From the course: Video Gear: Audio

Introduction to the Zoom H4n

From the course: Video Gear: Audio

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Introduction to the Zoom H4n

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- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington - And I'm Robert Carman. - Welcome to this week's episode of Video Gear Weekly. Rob, you know the Zoom H4n? - Yeah. - [Rich] Venerable, been around for a long time, love it. - Yeah I mean, in the days of sort of the DSLR revolution, at the start of it, people kind of quickly realized that their DSLRs did not do one thing particularly well and that was record audio. So, therefore, they started looking for alternatives and that meant an external digital audio recorder. And the Zoom H4n and others like it, there's made by TASCAM and others out there. Kind of in this form factor were really, really popular because they provided sort of hard disk record. Not truly hard disk, but to an SD card and that kind of thing. Also, depending on the model, including the Zoom here, you also had built-in microphones, so you had another way of getting audio in. This, of course, meant that you had to sync it in post and stuff, but yeah the Zoom has really become quite popular because not only can it record stereo audio, it can also do things like record four track audio, add effects such as EQ and things of that nature. You can adjust sort of the phase and the positioning of the microphones and overall, Rich, I would say yeah, it's been a very versatile recorder. And I've seen others, some newer models out there, this one's still very popular. They have the H5, and the H6 now, and that kind of stuff. But still, to this day, when you look at a lot of people's kits, this in it. - And we've actually explored this on another show here that we do on Lynda.com, called DSLR Video Tips. We took a look at some of these audio recorder options. Today, we want to actually go beyond the H4n and talk about alternatives to recording to your computer. We've got a whole pile of stuff here and we're going to use computers, cameras, extra gear. We just want to walk you through some-- - No robots? - No robots today, but we want to walk you through some extra choices that you might have because, as good as this is, it's not the perfect workflow for everybody. - Yep. - And it's always good to have a backup. So we'll give you some fresh ideas on this week's episode.

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