Rode Wireless Pro Beginners Guide/Tutorial

so you recently brought the rode Wireless Pro and you've got some questions probably like I did well I recently went deep I read the entire manual because I had to review this microphone system and I thought as long as I have all of this information floating around in my head why not share it with all of you guys so let's get into this full tutorial the rode Wireless Pro comes with three different units this one here is the receiver and this is the unit that's going to receive the audio signal from the two transmitters here you can recognize the receiver because it's the one that has the color screen on it now this receiver will take the audio signal and pipe it out of the headphone Port that we have on the side here to something like a camera or it can pipe out a digital signal out of the USB port to something like a computer on the top of this unit is a large button this button is going to turn the unit on and off if you hold it down for two seconds and if you tap it and you have this setting turned on it's going to start recording internally on both of the different transmitters on the bottom here you'll notice two different buttons these are going to help you change settings on this receiver and you can tap each one of these buttons you can hold each one of these buttons for two seconds and you can press both of these buttons at the same time to open up another menu as well this is one of the transmitters you can recognize it because it doesn't have a screen on the top it has one button that can be used for recording it has the built-in microphone it has a lavalier Port which now can finally screw and lock down which is nice and on the bottom it has the on and off button if you hold it for two seconds and if you tap it it's going to pair with the receiver if for some reason it becomes unpaired so let's hold this bottom button down and turn this unit on as you'll notice here there's three different lights this first blue one here is the connection light this is showing us that we have a connection to the receiver this next light is the record light I currently have mine to automatically record anytime they're turned on this is just a safety feature that I personally like I'll teach you how to do that in a little bit and this light down here which is currently green is our battery life right this will change to yellow and then red as this battery slowly dies as you can see now that we've turned on one of these transmitters it's showing up at the receiver let's go ahead and turn on the second transmitter as well by holding that button on the bottom let's quickly talk about what everything means on the screen here as you can see we have three different battery indicators the upper left one is going to be the battery in this receiver itself next up you'll see an S and an m and you can see that s is highlighted on our unit here that's either split or merged audio that means if you have two transmitters running at the exact same time and it's split one transmitter is going to be sending signal to the left side so if you're listening to headphones it's just going to be coming in the left side and the other transmitter is going to be sending a signal to the right side that's personally the way that I like to set these up because if I'm interviewing two different people maybe one of them is more quiet than the other or maybe you have to place the microphone in a different position and it's going to sound different with the two people I like to have the audio split so that when I get into Adobe Premiere I can even everything out and then of course I will manually merge it back together before I export the final video if you don't want to deal with that and you want the audio merged into both channels then you can set it to merged and M will be highlighted there now the moving green bars are the left and the right channel um so you can see if I just click on one of these you can see it peaking there and then the two red dots that we have on the bottom right there are letting me know that both of these transmitters are recording all right let's quickly go through our navigation options on this receiver on the bottom here you'll see this little ramp signal that's like an audio level signal m versus S is that merged versus split signal that I talked about a second ago and channel is changing the channel and this is how we're going to link and unlink the receiver to these transmitters so if I just tap this left button down here you can see that I can change the decibel level and this is the output volume of this receiver this is only going to affect the headphone output because the signal coming out of the USB port is going to be a digital signal and therefore volume doesn't matter now if I tap the right button here you can see I can press it again for two seconds and that's going to go into a pairing mode we can just tap the power button on the bottom and it's going to pair and now we have that solid Blue Light which means it is paired now if we tap the right button once then twice then three times it's going to take us into another mode and this is going to change the gain output of this Jack out of the box the receiver is set up to be used with a camera but you can use this product with other devices for example you could plug the receiver directly into a pair of headphones but to get it to sound good you need more power blasting into the headphones and so you can actually set the receiver to do that on the right button here I'm going to press it once twice three times and then I can switch the gain mode and as you can see we've got a manual setting uh camera setting headphones headphones with a microphone and then back to that original menu for most people you can set the gain mode to just that camera setting and that is what road thinks is best I believe that's around negative 12 DB and now when we're in that setting if we click the left button here you'll see that it's just going to show us that it's set to that default Road setting it's not going to let you manually change it this video is sponsored by click a snap which is a brand new social media platform it's one part Instagram one part Shutterstock and one part Google AdSense all wrapped into one the most unique element of click a snap is that you get paid up to nine dollars for every one thousand views your images get which is honestly much more than we get paid on YouTube and if you want you can choose to sell your photos on the platform as well unlike every other social media platform with click a snap you don't have to give up your image rights you don't have to figure out how to game some algorithm and there's no data harvesting or selling to third-party