 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I want to do a video today about using external microphones with the Femi Pan 2 Pocket Gimbal. Just a few notes about it and what I want to do in this video is show a sort of workaround, if you will, to try and get proper levels without having to do all this kind of fixing and post-production. Just one caveat, I'm learning video. I'm not trying to present myself as a professional videographer. As I learned and as I figure things out, I post them on YouTube just in case it helps other people who are also trying to improve their video production. The Femi Pan 2 is essentially a carbon copy of the DJI Osmo Pocket or Pocket 2. Probably fair to say in most respects, it's not as good. There are people who actually like it. I went for it because it was a bit cheaper and easier to just play around with. Regarding collecting audio, there is an audio jack here on the back of 3.5mm. If you ask me, my opinion, it's placement just below the lens is very problematic. Why would you want to use an external microphone? Well, in general, whether you're talking about camcorders or DSLRs or pocket gimbals, the internal microphone is generally going to be less good than an external microphone. A second problem is that the internal microphone on the Femi is located to the best of my knowledge, this little pin here, which means that if I'm going to turn this guy on for a second, if I was shooting an interview and I had my Femi Pan 2 like this and it's facing outwards, I have my monitor joystick and my record button here, but the audio collection is going to be from this side. I want to get audio from the subject side. So that's why using the external microphone is useful, both in proven quality and being able to determine what field you're capturing audio from. If I turn a shotgun or a directional microphone this way, I'm getting audio here, I can turn it this way, but if I've only got one microphone on the front, I'm very limited. The best I can kind of do as a workaround is to pop this guy into selfie mode and now the microphone is going to be on the same side as the field we're shooting in. But that doesn't work so well. If you're trying to do an interview, you could kind of hold it towards your subject like this, but it's not ideal. One other limitation on the Femi Pan 2 is that it does not have, when you connect a microphone, you do get a mic connected sign, but it doesn't have a decent level meter. And when you don't have a decent level meter, you're kind of flying blind in terms of what the levels are, what the audio quality I frequently, when I've been playing around recorded with an external microphone, then popped out the SD card and realized that my clips were unusable because the levels were not working right. So when you don't have a level meter or even for that matter, a monitoring function, there isn't a headphones out. It's very difficult to make sure that you're going to, you're going to, if you're doing something like an interview that you don't want to reshoot that you're getting good audio the first time. So one workaround that's come to my mind is to use the trustee Zoom H1N field recorder. The beauty of the Zoom H1N is that it gives you a lot of options. You can record while you're passing audio through. So there's a line out here and there's on this side and there's a line in on this side. So what this means is that you can connect a microphone into the line in, whether that's a lav mic or even the receiver on a wireless microphone or a shotgun microphone or whatever the case may be, the Zoom H1N is only 3.5. There's no XLR jacks on this particular device. And then you can pass it through into the camcorder or into a pocket gimbal. And what that means, and because it's got line out, you can monitor as you do that. So you can actually put on some headphones, listen, see that the audio is sounding good, and then know that what you're popping out to the next device is going to be good. You're also going to be using the preamps built into the Zoom H1N and not relying on the likely much inferior ones in the actual device itself. And there's a final reason that you've got very granular level control. You're going to have a good level meter here and there's a gain trim here. So basically the workflow that I'm suggesting is using a external microphone, I've only got two hands unfortunately, running that through the Zoom H1N and then going from the Zoom H1N into the pocket gimbal. Now I'm going to put this guy on another one of these Yulanzi tripod things. So that's a little bit easier to demonstrate this for this camera. So here's my Zoom, here's my pocket gimbal here. So I'm just going to keep that like this. Now, for monitoring, you're going to want either a some kind of a pair of headphones. I do use these ARS Technica Audio Technica headphones that I find really, really good. They are the product name is probably written somewhere in sight here. I'm using whatever, I'll put it in the video description, but these are super good. And so I'm just going to pop these on in a second actually. And what will be firstly is I'm going to just power on my external microphone. So let's say I'm using this comic a track shot microphone. Now this is a little bit complicated because it's got a gain meter. So there's going to be a gain control on this guy. And then again on the on the Zoom H1N before finally patching it through. If you have a microphone that doesn't have a gain level, then you've only got one to work about. But I'm just going to keep the gain on this guy at about, let's say five, four, actually, I'm just looking at the level meter there and trying to see somewhere that it's not clipping on. So that's powered on. And let's say this is the external microphone you want to use. So now I'm going to turn on my Zoom H1N. And I'm going to connect my microphone into the line in that's the red 3.5 mil jack. The other one is line out that's color coded green. So it's very easy. So I'm going to go line in now. And now my Zoom H1N is acting as a recorder to this microphone, but not only can it record, it can pass through if I use a 3.5 mil patch cable to go from there to this. Now one really cool thing about the Zoom H1N is that you can not only, you can not only record, you can actually you can record to the SD card as you do that patch through things. So for instance, I can be recording for syncing up and post as they put it through to the camcorder. So the final thing we're going to need in the setup, and yes, this is going to be a tiny bit more work than just popping this guy out to shoot an interview, but you might end up with substantially better sound quality. So I'm using a patch cable. In other words, a 3.5 mil male to male cable. It's got a male connection on each side. Now here's why I've got this guy in the tripod. I'm going to put that in and I'm going to turn this guy on. And then once it's got a microphone, we should get a mic connected indicator here. It's not currently showing because there's no live microphone on the other side. Let's just keep this here for the moment. And now we're going to go line out on the zoom H1N. And now we have that microphone symbol has appeared on the feme. So to the best of my abilities here, what I'm going to do is monitor the audio coming from this side. And I'm just going to put these guys on for a second. So now I can monitor. So now I'm hearing the actual feed. So here's what we have going on. There's the comic attract shot microphone. I'm actually using the onboard monitoring feature on this, which not all microphones have. Now you could monitor from the zoom H1N. I believe if you used a Y splitter from the line out, because you're going to want one of those lines to go out to the feme. And you want another one to go out to your monitoring headphones. And this is the ultimate setup I have. And then this line out is passing into the feme. So just to kind of re explain what I'm doing here one more time, microphone, passing it through the zoom H1N, I can hit the record button and grab and I can also look at those levels. So those levels are actually a little bit high. And now as I speak, I've got the zoom H1N set to 6.5. There are about no six on the game training. And I can see that I'm getting peaks at about the minus six DB level. And that's going out into this. So now basically the advantage of just simply connecting, you know, this microphone straight into the feme pan too, is I can see what the levels are like as I'm speaking as I'm listening to somebody. And I'm not going to be in for some unpleasant surprises. Hopefully by the time it comes to post production and finding out that the audio I captured from an external microphone was just completely useless. This hopefully eliminates that possibility. I've done a couple of test recordings with it and seemed pretty good. In other words, the levels that I was that I was getting from the zoom H1N were pretty much well reflected in the audio as it captures captured out of this. Hope this video was useful. If you want to get more videos from me, please subscribe to this YouTube channel.