 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here I was recently talking in one of my camcorder groups on Facebook There's a very good one for Canon X a 40 camcorder owners talking about Something related to microphones and someone mentioned that using a pistol Microphone grip would be a good idea now. I must admit I had never heard of these things But I'm gonna explain what they are what you can use them for and a quicker and cheaper way to make one for yourself So basically when you are using a shotgun microphone like the one I have I'm speaking into on top of my camcorder here Generally the they're very directional and the closer you can get them to the voice of the speaker Without crossing into the frame line the better the audio pickup. You're usually going to get so in big movie productions People are probably familiar with the sight of a boom operator Who's got a big pole and a shotgun microphone at the end and his job is to get it in something that someone recommended that people can do on a more kind of rookie or solo operator friendly level is to just have a decent XLR cable and put your shotgun microphone into a Shock mount and then if you've got one hand on the camera You can have one hand on your microphone and sort of try to do a DIY boom job yourself of trying to get the Mic in closer to your interview subject so you can do this by yourself or if you have a second person that'd be great now I was expect I was not expecting these devices are basically just a hand grip and a shock mount together I wasn't expecting them to really cost as much as they did I didn't I only found one or two on Amazon and they were like a hundred bucks and a lot of people were Complaining about the price of them. So I thought to myself well I probably actually already have enough stuff in my camera box to make these without even needing to Get anything new and it turns out I did so let me show you what you can do If you want to save yourself a bit of money first thing I had is this pistol grip and I use this for my old camcorder the Canon Vixia HFR 800 And it's just a little thing that fits into your hand like this It makes it a bit easier to grip and stabilize your camcorder. It has a quarter inch head and little Thumb mechanism. The second thing I needed is a shock mount. This is a rather large shock mount You can get them in different sizes. I mean you have to pay attention to the thread size on the inside This is where it starts to get very finicky because if anyone anyone who's Experimented with microphones and audio gear knows there is one over four three over eight and five over eight What I find helpful is buying a thread adapter kit that gives you a ton of different permutations so this what I have here to the best of my knowledge. It's one over four female. That's a One over four female at the bottom here and coming up as a three over eight male So it's a female to male Thread size extender I guess because we're adding to the thread size. So taking my shock mount. I simply screw in my thread adapter making sure it's Good and tight. So now that's All the way in and then I just take my Grip now it's definitely as you can see this is not a work of beauty There we go. I'm just making sure it's screwed fully But it should get the job done. So now I've got myself a little handheld grip I'm what I can do is just thread a microphone through this with the decently decently sized XLR cable I can even adjust the position of the microphone here and then with one hand on my camera I can actually and it's gonna might look a little bit funny But I can use this for a sort of a manual boom method So that's the way if you don't want to pay the 90 dollars for one of these and you happen to have or you can Even buy these components by components. These were about 10 $15 the pistol grips shock mount It's probably the same and threaded afters are a couple of dollars each So with the cumulative tote cumulative cost of these components is still actually going to be quite a bit less than the Ready assembled ones, but it won't look quite as pretty Arguably what this should get the job done and I've been using it for a couple of videos I just played around with it and seems to do a good job at getting your getting the microphone in closer to the Person you're trying to record. Thanks for watching this video If you'd like to get more videos from me about everything related to camcorder technology and other subjects, please subscribe to this YouTube channel Thank you for watching