My mic. setup vs. the Zoom H2n. Is this good enough?

Lucas 7D

Lucas 7D

Active member
Hi guys

What do you think of this setup for interviews? A few years ago i bought a few of these iriver 790 mp3 players with line in/mic in capability and paired them with Giant squid mono lav mics. I used this setup for wedding bride/groom/priest audio recording giving me 3 channels to sync with video via film slate. The result sounded good.

Now I got a 7D and want to get back into shooting some interviews and i pulled these out of storage. Is my set up good or should I be going with a Zoom H2n? My mp3 players ane small and I can slip them into the subject's pocket and shot with a directional mic plugged into camera as well for extra security.

I dont know much about sound tech so please educate me a little.

here are the links to the mp3 player and giant squid mics.

http://www.amazon.com/iriver-IFP-79...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1257665903&sr=8-1

http://www.giant-squid-audio-lab.com/
 
From my point of view that seems like it would work fine.

The H4N is $300+ the reason I justified buying it is I will be shooting narrative style stuff. I want crisp recordings of just the actors voice since I don't have access to an ADR room. I also want to be able to plug in Shoot gun mic with the XLR jack on the H4N.

If your recording something like an interview in a closed of quite room and arent looking to win any festival awards with it those little things should work just fine. Easy to conceal and record shoot with the directional mic plugged in too just in case like you said. It can also make for syncing the audio much easier.

Im sure a lot of techies hear will disagree and talk about bit rates and sampling and such but really, if it sounded decent to your ear when you did the wedding why wouldnt it be just fine with an interview thats probably going on the net, correct??
 
The Zoom H2N can record wave files at high quality. MP3 files are compressed a lot compared to wave files. There's just not as much there to work with as a wave file. Sound recording, like image capture, benefits from more data on the initial capture when you get to post production.

You should be able to plug the GS mic into the H2N and you will always get a better recording with the mic closer to the talent.

The H2N records in stereo so get a splitter cable for the input. You can plug two mics into it and they'll each be on their own channel. You can't control the volume of the channels independently but that's a small trade off for the increase in quality.

You can use the 7D mic and audio for sync only as it's no better than MP3.

-a-
 
Just listened to this series of tests with various audio devices and a 5D, should be the same with the 7D.

http://vimeo.com/5903379

They show using the camera to record as well as stand alone recorders.

From my perspective, I recommend capturing as many audio tracks as possible, especially with interviews. You can roll the scene, check the audio and shoot another take. What you get is what you get the first time. So I always run two devices attempting to get great sound on both. Besides the safety factor, it's great to have options in post.

With everything else we go through to get a shot, it seems well worth the effort and expense to make sure the audio is captured cleanly as possible.

-a-
 
brunsona said:
So I always run two devices attempting to get great sound on both. Besides the safety factor, it's great to have options in post.

With everything else we go through to get a shot, it seems well worth the effort and expense to make sure the audio is captured cleanly as possible.

-a-
Click to expand...

Agreed. I would've botched an interview because a mic cable ran too close to a wireless device and had the horrid cell phone blipping. Thankfully I was using a separate area mic and still had the stereo pattern mics on my H4N and was able to cut out the noise
 
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