ZOOM F3 Quick Setup Guide | Curtis Judd

if you need to quickly set up your Zoom F3 to record with microphones or from a mixing board here's how you do that first up we need to add a Micro SD card over here on the side that can be a Micro SD HC micro SD XC card up to 1 tab in size and I will say this audio doesn't need nearly as much space as video does so I'm running a 32 gbyte card and I can record plenty here so don't go crazy if you are not sure whether your card will work with a zoom in F3 and you haven't bought one yet head on over to zoom corp.com and take a look at the zoom F3 page go to the downloads there you will see a list of compatible SD cards so I recommend doing that next up we're going to put batteries in to power up the F3 now you have a couple of options here you can see I had a USB cable plugged in there now I have two ablea lithium batteries in here I would put two batteries of the same exact kind in here don't mix and match and make sure you use fresh batteries when you put them in then what you'll also want to do is power on after you put the batteries on and we'll go ahead and show you how to do that I'm going to go ahead and shut it down you just press and hold the power button till the red light comes on let go and it will come on the first time you turn it on it may ask for some initial settings so that'll be things like setting your language and your date and time that's very simple just do that and you should be good next up we're going to come into the menu which we get in by pressing the menu button over here and then we're going to come down to system so you can see these buttons are kind of programmable buttons If you will and it tells you what each of them does so if I want to go back out of this menu I press the left button if I want to go up I press this button down this button and enter this button so we're going to come down to the system menu press enter to go in very good and then I'm going to come down until I get to the power menu when I'm in the power menu here I want to go ahead and choose my battery type in my case I'm using us lithium batteries if you're using just regular disposable batteries choose alkaline if you're using uh regular rechargeable batteries use nickel metal hydride and if you're using rechargeable or disposable batteries which specifically say that they are lithium then choose lithium why is this important and then when you're done you can go ahead and press back to come back out of the menu so just to confirm you go in you go to the one you want to choose and you press the check button I want lithium so I press check and then I press back back to come back out of the menu this is important because the zoom F3 needs to know what type of battery it's using to give you accuracy on your battery status indicator here and to know when the battery is run out that's why it's important to set that on the settings here now you can also power via USBC so here for example we have a USB battery Bank connected I'll go ahead and plug that in notice what happens when I plug it into the battery status now it's plugged in and the battery status disappears that means you are now powering via USBC if you need to know how much is left on your battery your external battery you have to look on the battery itself instead of on the zoom F3 the zoom F3 just doesn't know Al also you can plug in not just to USB battery Banks but if you have a USBC to AC adapter you can use that as well or you could plug into a computer and all of those should power your Zoom F3 just fine now next up we need to format the SD card so we're going to come back into the menu now if you have already formatted your SD card you'll want to do it again here just because it's really important to format it in the recorder so that you can ensure that everything is going to record okay so we're going to come into the system menu come down to SD card and then we're going to go ahead and choose format I'm going to come up to execute which is a rather ominous way of saying go ahead and format the card it'll take it a little while again this is a 32 GB card if you're using a larger card it may take even longer what I would also recommend is the first time you do use a new card I would do a quick test just to make sure it's going to work okay again execute ominous there we go it's just going to quickly test and make sure it can write okay to the card in this case it passed so that means we should probably be good so we'll come and pop back out of the menu all right now we can connect our microphon so I'm going to go ahead and connect One microphone of course you can connect two because we have two XLR inputs it should snap in just like that and you can see already we got some signal that's uh that's good now what I'm going to do here is show you how you would set this up normally it may not come on right at first so what you want to do is these buttons down here allow you to control the inputs as well so for the left input here input number one I can choose this second button that has a gear on the on the printed on here I'm going to go ahead and press that button there I'm going to go ahead and choose and make sure that that input s is turned on we're good there then we want to choose source source tells the F3 what you've plugged into that input you can plug in a variety of different things so you can plug in what they're just calling a mic so if you have a dynamic microphone that does not require phantom power then you'll want to choose that one the second option is mik plus 48v what is that that is a microphone that requires 48 volts phantom power most condenser microphones require that if you're not sure whether your microphone does or not look at the documentation for your microphone if you don't have the documentation for your microphone go look it up on the web you'll certainly find it out there and that'll tell you whether or not you need phantom power 48 volts okay if you're getting an audio Source or an audio feed from say for example a sound mixer then you would choose line so those are the three options here we're using a microphone that requires phantom power so we're going to go ahead and select that and then we can pop back out of the menu and that should get us in a good spot next up let's come to the record menu I'm going to go ahead and press the menu button here we're going to go into recording then we'll go into sample rate now if you don't know what sample rate you need I would tell you to use 48 khz in 99.9% of cases that's going to be great if you're worried about audio quality and you're thinking well I want the best audio quality so shouldn't I choose 192 khz well the best audio engineers in the world generally can't tell the difference between 192 khz and 48 khz generally so the higher sample rates are generally if you're going to be recording uh sound effects and you're going to want to slow them down that's that might be when you want to choose those but otherwise I would just choose 48 and we can pop back out of there next up we want to choose the file format now if you're recording just individual microphones you'll choose mono if on the other hand you're trying to get a stereo recording you specifically have two microphones that are that are matched that are similar and you want to record them as a Stereo Sound Source like for example nature recordings then you would choose stereo if you are going to record two people two separate people talking you'll want to choose mono because you want each of the microphones to be managed as a mono audio source so that you can edit them separately when you're in post- production or editing we'll come on back out all right there's one other thing in there that I want to set so let's come back into the menu in the recording menu come down one more and there's something called prre this is pre-record so when I press the record button and prre is turned on it will actually go back to the 6 seconds prior to the time I pressed record and capture that audio as well what does that mean that means the zoom F3 is actually always listening so just so that you're aware so we can go ahead and turn that on and we can get those six seconds prior why would you ever want that well if you're a little bit late getting to the record button and you wanted to capture something you can get those 6 seconds prior depending on how the rest of your Zoom F3 is set up if you have a higher sample rate you're using you will not get as much pre-record time it's just a trade-off that you make so we'll go ahead and leave that on and pop back out next what we need to do is adjust our levels and to do that with this one microphone we've set up so far I can go ahead and press this button right here and then that'll allow me to increase the levels you'll notice the waveforms are getting bigger and bigger obviously we don't want to go too big because then they're going to be running up against the top line and we'll have to do extra work in post to make it sound right but somewhere in this range right here if I was recording spoken word will work just right don't worry about the number there this is X32 it should be whatever it is for your microphone every microphone every voice is different but we probably don't want something like that we want something that's going to be more like somewhere in this range right here maybe maybe here or maybe even here so again not something that's hitting up up against the top lines and not something that's so small that you can barely see it so in our case here I would probably go Min or go X32 or maybe I'd go x16 somewhere in there so that is setting your levels now once we've done that we're ready to record and the way you do that is you actually slide this switch on the side towards record and it starts recording and then when you're done recording you slide it that way again and the little red LED turns off and that means you're done recording while you're recording one thing you can do as well is you can slide the switch down to the hold position and you can do that so that you lock all the controls so you don't accidentally bump something out and then when you're ready you can slide it back off of hold and stop the recording so that's a quick look at how to set up your Zoom F3 for recording with a microphone right out of the [Music] box

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 7,967

Keywords: Audio, sound, video, Zoom, Zoom F3, F3, Recorder, Audio Recorder, Curtis Judd

Id: qoPm2rVSLRI

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2024