I don't know what kleinbl00 meant, but I certainly didn't take away the same thing from his post as you did. Someone who knows what they're doing isn't necessarily a professional, it could just be a friend of yours that has some recording experience. However, I think the main point, which would also be my advice, is that you should experiment a bit yourself, and try things out to learn about the process. This doesn't mean get time in a professional studio, it means get some simple, but functional equipment that you can use at home, and start small. For software, I personally make music, so I don't know exactly what you would need, but if you want to keep it above board and buy it, I've heard good things about Reaper, which only costs $60. A free alternative is Audacity, which is probably a bit less user friendly than commercial software, but it's certainly functional, and has a lot of available effects. The biggest downside with Audacity for me is that its effects are mainly not real time, that is you don't just drop a plug-in on the track and hear its effects immediately, you usually input the settings into the effect, and then apply the processing, which then permanently changes the recorded audio (you can still undo). For equipment, you would need either an audio interface to plug your microphone directly into your computer, or a hard disk recorder of some kind. I recommend looking into M-Audio, since they make stuff that is pretty cheap, and still fairly good. If you want to rent, I have never done that myself, so I don't know, but it's fair to point out that if you just buy cheap equipment, your recording will obviously sound less good in the end. For practice, though, owning your own equipment is a lot simpler, and you will have time to learn. You can still do a lot of things with cheap equipment, and as long as your recording is halfway compentent, the content will be the most important thing, rather than the production value. You will have to invest a lot of time in order to learn how to do it yourself, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, and it's very satisfying. The reason you should start small is that you'll probably make something crappy the first time you try, and then you'll learn from that experience and make something better next time. Good luck!
Here's the problem: You're willing to experiment, and your handle on the subject is "a hard disk recorder of some kind." You're wrong, by the way - if you wanted to do it on the cheap, you could effectively run a boom mic into an iPhone. But that requires knowing a lot more about what's going on than we've been told and there are many, many ways to screw it up between here and there. I'll say this: a non-negligible portion of my income in 2010 was from indie pikers who thought they could do it themselves and then ended up needing to reshoot because, well, they were wrong. Which effectively doubles your shooting days and, therefore, the budget. When someone says "I wanna learn about mixing audio" I have a very different response. When someone says "I'm stuck doing this somebody keep me from totally screwing it up" I have a very different response. But when someone says "help me spend not nearly enough on gear I don't understand to do a task I'd rather not do" the answer will always be "find someone who WANTS to do it and pay them what they ask for."
That's why I asked. Obviously I had no idea what I was asking for in particular the thought of using a professional hadn't even occurred to me. After sleeping on it the idea becomes more and more appealing as then I don't have to be responsible for our entire groups failure because I hit the "Bennett hill" button half way through.But when someone says "help me spend not nearly enough on gear I don't understand to do a task I'd rather not do" the answer will always be "find someone who WANTS to do it and pay them what they ask for."
Good on ya. Everybody on set can look at an image and say "that's too dark/light/blurry/close/far/vivid/dull/etc." Everybody on set can listen and say "that doesn't sound good." Knowing what's wrongis most of fixing it and it takes more experience to identify sound problems.
I guess I misread the situation, I thought mknod might be interested in learning how to do recording themselves, but looking back it doesn't sound like that's the case.