Hi. Hoping to get some advice on which to buy. I am mounting the mic on the hotshoe of a Canon T3i. My main thing is, which one would minimize focusing/zoom noise from the camera? There is also an Azden ecz-990 that I heard good things about. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
General Looking for a budget mic... Pro24cm or Azden smx-10?
- Thread starter Singhman
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Thanks for the reply flinty. Was the reason why it didn't sound good because of the AGC on the 550D or did you have it disabled through the hack?
M. Gilden
Canon DSLR Moderator
If you are planning on using the camera's mic jack, the cheap options probably won't work for you because you need a hot feed to get any kind of decent sound. Using the camera's amps are bad news, as they introduce a LOT of background noise and hiss. If you feed an amplified signal in, and keep the camera's gain at zero (or as close as possible), you can get decent audio in camera.
But in order to do that, you need something like the Rode Video Mic PRO (not the regular one), since it has a +20db preamp built in. Or an external amp like the Juiced Link or Sennheiser receiver. If you plan to use an external recorder like the Zoom H4N, that's a different story because you can use just about any half-decent mic, and you can mount it a bit away from the camera to avoid that kind of noise- perhaps even on a separate stand closer to the subject (since you don't need to be tethered to the camera) or on an external bracket or other side of a rig.
But if you want decent in-camera audio, you need a hot feed going in.
For more info, check out the audio thread in my sig.
But in order to do that, you need something like the Rode Video Mic PRO (not the regular one), since it has a +20db preamp built in. Or an external amp like the Juiced Link or Sennheiser receiver. If you plan to use an external recorder like the Zoom H4N, that's a different story because you can use just about any half-decent mic, and you can mount it a bit away from the camera to avoid that kind of noise- perhaps even on a separate stand closer to the subject (since you don't need to be tethered to the camera) or on an external bracket or other side of a rig.
But if you want decent in-camera audio, you need a hot feed going in.
For more info, check out the audio thread in my sig.
The Audio Technica ATR-55 is in that price range and has a tele mode that will give a boost to the signal that works well with the Canon DSLR and AGC disabling of Magic Lantern. I can't comment on camera noise while mounted on the camera as the one time I tried this mic I had it attached to a 6' cable and on a boom.
The ATR-55 is absolute garbage, and the "tele" mode is a very misleading marketing tool that will simply increase ambient sounds.
By the way, this question was also posted - and answered - in the audio forum. Cross-posting tends to clutter the forums.
I won't argue that the ATR-55 is garbage. I offered the suggestion since the poster seems to be shopping in the low/no budget range. The tele mode does provide a boost to the volume level and not just raise ambient sounds. It wasn't the kind of boost that the videomic pro seems to give, but it was louder than other mics I tried that don't have any kind of signal enhancing feature. The only way I could think of a mic just raising ambient sounds without doing some kind of post processing of the signal would be to change it's polar pattern maybe and the atr-55 maintains directionality when in tele mode.
I should clarify. My experiences with this mic show that it has terrible directionality. It barely qualifies as a true shotgun. This results in a higher amount of background/ambient sounds in relation to the sources directly in front of the mic than would be found in a decent shotgun. So the "tele" boost (which leads average, inexperienced consumers to believe that it has some crazy mojo that can hone in on distant sounds) merely raises the overall level. That means the background/ambient sounds are also raised, and the direct sound suffers for it.
it was no better than the on board,also i only tried it as a substitute for my Rode Stereo mic which is rather large but it is not in the same class.