hvx sound quality

[Filip Staresinic]

I recently bought my HVX. In the first tests I was dissapointed about its internal mic sound quality, it was poor with very low volume. But as I knew that I will not use this mic for recording and that I will use my Rode NTG2 shotgun I was not concerned. Now with rode the sound is better but not to much. I made lots of tests and combinations and if this what I am getting is its sound quality then I must say HVX sucks. I bought it to make movies and now sound is not good enough for this. I mean what should I do now, buy external sound recording unit that costs as much as camera it self?
The volume is not high enough, yes when I turn volume wheel almost to the end but then there is too much noise. I've read that on the volume meter the dots need to go to second line for best results. Yes they are going to it but the quality and volume are not there.
Just say is this normal. (speaking about in camera mic).When the volume wheels are positioned in the center so arrow goes straight up and I am 2m in front of camera I am getting the sound that is so quiet that I have difficulties to understand recorded speech. With Rode it is just a little bit better. In the best situation when mic is 1mm from actor and volume is set to be good enough the quality is still not there, my friends 500$ dv handycam has better sound. I can not shoot my films with this sound quality.
On the volume meter if dots just slightly pass second line a slight distortion of the sound can be heard even when mic alc is on.
If somebody has some experience about this, please comment.

[William_Robinette]

Where do you have your Rode mic positioned?

If it is on your camera then that is your problem.

[Filip Staresinic]

It is positioned on the boom pole.

[Angry Ostrich]

It is positioned on the boom pole.

Even if it was on the camera the difference should be huge. I agree that the built in mic on the HVX is worse than a $500 consumer camera. Much worse. If you're not experiencing a HUGE difference with your Rode on a pole than you have one of two things going on. Either your Rode is broken or you do not have the input selected correctly. Check your signal path.

[mico]

Assuming you have the right switches on the inside of the LCD panel correct you should check to see if the line/mic switch in front of the camera is switched to mic if you are not getting a line signal in. Many people forget about this switch located in front of the camera.

The HVX audio is great and you should not be experiencing this.

[Angus_Findlay]

Another thing to check is phantom power - the NTG-2 can be powered from an AA battery or phantom powered. I would suggest leaving the battery out of the mic and phantom powering it.

[amber]

There definitely has to be a problem with your external mic. As for the quality of the
HVX internal mic, I love that its 'imperfect'. We did a lot of scenes in the mall, and
I like to use the internal hvx mic for the background 'roar/hum' of the shoppers,
and my sennheiser for the dialogue. Totally different sounds that really complement
each other, like having a shallow depth of focus... Plus the Sennheiser sounds great, and that's just from shooting the mic towards the speaker (our boom was lost the first day at the mall).

[Filip Staresinic]

I have maybe found out the problem.
When using playback function audio is allways set to 12b instead of 16b and it can not be moved to 16 alldough it is recorded at 16.
Why is that?

[Barry_Green]

This can only happen in DV mode to tape, or DV/DVCPRO25 mode. There's an option called something like "25M audio channel select" or something, and it's able to be set to 2 or 4. You'd want to set it to 2.

[Filip Staresinic]

This can only happen in DV mode to tape, or DV/DVCPRO25 mode. There's an option called something like "25M audio channel select" or something, and it's able to be set to 2 or 4. You'd want to set it to 2.
I did that but there are no changes.
Can any of you get any audio when volume adjusters are say at 10 o'clock on the volume adjusting wheel. All that I get then is silence with internal mic and some very, very quiet sounds from Rode ntg2.

[Robbie Comeau]

Fil, i have my ntg-2 rode mic on a rode boom pole, and the sound is great! this is for a dvx though