Q:

What is an acceptable noise floor for recording foley in a quiet room

Recording some foley mostly backpack movements and chair sitting downs and ups in (any wild ideas out there other than mimicking the real thing?
Anyways, my noise floor is -50.5 dbA from SankenCS1e to MixPre and Zoom H4n.  I have a 30dB pad between the recorder and mixer and have to crank the MixPre pretty high to get the right signal.
Whats an acceptable noise floor to most situations?

A:

why are you running a pad and then jacking up the preamp?  Pull the pad out and turn the pre down.  With the mix pre as your front end you should be totally fine to cut foley with that rig assuming that you're in a very quiet room.
generally foley noise floors can be moderately forgiving since they'll be interplaying with the location audio from the dialogue track, but you do want to be careful not to have a bunch of noise ganging up on you across multiple tracks.  Backpacks are also relatively loud things to cut so if you're experiencing too much noise I'd look either at your room or your gain structure.
also, to answer the question in the title - acceptable is what sounds good.  Its an ear thing not a measurement thing, and it is highly dependent on context.  If the backpack is on a kid running down a city street then you're going to be able to get away with a lot more noise than if the backpack is on a student in a quiet library.