entities if you're a photographer looking for a new way to display your work while also making money join click a snap in the link below alright let's quickly look at some of the accessories that come in the Box first of all let's look at these two lavalier microphones so it comes with these clips and the way these clips work is the microphone fits in the larger clip and then you can make a loop that holds the cable like this and what this does is it allows you to put it in a shirt and keep the cord a little bit more clean on the other end here we can connect it to one of these transmitters and we can turn this here to lock it in place so that it's not going to come out you'll notice that mine is green here this is a small piece of plastic that's included they give you a few different colors and this can just be pulled off and you can put whatever colors you want on here it's just going to make it a little bit easier to keep track of which lav is which for indoor use the lav can be used just like this you don't need any sort of accessories at all however if you go outside and there's any wind at all you're probably at the very least going to want this foam pad here this just slides on top I wish it held on a little tighter but it doesn't so keep an eye on that because you're going to lose it very easily and then if there's a lot of wind it comes with this dead cat and once again this just slides right on top there and this does an amazing job of allowing you to capture clean audio even in like hurricane level winds and in the box you'll also notice other types of dead cats these dead cats are made to fit on the transmitters directly here and these press straight down and then you can rotate them and lock them in place I actually like this far better than this style that will easily fall off now I've done tasks comparing the audio quality out of the built-in microphone to the lavalier mic and the audio quality out of both is very similar so I think it's really just going to come down to whether or not you want to put in a little bit more effort and hook up this lavalier mic and clip it to the shirt to make it a little bit more discreet using this can be easy and convenient but at the same time especially with t-shirts sometimes I have issues with it like flipping forward or backward while I'm recording so usually I don't clip this directly to my shirt anymore unless I'm wearing some sort of button-up shirt or a jacket then it works great for that now something else that road included is this small little piece of metal and what you can do is attach this to the back of the clip on the uh transmitter here and it's going to allow you to use a magnet and I personally just leave this on all the time it doesn't add much width to the device itself so I just put these on and always leave them on and then if I want to use the magnets I pull it out of the little case that it comes in and you can just snap it on just like that so basically what this allows you to do is put the microphone right here so as you can see here I've got the microphone on my front here and then I've got the magnet behind on the inside of my shirt you could do the opposite as well feel free to do tests and figure out what works best for you but as you can tell with this thin shirt I just don't really like the way that it looks and it's pulling and everything I don't think it looks great let's quickly talk about this charging case here the receiver has to go in the far right slot and then the two transmitters can fit in the slots to the left here when you place them in this case they will automatically turn off and when you take them out they will automatically turn on so if you constantly use this case you may never need to turn the units on and off they will do that automatically for you also when you place them in the case they will automatically charge up from a battery that's built into the case itself to charge this case and each one of the units up at the exact same time we can plug in a USBC cable into the back here and we can press this button and it will tell us how much battery life is left in the case so if it's green you can tell it's totally full right now now it is possible to take each one of these units out and plug them individually into a computer or smartphone using the USB port on the side however I find it much more convenient to put them all in the case and then plug the entire case into a computer or smartphone and then everything will connect all at once in the Box rode gives us three different cables a thick USBC to USBC cable a thin USBC to USBC cable and a thin USBC to lightning cable for the fastest transfer and charging speeds use this thick cable to plug it into a computer or a USB hub however there was a warning in the manual that said this cable may give you errors with some computers that can't support high-speed charging and if that's the case then you may need to use the slower cable to transfer and charge up from a computer the lightning cable is used to connect these devices to an iPhone you can get the rode app if you want to which allows you to make some but not all changes that you can on a laptop to these devices you can also use this device as a wireless microphone for an iPhone if for example you wanted to record a video with your iPhone but you wanted better audio of course the iPhone doesn't have a standard 3.5 millimeter headphone jack to plug in that audio port anymore so you're going to have to plug it in using this cable let's go ahead and pull out my computer connect this entire system over and show you all of the settings that we can change when we're in the rode Central app to download this software simply go to Google and type in rode Central download it should be the very first option and and of course choose Windows or Mac depending on your computer so as you can see on the screen nothing's currently popping up because I haven't connected the microphones over to the computer yet once I plug this in the application will automatically recognize both the receiver and the two transmitters if you need to update the firmware on any of these devices this is where it's going to show up in the application itself as you can see right here it's telling us the firmware and the case the receiver and the transmitters and then it says select a device to get started so I can click here on the charging case and it's just going to tell us the firmware I can click on the receiver and this is where it's going to give us the options for the receiver I can click on each one of the transmitters and it's going to give me all of the recordings here and this is going to allow us to download the highest resolution 32-bit float file so if for any reason while you're