MarcusBrody
Member
The project I'm most concerned about is a documentary of a white rural American family traveling to India for their son's wedding. There will be some interviews as well as run and gun footage from the city/airport/etc and probably even a few staged scenes to set things up. This isn't a professional project, but it will be the only way some of the non-attending family members will see the whole shebang, so I'd obviously like it to turn out as well s possible.
I had been set on picking up a Videomic Pro to use with my GH2, but with the recent Videomic price drop, I've been reconsidering my options. For roughly the same price as the VMP, I could get the original video mic, an Zoom H1 (or equivalent) and possibly a (cheap) wired lav. I know a lot of people on this board migrated from the Videomic to the Videomic Pro. What would you say the advantages and disadvantages of going each route are and which way would you go? I've read a lot of old threads, and it seems that on its own the VMP certainly is worth the upgrade from the VM for use with the GH2, but I'm curious if the more experienced folk on here would take the flexibility of external recording and the additional mics over the boost in performance coming with the VMP.
My preliminary list of pros for each:
VMP:
1. Better sound when hooked straight into the camera given the ability to turn up mic gain (I would probably do this at least sometime for short shots when traveling)
2. Better on camera form factor (I don't like how the VM sticks out the back of the camera making the EVF hard to use. I'd have to rig up a mount to eliminate this.
3. Smaller package (I'll be traveling with a huge variety of stuff -camera-related and not- so a single mic is appealing).
VM+external recorder:
1. Possible better sound quality?
2. Flexibility of the extra mic (record away from the camera, record ambient through Zoom mic while shotgun focuses on whoever is talking)
3. Ability to hook up to a lav and directly mic more discrete areas (on body or otherwise).
So, do any of you more experienced types have any advice? If you had access to either package, which would you expect to get better sound from? Do you prefer any of the small Tascam recorders to the H1, which I'm not at all wedded to?
Obviously the ideal solution sound-wise would be to grab the Videomic Pro, a decent external recorder, a lav setup, and maybe even a hypercardoid, but as I'm the one getting married, that doesn't seem like it's going to be financially feasible (I have some other stuff I need for the video project as well). So what would you do?
Thanks!
I had been set on picking up a Videomic Pro to use with my GH2, but with the recent Videomic price drop, I've been reconsidering my options. For roughly the same price as the VMP, I could get the original video mic, an Zoom H1 (or equivalent) and possibly a (cheap) wired lav. I know a lot of people on this board migrated from the Videomic to the Videomic Pro. What would you say the advantages and disadvantages of going each route are and which way would you go? I've read a lot of old threads, and it seems that on its own the VMP certainly is worth the upgrade from the VM for use with the GH2, but I'm curious if the more experienced folk on here would take the flexibility of external recording and the additional mics over the boost in performance coming with the VMP.
My preliminary list of pros for each:
VMP:
1. Better sound when hooked straight into the camera given the ability to turn up mic gain (I would probably do this at least sometime for short shots when traveling)
2. Better on camera form factor (I don't like how the VM sticks out the back of the camera making the EVF hard to use. I'd have to rig up a mount to eliminate this.
3. Smaller package (I'll be traveling with a huge variety of stuff -camera-related and not- so a single mic is appealing).
VM+external recorder:
1. Possible better sound quality?
2. Flexibility of the extra mic (record away from the camera, record ambient through Zoom mic while shotgun focuses on whoever is talking)
3. Ability to hook up to a lav and directly mic more discrete areas (on body or otherwise).
So, do any of you more experienced types have any advice? If you had access to either package, which would you expect to get better sound from? Do you prefer any of the small Tascam recorders to the H1, which I'm not at all wedded to?
Obviously the ideal solution sound-wise would be to grab the Videomic Pro, a decent external recorder, a lav setup, and maybe even a hypercardoid, but as I'm the one getting married, that doesn't seem like it's going to be financially feasible (I have some other stuff I need for the video project as well). So what would you do?
Thanks!