 Hi everyone, it's Rob Horlacher from Project Sandbox, a University of Lethbridge Library Initiative. In this video, we're going to look at audio kits. In our audio kits, you'll find several items. You'll find headphones, a lavalier mic, a shock mount stand for the F1 Zoom, a USB to micro USB cable, a stereo cable for DSLR cameras, the Zoom F1 audio recorder, a shotgun microphone, and four batteries, which you're probably going to roll. Also in the Zoom F1, you will be able to see that there is a micro SD card inside of it as well, that's 16 gigabytes. So there are two setups that you can do with this kit. The first setup that I'm going to go over is the shotgun mic setup. You'll need the stereo cable that will attach to a DSLR camera. That's if you are actually connecting it to a DSLR camera. You will need the shotgun microphone, the Zoom F1, two AAA batteries, headphones, if you want to listen to the sound, and then the shock mount. Once again, if you are connecting it to a DSLR camera, this shock mount will actually also connect to tripods with a standard screw size. So in order to set it up, what we need to do is first grab the Zoom F1. On the side of the Zoom F1, you will see a little door that you can pull the little trigger and pop it open. You'll be able to see that it has a positive and a negative, a little symbol, they're very hard to see, but you'll want to put in one AAA battery up and one AAA battery down. And once again, read the symbols if you want to know which ones you're actually doing that to. Once the batteries are in, you just want to flip it over and make sure that the SD card is actually inside of it. Then you will pop off this end. This little cap comes off. Make sure you save this and not throw it out because we need to put it back on afterwards. You have the Zoom F1 with a little plastic cap on there too. And then these two will just clip together like so. Once that's done, you want to grab your shock mount and clip it around here. This little piece of the shock mount right here, you want it to go on this piece of the clip. So we'll put it like that. Clip it on the side and then you'll want to bend the other side just around to go on to the other bar so that your shock mount now looks like this. After your shock mount looks like this, you can do one of two things. If you notice on the back, you probably can't see this on the camera, but it has a little headphone icon and a little mic icon. So the mic icon, it will be for the lavalier mic. Since we don't have it, you can connect your headphones into the headphone thing. And then that setup's done. If you wanted to connect this to a DSLR camera instead of the headset, what you would just need to do is take this stereo cable mic and plug that into the headphones as well. And then this end can plug into your DSLR camera. If you would like to know how to attach this to a DSLR camera, you can watch our DSLR camera video, in which case I will show you actually how to attach this. That's what you need to do for the shotgun mic setup. Now let's look at the lavalier mic setup. So for the lavalier mic setup, what you will need is the lavalier microphone, two AAA batteries, the Zoom F1 and a headset. How this one goes together is much like the shock mount. The first thing we have to do is put in the batteries. Then once the batteries are in, you'll want to make sure that the Zoom F1 cap is on that one end and that the contacts aren't showing. This is to protect the Zoom F1, so please do that. Then what you will need to do is you will have to get the lavalier mic. You will plug the end of the lavalier mic into the mic spot. Once again, you might not be able to see that on camera, but when you actually have a hold of this, you'll be able to see. So you plug it right in and you tighten it up. And that's the basics of the lavalier mic. So the reason I told you to grab out the headset is before you actually put this on your talent and actually when it's first on your talent, you'll want to make sure that the sound is OK. So just like the shotgun mic that you just saw, you'll just want to unravel your cord and plug this into the headphone jack. When your talent is actually beginning to do the recording, I would suggest removing this so that you're not tethered to the talent. The point of the lavalier mic is that it can be free and go on with you. That's why it has this little belt clip right here. So now that we know what's in both setups for the audio kit, we now need to choose which setup we want to use to do that. There are a couple of things we need to consider. Shotgun mics are particularly good at a quick setup because they can just be slid on top of a DSLR camera. They're good at capturing interviews if the interviewee is closer to the camera. They're good at capturing environmental sounds. The shotgun mic is good at picking up more of a directional sound. So basically the sound comes out of the very tip of the shotgun mic and a little bit of the left and right. So if you want to isolate a sound that's at the front of it, this is definitely the mic you want to use. The thing you want to keep in mind with it, though, is the farther away a subject is from the front of that microphone, the more ambient sound this mic is going to pick up. So if you're choosing to use this mic, just be wary that those are some things that you'll have to work with. The lavalier mic, on the other hand, is particularly good at being used for interviews. The reason that it's good for interviews is you can have the mic really close to the talent and hide it underneath different parts of their clothing. Traditional places people will actually put the mic for a lavalier is underneath collars on shirts, in scarves, in ties, in buttons. A quick Google search will be able to show you kind of the concophony of places that people will put the lavalier mic. In addition to just being good for interviews in general, if your talent is particularly far away from the camera, using a lavalier mic is a really good option because you won't get all of that ambient sound associated with if you would have used the shotgun mic. So now that we know what's in each setup and why we want to use each setup, now it's time to learn how to actually use the setups. To use a shotgun mic, we first need to turn it on. To turn it on, all I did was I pushed back this power switch just for a second or two until the screen actually turned on. Once the screen's on, you'll notice there's different things that we can look at. The first one I want to point out is gun. So what this basically means is that this is the attachment that's on there right now. What you can do with this is you can adjust this knob right here, and as you can see, as I'm adjusting it, this line right here is getting longer and shorter. This is referring to the sensitivity of the microphone. What you generally want to do is you want to have this end as close to your talent as possible and you want to have this number as low as possible. That's the best way to really make sound as clear as possible without picking up a bunch of ambient sound. Something else I want you to watch for is this limiter button. So as you look, mine is on. What limiter does is it prevents this sensitivity from peaking. This normally creates pops and awful sounds whenever you go into post-production with your recording. So if you leave the limiter on, that'll never happen, even if it's cranked all the way to 10. The next thing to notice is this low cut option. So with low cut, what it does is when you press the button, it changes the certain