UNDECIDED. (07/08/14)

The Zoom stereo microphone and recorder arrived this morning. It cost the thick end of seventy pounds sterling. It does the job but I was amazed how plasticky it felt. It uses a micro SD card that holds 2GB. I eventually popped it into it’s slot, it blew away when I sneezed, smaller than a postage stamp it is and not much thicker. It can stop where it is in it’s slot and I’ll use the USB port to pull the sound from it.

It is palm of the hand size but very ticky tacky plastic. It would be worth a bit more were it built inside a rubberised case. It would feel better if nothing else but feeling microphones is a no-no. A Cardinal sin , as a few of the many feely Cardinals would tell you. I am still waiting for twenty pounds worth of accessories to arrive. I get a hard case to keep it in, a USB cable that I don’t need, a handle for holding it and an external power supply. I have also ordered a rubber mounted hot shoe holder for it.

It can record up to 35hs of MP3 sound and about 2hs of WAV at 48khz and 24bit… that is overkill. It also has auto Low Cut and auto levels and a little light that flashes to show you if it is peaking, it is adjustable for both manually. It’s two channel but will accept a Rode or any other microphone but that drops it back to two channel not three as some reviewers state. The external microphone plug switches off it’s own X/Y axis non adjustable microphones.

      Here it is. The wire was something I have lots of it just runs to a set of JVC ear plugs so I can hear what it is doing. I gave it a whirl and with low cut and even in 20mph of wind it is spot on. I put a foam cover on and it was perfect….no wind roar at all even with the Low Cut turned off. It does hammer AA batteries but so do the strobes. That’s why Maplin sell great batteries at seventeen pounds a hundred.

I can balance both channels but don’t think I can balance them independently. I suspect if I look into it that sound editing software can. Not that I’d know what to balance. I am happy with it but there again I am a numpty, I know little about recording sound last time I did it it was four track and lots of gear which I had trouble lifting and that was forty years ago. This is so light I could forget where I had put it. I remember putting condoms over microphones it cut extraneous noise perfect.

I have not been idle I have resurrected the 3D title I was trying a year ago. I started again. I want a ten to fifteen second title in front of my videos but I would like a pile of dust that slowly rises from summat and makes the letters that go into Adrian’s Images. I then pop them on a little UV mapped image and light them. Blender is bloody hard. It is also awfully memory hungry. I could do with larger monitors. I have over fifty layers and I am no starting to bake yet I have learned to give everything meaningful names. I hope I have. I can see it ending in failure.

Have fun.