Open Quicktime Pro, and open a new audio recording. Put headphones on and turn the little volume slider on the left up so that you can hear the microphone passthrough. If you can't hear it, open system preferences, sound, select the proper input (iMic in this case), and make sure the input volume is turned up. Once you have it working, close and restart quicktime to make sure all of your input settings are being used properly.
Now, at this point I always have a fairly clear signal, but with an annoying underlying buzz.
To get rid of the buzz, I open a new Quicktime recording, and turn up the volume slider on it so I can hear the passthrough again. Then, I open the Audio Midi Setup in the Utilities folder, and mess around with the channels drop-down menu. In my case, it was set at 44.1kHz, with 2ch-16bit. Changing to 2ch-8bit produces a different, yet equally annoying noise tone. If I change to 1ch-16bit though, it's crystal clear (or at least as clear as the iMic is going to give me).
If you want to use 48kHz, you'll have to set it, then restart quicktime to test it out, as it will go silent otherwise.
I usually use a Seinheiser G2 wireless Lav Mic setup with the iMic. I don't have a sound booth, so by going wireless, I can leave the room and go into a nearby quiet room to do the recording. I use the lav because my only other choice is a shotgun, and the lav has a lot less ambient noise.
A few days ago RED quietly released a beta plug-in for the Log and Transfer tool in FCP that makes the RED workflow very similar to the P2 workflow. I tried it out yesterday, and it worked well.