ranges of sounds that it cuts out. So this is really good for minimizing things like fluorescent lighting sounds and sometimes certain types of wind sounds. Finally, you'll notice recording format. So this is what types of files this thing will create after your recording. Right now, it's set to 48 kilohertz and 24 bit. This is the setting that I would leave if you were using the recording for video. Say if you're just doing something that's not that important, though, and having a small file size is better. Using one of the MP3 options would be the one you would want to go for. But since we're going to do it for video right now, we're going to leave it at 48K. So that's how you adjust the sensitivity and that's how you help it out a little bit. So once you have all that set, you can press the record button. You'll notice that it'll have a little dot that will signify that it's recording and the number is increasing. If you don't see that, try and hit the record button again because that's how it indicates that it's recording. So once you press the record button again, that will stop the recording. And if you want to review the recording, first thing I'll mention is you'll want to have headphones plugged into the back. But what you can do is just hit play. If it's not loud enough, once you see the numbers going up, you can just adjust this volume button on the left-hand side. Say you like that recording though, you can hit stop and press record again in order to continue on. So as we talked about before, this is the lavalier mic setup. You'll notice that lots of the options on it are pretty much exactly the same as the shotgun mic. The one option you will notice has changed though is instead of saying gun right here, it says mid, at least on mine, yours might say something else. What that refers to is the sensitivity level. So basically the same as that knob was for the shotgun mic. So if you watch me change the sensitivity level from mid to high plus plus, you'll notice that this bar is getting really high. What that means is when it gets to the end, like I said, it's peaking, so you don't want it to be that high. But say if we change it to auto, it'll bounce it out for you. Or you can change it to low and it'll be very, very quiet, which isn't what you would want either. So basically what you have to do is with these settings is just find a happy middle ground. Generally the middle ground, and this goes for the shotgun mic too, is somewhere between negative 12 and negative 6 decibels. That'll catch pretty much the best sound that you could go for with a video or even an interview or anything like that. The one thing that you should watch for, though, when you're using the lapel mic, is if this bar isn't moving at all. What that means is that the plug-in power is not working. So how you enable plug-in power is you press and hold this option button until the secondary menu comes up. And with that button still pressed, you want to press a limiter, which is associated with plug-in power. And you would want to change it to the on position, because as you can see, it is now off and nothing's happening. But now when I turned it on, you can see that the bar is back. And then once again, all of the other settings are exactly the same as the shotgun mic. Once you're done recording and doing all your business, you press and hold the switch down until it says goodbye to you again, and then you're done. One thing I will point out before we move on to the next thing, though, is with this switch, say if you're using this as a lapel mic and you don't want any people to press these buttons in their pocket, you can flip the power switch to hold, and then all of these buttons will be deactivated. So after you're done recording, now it's time to transfer it to a computer. To do that, you just want to grab one of these USB to micro USB cables and plug in the micro USB end into the associated slots on the Zoom F1. Once it's in there, you want to plug this slot into the computer. I will have to unplug the light for a minute so it won't look as pretty as it did. So once it's connected to the computer, you just have to flip the on switch. It's hard to read, but what it says now is it says USB at the top, then audio IF and card reader. If you are going to use this to record sound to your computer, you would use the audio IF. But what we want to do is we want to take the two files off of this that we've created. So with the arrow keys, you just want to go down to CarReader and hit the right arrow. Once you hit the right arrow, you'll hear that your computer made a sound, at least if the sound's on. And you'll see this little USB symbol show up on your screen. And this is how we know that it's actually connected. The next step I'll show you is how to actually transfer the files from this to your computer. So once you're in your computer, you just want to bring up a File Explorer. From that File Explorer, you'll just want to find wherever the Zoom F1 is. Click on that, click on Stereo, click on whatever folder it's going to be in, probably folder one. And then you see your two files, in which case you can highlight them and drag them to wherever you want. Once the transfer is finished, they're off. And then normally something I always like to do before I decide that we can move on to the next step in the Zoom F1 process is I like to disconnect it completely just to ensure that the files are still there. But once you're done doing that, you can disconnect the Zoom and go on to the next step. So now that the files have transferred to the computer, the final thing that we need to do is we need to format the card. You want to do this so that nobody will be able to hear or see or anything with any of the audio files that you left on the sound recorder. So now that we've finished recording and have transferred all of our files to the computer, the next step is to remove all of our files from the Zoom F1. So when it gets brought back to the service desk, you can ensure that nobody is going to see the content that you were just creating. So what you need to do is you need to hold down the Option button and then go into Menu. After you go into Menu, let's see if I can bring it up a little higher for you. It's a little blurry, but you can someone make it out. So we scroll down to SD card, hit Right. Hit Right again if the arrow is on Format anyway. Go up to Execute and hit the checkbox. After that, you'll see the little hourglass spinning around when it finishes spinning around, as it did just there, and says Done. That means that there's no more files on the Zoom F1. I would really like to make clear that do not do this step until you are 200% sure that all of your files are off of it, because this will totally erase all of your files and you will have to redo everything you just did, which, depending on how much effort you just put into it, is a lot of work. So once again, be 200% sure before you actually Format this. When you're done, you can turn it off and you're good to go. So thank you for watching and remember to keep experimenting with these audio kits. Although I went over some different aspects of the kits, that doesn't mean that's all the kits can do. So I do encourage you to keep trying out different things with the audio kits. Secondly, if you would like to keep up to date with videos that the library is releasing, remember to subscribe to our channel or you can watch one of the two videos that are on the screen right now. Once again, thank you very much and I hope this helped a little bit with the audio kits.