Rode VideoMic Field Recording

[Kevin Pineda]

I have a question regarding field recording. When I purchased a canon hv30 months ago, I also bought a rode video mic complete with the boom pole and VC1 extension. However, now that I moved from the HV30 to the XHA1s, I need a good audio capture device. I tried to connect the rode to a voice recorder, it works, however, its picking up some echo and doesn't really sound to good. Im guessing this is because the voice recorder doesn't have a preamp?

Is it best to just record the audio using the hv30? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Kevin Michael

I have a question regarding field recording. When I purchased a canon hv30 months ago, I also bought a rode video mic complete with the boom pole and VC1 extension. However, now that I moved from the HV30 to the XHA1s, I need a good audio capture device. I tried to connect the rode to a voice recorder, it works, however, its picking up some echo and doesn't really sound to good. Im guessing this is because the voice recorder doesn't have a preamp?

Is it best to just record the audio using the hv30? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

What's wrong with recording to the XHA1?

As they say in real estate, it's a matter of "location, location, location." You didn't mention what recorder you were using or what file format you were recording to but the first thing to check if your sound isn't to your liking is the position of the mic and the sound qualities of your location. Microphone position is the single most important factor for quality sound and its proximity to the subject makes a far greater difference in the recording than does any differences between recording devices.

[Kevin Pineda]

The reason im not plugging into the xha1 is because that camera is constantly moving around on the steadicam. So I think it would be a little difficult to really keep roving around like that. I tried using the Olympus WS321 voice recorder to capture the audio, which records to WMA files that can be directly transferred to the comp. I didn't really do a direct test on the boom pole, just hand held the mic while it was plugged into the voice recorder. I also did not have the dead cat slipped on, the mic picked up just about every ambient sound in the room.

[Steve House]

WMA is a highly compressed format that will give you all sorts of grief when you try to edit it in post and sync it to your video. If you're going to record double system, use a recorder that allows you to record to an uncompressed PCM format such as a WAV or BWF file. Using a compressed format like WMA or MP3 is begging for trouble.

That being said, the recorder or the file format aren't the immediate cause of the issues you're having. The "dead cat" is for wind protection and will have little or no effect on room noise. If you look at the polar pattern on the Rode web site you'll see the Videomic has a fairly broad front lobe and a relatively large rear lobe below 1000 Hz with good directivity only in the higher frequencies up toward 4kHz. Its "beam" of maximum sensitivity is more like a floodlight bounced off a reflector than it is a sharply focused spot. In normal interior locations the mic is subject to reflected sound hitting it from all directions as well as ambient noise itself. If you're some distance from the subject, as I'll bet you are, the inverse square law is going to be working against you and the desired sound you're looking to record isn't going to be much louder than the surrounding noises. To properly isolate the subject from the ambience, the mic must be close to the speaker, ideally no more than 2 out to perhaps 3 feet away from them. Anything farther will be trouble. Because of the frequency dependent directivity of a shotgun style, line-gradient mic, hypercardioids are usually recommended over shotguns for interior work to minimize the distortions introduced by mixing direct and reflected sounds in the mic.