The RODE VideoMic NTG is the best on-camera mic to get clear audio outdoors. It comes with a shock mount for reduced vibration, a windscreen for wing reduction, multiple high pass filters, a safety channel, a gain knob, and much more. In this video, you will see and hear why I prefer this mic over any other.
Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video.
If you ever wanted to get better quality audio in camera with a microphone on top of your camera outside with all the ambient noises going on, this is the video for you. Hey, this has got one kid, the woods, a storyteller with a camera talking about all the things photographers like you and I are thinking about. And this video, I am here in the sun, on my deck, and it is noisy out here. There’s wind there’s traffic, there’s cats and construction going on, and a whole bunch of stuff happening all at once. And in fact, uh, I’m actually losing my voice. So that is even better to record this video because I can only get so loud. So I thought I would take a moment and just share exactly what I’m using to get such good audio in camera. As you can see, I am not miked up.
I have one microphone on top of the camera and it’s just set up perfectly for exactly this situation. So here’s what I did. First of all, I have the road video mic and TG sitting on top of the camera. I used to use the video mic pro and then I use the video mic pro plus, and then the video mic NTG came out and it’s even better for a few reasons. One is just a better shotgun mic in general. And two, it actually has the ability to move in and out, I mean, forward and back so that the microphone was actually in front of the lens, closer to me right now, the subject and further away from the camera and everything else behind it. In addition, it has better filtering and it has a better boosting of the game. It even has a dial so I can enhance and increase the volume of the game inside the microphone.
This is not a review of the road, video mic NTG, but I will say that it is the best on-camera microphone I have ever used. I mean, that’s not saying much, cause I’ve only used a few of them, but, but it’s the best one I’ve used. There’s a catch when you’re doing audio in your camera, the preamp built into your camera is not that great. In fact, the more gain you put on that preempt in your camera, the mic volume, the more noise you will wind up getting. So we actually recommend keeping that as low as possible. And that’s one of the nice things about the road video mic NTG is that the volume, the gain on the microphone itself counteracts the poor game on the preamp in the camera. So I actually leave the game on the road, video mic NTG all the way up.
And I have the volume of the mic, the gain of the pre-emp in the camera set to minus four, which is almost as low as I can go. Zero would be nothing. It would be muted one, two, three, and then four. And I leave it at four, whenever I’m outside. If I’m closer to the camera inside L actually lower that down to three or two, depending on what else is going on. Furnace, air condition, fans, things like that. So right now I am going to just stay quiet and let you hear the ambient noises that you get out of this microphone in camera. This is doing nothing, nothing right now in post-processing okay, now I’m going to the same thing, but instead of leaving it as the default, I’m actually going to do a little bit of enhancement. What I normally do with my voice and things like that when I’m outside, I’m going to do right now, but I’m going to stay quiet so you can hear what that sounds like.
My daughter is staring at me at the window, so I was just making some noises or symbols at her. So there you go. That is what I do, uh, both with the microphone and then in camera itself. Other than that, I’ll show you what I do on the computer in final cut pro to further enhance the audio for voice. And if you liked this video, click that subscribe button below right now, I publish new videos every Monday and Thursday, whatever possible you don’t want to miss it and be sure to karate kick the notification bell.