using these devices if maybe you lose connection and you get static or maybe you get clipped audio and it sounds bad you can come in here and you can find the audio based on the time of day and then you can choose the different settings personally I like choosing 32-bit float this just gives you the most possible latitude when it comes uh to editing or fixing the audio and then you can click export and it's going to pull the recorded file off of this unit now to change the actual settings on the transmitter there's this small little Cog down here it took me forever to find this and once you click here it's going to take you into the options menu let's go back up to the receiver here and go through each one of these menu options I'll tell you what they all are now here we can choose merged or split audio we talked about that earlier now you'll also see a safety channel here and that's going to be a merged channel so everything's going to be coming in on both sides but the left is going to be louder than the right or vice versa it doesn't really matter basically it's going to save you from clipped audio that's being recorded into the camera so basically if the loud Channel potentially on the left side starts to clip because your subject gets really loud or you record an airplane plane or something you could go to that right Channel and it's going to be coming in a little bit lower and then you could grab that instead and it's not going to be clipped audio remember that one of the cool features is that 32-bit internal recording on each of the transmitters and that audio is basically impossible to clip so if you happen to get clipped audio into your camera and you're like oh my gosh you know what am I going to do it should be saved on these devices if you change the proper settings that I'm about to show you in a second in the gain mode here we have different options and we went through this very quickly on the device itself but we have manual which lets us set the output level we have a preset of a camera which is how I use these mics I pipe them into a camera like this A7 S3 and as you can see here the road default is negative 12 DB we can click on headphones and again you can use the receiver as like a monitoring device I can't imagine many people are going to be using it for that but if you do you just have to really bump up the output level of the receiver or else you won't be able to hear anything in the headphones so that's where you're going to use that for and then the headset would also have the mic option as well I've done a few tests and I find that preset works fine so I'm going to leave it there now this last option on the right here is what's going to happen when you tap the on button on the receiver it's natively set to record but I currently have my transmitter set to automatically record whenever they are turned on so I'm going to set this to marker and what you can do is when you start recording on the camera if you remember to you can tap that button on the bottom of your receiver and then it's going to create a marker in the digital audio file that's created by these Wireless transmitters this is just going to make it easier for you to find when you start recording especially if you keep these transmitters on and they're recording hours and hours of audio that you don't need every time you turn them on the next option you'll see here is time code and time code is is far more complicated than I thought it would be I thought I was going to use it and love it and then I realized okay I'm definitely not going to use this I'm just going to give you a very quick rundown of how this works the basic idea is is that if you turn this on here it's going to create this clock that's running all the time in the receiver it's going to automatically communicate this clock with the transmitter so you don't have to worry about that but you do have to figure out a way to get this exact clock onto your footage that you're recording and there's two different ways to do that some cameras allow you to jam this clock into the camera using a cable and this allows you to copy the clock exactly into your camera and then when you unplug your device both of the clocks are going to be synced up and they're going to be running together the issue is that the internal clock on this and the internal clock on the camera are going to get out of sync after a few hours so you're going to have to keep jamming it all the time which seems like a huge pain in the butt and then the other thing I recently learned is that all of the cameras I own actually don't even allow me to do this my Sony cameras do not have this option natively so I can't even do it the next option is that we can force this time code signal into the audio itself it's going to merge both channels onto the left side and then on to the right side it's going to make this horrendous sound that sounds like this and then some editors can decode this sound and figure out exactly what the time code is and in theory you should be able to automatically sync up your video and your audio when you get into post I personally edit with Adobe Premiere and I've recently learned that Adobe Premiere cannot do this Final Cut cannot do this currently the only editor that can is DaVinci Resolve if you click on time code modes here it gives you different options on how you want to pipe the time code into different channels and everything again this can get very complicated and it's very different for each one of you who's watching depending on what camera you own and depending on what editor you use and depending on what workflow you use so if you want to get into time code this is probably not the video for you I'm not going to go any deeper here but I will show you one final thing that complicates things even further to make this work you have to set your frame rate exactly the same in the microphones and in the camera so you can see frame right here there's different options uh we have you know drop frames without drop frames and almost every shoot that I do I'm jumping between 23.976 and 60 frames per second to get slow-mo and I don't even see the you know 59.99 whatever option here and the only way to change this frame rate is by plugging it into a phone and using the app or plugging it into a computer so literally every time I'd be shooting slow-mo I'd have to remember to do that it's just way too complicated for me personally all right let's look at the options on the transmitters themselves once again we click on a transmitter we click this little Cog down here the first option here is gain assist that's going to help you with clipping audio clipping audio is when your subject gets too loud and it overloads the recording