Rode Mic
 

I need a good mic to do wedding interviews at the reception. A friend of mind gave me a brand new Rode NTG-2 Mic. I was wondering if this is a good on board mic for my Sony VX2000? I would only use it to record the interviews

Gary

The Rode is an excellent mic for the price, very competitive with mics costing quite a bit more. BUT there is NO mic made at any price that will really do well for interviews if you mount it on your camera! Zip, nada, none! The reason, in addition to picking up camera and handling noise, is that the camera position is almost always going to be too far away from the voice for any mic to work well unless you're sticking the lens right up the subject's nose. In a quiet environment (which a wedding interview situation definitely is not!) you can work a short shotgun from about 24 to 36 inches from the subject's mouth. In a noisy room 24 inches is going to be about the max you can go. You would probably get much better results if you were to buy an inexpensive hand-held dynamic reporter's mic like the ElectroVoice 635 or RE-50 or Sennheiser MD46 and hand it to the interviewee to hold while they give their spiel. After all, have you ever seen a TV news field report where the reporter didn't have a mic in their hands? That's not for show - the on-camera shotgun is for recording general ambient sounds, not interviews.