Rode VideoMic Pro Questions

[Cynthia West]

For those of you that are using the new Rode VideoMic pro on your DSLR, what lenses have you used while recording sound? Wondering about the quality of using it on a 500mm lens for subjects that are fairly close.
Any other suggestions/comments for using this Mic are appreciated. Would love to hear samples if you have a video and can post a link to it.
Thanks, Cynthia

[Roger Clark]

Cynthia,

I took a videomic pro to Africa in February, and used it with wide-angle lenses and a 5D2 and a little on a 300 f/2.8 on a 1D4. Its performance was impressive. I just got the fuzzy cover for minimizing wind effects, but have not yet tried it. But the microphone did a great job of picking up sound from distant animals

I don't have anything to post yet, as I'm in the process of changing computers as my old one is dying. And I'm taking the hard route: changes from 32 to 64 bit, and moving most operations to linux, with windows 7 in virtualbox under linux. Then I want to process more stills before video (actually I need to find software that will stabilize an image for some clips).

Roger

[Roger Clark]

Cynthia,
Check out Norm's video:
http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/82372-The-Swans-of-Fairlee-Creek

In the thread discussion, he says where he used a Rode VideoMic Pro.

Roger

[Norm Dulak]

Hi Cynthia.

I don't have a 500mm lens but can tell you something about my experience with the Rode VideoMic Pro.

Both it and the microphone built into my Nikon D7000 work very well recording video using my Nikkor 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 vrII lens.

When using my Nikkor 300mm f/4 lens with a 1.4X TC recording video using the camera's built-in microphone, however, an annoying, periodic noise can be heard that ruins the sound recording. The Rode microphone completely eliminates the noise and produces crystal clear bird sound recordings.

One further advantage of the Rode is that you can quickly adjust the sensitivity, depending on the intensity of the sound you want to record, going from the normal "0" setting, to -10 db to tame very loud sounds, or to + 20 db to bring in weaker, more distant sounds.

Based upon my experience, I'm very pleased with my VideoMic Pro microphone.

Norm

[Cynthia West]

Roger and Norm,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my question. Norm nice video, it really shows how important sound is to video, thanks for sharing.

[Dave Spates]

Here is a video I took of a lark bunting using a 300mm f/4 and 1.4x teleconverter, Rode video mic pro, top switch in center and at 0 db, still messing with the mic settings to see which works best. I didn't do any editing to the sound and also have a wind muff thingy on it. http://youtu.be/FXHrhaBy8j0