device and it sounds really bad this is what it sounds like check one two I did tests with both Auto and dynamic turned on you can listen to them here check check one two one two check one two check check as you can tell it sounds way better and it's just going to smooth out the audio that's being sent to the cameras themselves again we still have that pure 32-bit unaltered audio being recorded on the transmitters themselves but it's such a pain in the butt to have to download that and sync it up and everything of course we would prefer to have just clean audio going into our computers for me personally I set this to Auto I'm getting great results right now and it's just kind of like a set it and forget it setting now we have an option for what the on button will do on the transmitters themselves I have it set to none you could have it set to make a marker on the digital recording as well or you can mute the microphone I don't want there to be a chance that somebody could accidentally mute the microphone so I just have mine set to off next up is the LED brightness each one of the transmitters has those three lights on it and you know if you're going to be using it on somebody's collar you don't want those Bright Lights showing up by their face so you can set that to dim if you want to and finally on the right here we have the option for recording we can set it to manual which means we could press that power button on the receiver and it's going to make both of our transmitters record I personally have mine to always record it's just this safety backup that I know that if these things are on they're going to be recording it's not something that I have to remember to do and to be perfectly honest 99.9 percent of the time I will never use those recordings but I don't have to it's just this like peace of mind to know that it's this backup in case I do something wrong once the internal memory fills up it's going to automatically start deleting the oldest recording so you really don't have to worry about it Dropout markers are markers that are made on the digital recording When the transmitter and the receiver loses signal so if you were recording somebody and they were really far away it's just going to tell you like hey right here is where the signal started to drop out you may want to uh you know switch over the recording to the internal recording because you're going to have static on the receiver now keep in mind that there are two separate transmitters with two separate options here so anything that you set on one will not change on the other so we have to go to the second one here and hit the Cog and make all of the exact same changes here unless of course you wanted them to act differently finally let's talk about how we're going to use this system and plug it into a computer and into a camera I'm going to take the receiver out of the charging case and I'm going to plug it in directly to my laptop with the USBC cable on the side and in my sound preferences here you will see that wireless Pro RX shows up under input so this is going to be the exact same if you had some sort of you know USB microphone or whatever if you plug it in you're going to have to go into your operating system or into whatever program you're using and tell it hey this is the microphone I want to use like if you've ever used Skype or Zoom or whatever before every time it loads up it's grabbing the wrong microphone just remember you have to go into the options and choose Wireless Pro RX now let me show you how to set this up with a camera this is probably how 99 of people are going to use this thing so I've got all three units on here and I can see that they're all connected this little clip here will fit perfectly in the hot shoe and we're going to plug in the headphone jack to the side here and then we need to find the mic port on the side of the camera we're going to plug this in right here and now you'll see that we have audio signal coming into the left side with this one and the right side with this one it's very important that you set your audio levels properly on both the road system and your camera before you start using this this is probably something you only have to do once but it's very important because if you set it too low you might be able to recover it in post but you're going to have a really hard time hearing it with headphones on if you plug headphones into your camera so that you can monitor your audio and if you set it too high you're going to have an issue of your audio clipping in the camera and the only way to fix that is to download the 32-bit recordings from each of the transmitters and then sync them up later it's just a pain in the butt so the goal is to get our audio coming in perfectly into the camera what I like to do is hold this at chest height and then I just start looking at this audio signal on the camera itself here and then I can get really loud check check check check check and it's starting to hit relatively high this isn't too bad here but I could come into the menu and I can find my audio settings here and in this camera it's called audio record level and you can see I can just change these levels in most cases for cameras the lower the better if you start boosting this up really high it might introduce hissing into your audio so you can just figure out a level that that looks good check check check check check when somebody gets really loud check check check I just don't want it to be hitting the in there because that's warning me that it's clipping as I'm talking naturally here you can see this is hitting right around the middle of our range which is perfect so I think that's good for my personal camera again I can't tell you what the right settings are for your camera you're gonna have to figure that out for yourself well guys that wraps up this tutorial hopefully I've answered all of your questions if you're interested in photography and video related content similar to this check out f-stoppers.com we have daily free content and if you want to take your photo and video to the highest level check out fstoppers.com store we have a ton of full length tutorials filmed with many of the most talented and famous photographers and video photographers on a range of different genres no matter what type of photo or video you're into there's going to be something in our store for you I guarantee it and currently everything is also on sale so check it out and I'll see you next time

Channel: Fstoppers

Views: 102,481

Keywords: rode wireless pro, help, setup, beginners guide, tutorial, audio, lesson, how to use timecode, how to internal record, how to use rode wireless pro

Id: j5RXFvPYDhg

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2023