GH1 Audio..?

MyFilmPro

MyFilmPro

Active member
Hello,

I'm a film teacher at a secondary school and I'm trying to make the process of using the GH1 as smooth as possible for the students. I'm trying to have it so they don't need to sync sound. So my question is:

Is the GH1's audio good enough for a student film?

thanks.
 
stonebat said:
Please teach them how to sync. That's the way to go. I learned the hard way.
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Oh absolutely... I have groups that do... but one step at a time... they are high school... they can only learn one thing at a time... :)

Also, with no budget, if I can get away with not needed a h4n then thats good too... would the H1 from zoom work?
 
MyFilmPro said:
What about the audio on a Magic Lantern Canon t2i?
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I actually use this daily for my work (mostly documentary style shoots).

The biggest issue is the range, as has already been mentioned. More specifically, the camera's amplifier introduces noise if you need to pump it up, which leaves a narrow range of volume between noise floor and peak levels.

What I do is feed a hot signal into the camera that is already slightly amplified (using the AF out of a Sennheiser G2 wireless lav system), or a dynamic mic going into a cheapo preamp like the Fiio F5, keeping the T2i's gains set at ZERO whenever possible.

While this won't replace the kind of projects that require a dedicated sound engineer, I've personally gotten perfectly usable audio this way for most purposes. I think it would be more than good enough for a student film.

...but, that's the Canon T2i. If you're going with a GH (and I understand there are plenty of reasons to prefer that camera), I'm not sure that you have many options for decent in-camera audio. This is actually one of the reasons my main cam is still a Canon- workflow is so much faster for me.
 
Here is some GH1 audio using the cam mic from 40-50 ish feet from the speaker and 75 ish feet from the stage. IMO, if you are not going to mic the film properly, slapping a recorder or shotgun on the camera is going to be a marginal improvement. If "close enough" counts then any of the above suggestions will work.
 
The audio from the GH1 mics has surprized me at times, sure you don't have any real control over it, but for simple audio where there is continuous background noise and a close by voice it's fine. Outdoors i've mounted a REdHead deadcat windscreen over the in-camera mics and it performs quite well. (hold it in place with a rubber band around the EVF and Redhead.
 
ChipThome said:
Here is some GH1 audio using the cam mic from 40-50 ish feet from the speaker and 75 ish feet from the stage. IMO, if you are not going to mic the film properly, slapping a recorder or shotgun on the camera is going to be a marginal improvement. If "close enough" counts then any of the above suggestions will work.
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Yeah, just to be clear, they have been taugh propper mic technique... get it close! And using fairly good audio technica mics... the goal is to have them make really GOOD films, not "good enough" films.

I've been looking at the zoom h1 as an option. Any coments?
 
MyFilmPro said:
Yeah, just to be clear, they have been taugh propper mic technique... get it close! And using fairly good audio technica mics... the goal is to have them make really GOOD films, not "good enough" films.

I've been looking at the zoom h1 as an option. Any coments?
Click to expand...

Then either get a T2i w/Magic Lantern (if you want to avoid the whole dual-system thing), or get a Zoom H4N.

The H1 is ok, but once you're already forgoing the proaudio features of the H4 (XLR inputs, etc) its really more of a consumer edition device that I would expect to yield the same results as a Canon with Magic Lantern.

Which again, I use daily and have never found anything to complain about!
 
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