Zoom H5 Menus, Settings & Levels

[Music] hello everyone and uh welcome back to another little tech breakdown episode uh today we're going to be going over the zoom h5 we're going to be continuing our series here and today we're going to go over the uh the menus and setting of the levels so you can take a look at our previous episode if you want an overview of the buttons and what they do but today we're going to dig a little bit deeper and take a look at these menus here uh so we're going to get rid of the module don't need that certainly not for onset sound anyway so first thing i would always recommend you do anytime you're using a new piece of equipment or rented gear is to go in and do a factory reset so i'm going to hit the menu button on the side here hit the menu and then we can use this little scroll wheel on the side here to go up and down those menus i'm going to look for system should be there we go system and i'm going to scroll on down to factory reset and then just hit yes there and it'll take a second and it'll power off it's a pleasant little machine saying goodbye and we'll power that back on and you'll notice the first thing it's going to ask me for is the time and date so always a good idea to set that properly it's a good courtesy for your editor in order to do that i'm going to hit this little enter button there and then we can just use the wheel to go up and down so currently it's the 2020 and uh this is october so where are we stop that there we go and this is the 18th of october that we're filming this today so we'll go the other way get there a little bit quicker and there we go 18th and currently it is 1 12 p.m so that would be 13 00 or 13 12. 12 13 and arrow over set that to 12. there we go and now you can see it says record to set so this is an easy one to overlook in order to save this information and get out of this i have to hit the record button and then it says done and it saved that information the next thing i would always recommend doing first two things do that factory reset then go ahead and format your card so i'm gonna go in here hit that menu button again on the side we're gonna go down to sd card i'm gonna go in on sd card and i'm gonna go to format so go on up to yes and make sure you format that card always a good place to start there so as soon as that's done formatting we will hit the menu button again so go back out to your main menu and we can start going through each of these options here so i'm going to start here with uh let's see and we'll start with system here so we already did date and time so if you need to change it you can go back in there hit the menu to get back out backlight i always like to turn the backlight on i don't like the backlight constantly turning off on me it just gets annoying and i always want to see those levels it will use a little bit more battery having that backlight on but it's pretty negligible so i like to have that backlight just on the whole time otherwise you can change it to auto turn off after a few seconds or just not be on at all mostly that's just for saving battery life but i would rather watch my meters next display contrast let me change that give you a little bit more contrast here for the camera um just depends on you know what how much light you have and how much contrast you need that's a case-by-case basis won't really affect too much battery type you do want to tell the machine what type of batteries you're using so i put in rechargeable batteries so i'm going to go to nickel metal hydride if i was to use disposable batteries i would go up to alkaline so alkaline for any disposable batteries and imh nickel metal hydride for any of the rechargeable batteries so since i'm on rechargeable i just went to nimh and basically now the machine will accurately tell me how much battery life i have left so if you don't change that battery type you might think you're about to run out of batteries and it's it's totally fine or you might think you have tons of battery and it'll just die on you so make sure you set that battery type correctly and your battery meter will just be a little bit more accurate firmware version you can check that i'm using system 2 so yours might be a little bit different that might explain some differences factory reset we already went through that and date and time brings us back to our first set so then we had sd card we already did a format on the sd card you could also go into remain to see how much life you have left this is an 8 gig card so have just under eight gigs left and then we also have performance test you can run a performance test if you're not sure if your card works well you just want to have the machine read and write data to it for a little while um that's you know mostly if you if you're either having errors with the card or uh if it's a card you just dug out of an old bag or something and you're not sure if it works well you can always throw it in and run a performance test and make sure that the card seems to be working properly um let's see here we can go on down to usb so in usb this is where we would turn uh this machine into an audio interface so when i plug the usb cable in and then plug that into my computer i can change this mode to either card reader or audio interface so card reader is basically just going to make this able to read the information off your sd card whereas audio interface allows you to plug your microphone into the xlr cable and then use this to go use the usb to go into your computer into a digital audio workstation any daw a you know logic or garage band or sound booth or you know pro tools anything that is uh digitally recording audio inside of your computer you could use this as an interface for not certainly the main reason we would use it but it is a nice little additional bonus feature that this thing offers next up we have the record mode so there's some important stuff to know about and record or important thing to understand here so we have the two different options multifile and stereo file so multifile is first off going to give you multiple files every time you record so that would mean you would have one file for the upper left and right channel and then you would have one file for channel one and one file for channel two so multifile would allow you to record all four channels at once if you only wanna record two channels either the top two microphones or just these two inputs you can just put it down to stereo mode so i'm gonna go down to stereo mode here or stereo file and now you can see i only have two channels on here that i can record to so if i wanted to i could select left and right but there's no connection there so if i select one and two now channel one and two are connected to the input there so i can hit the menu and go back into our oh record mode we were already there uh file list honestly i just ignore file list our file list and folder for the most part file list is going to bring up the list of files that you've already recorded if you're in multifile mode that will say project instead it's the same thing it's just it puts everything in folders the folder is where you can navigate to essentially different folders so you can set up you know different recordings into different folder structures if you wanted to it's not something i ever use honestly i just uh best practice is to format your card at the beginning of every day and then put just record directly to the to the uh standard folder that way you don't have to look through everything you don't have to search out things things don't get disorganized or lost if you're only recording to one folder it's just a lot easier to manage things so i don't use the folders at all next we have the in out in out is going to be a lot of different settings for each of your channels so first off we have the low cut filter you can choose the low cut filter for either the top input or the inputs one and two and you can have those in that low cut filter uh it looks like anywhere between 230 hertz or 237 hertz uh to 80 hertz so you can set that to wherever you want to get those low frequencies or get rid of those low frequencies i should say or cut out those low frequencies um so if you wanted to you could cut out just anything below 80 hertz or you could cut out anything below let's say 168 hertz um you just it just depends on what it is that you're recording honestly you really don't want to use too much of a low cut filter because you can do it in post-production um so if you're getting like a little bit of electrical hum or something like that uh setting the low cut at 80 might be helpful but you know you got to be careful because you start cutting into voice pretty soon there so if you have a low you know rumbly male voice you could be you know cutting into voice frequencies a little bit even at 80 hertz so uh use that low cut filter sparingly but it is there if you need it next we have the compressor limiter now the compressor limiter i do recommend using mainly because it is really difficult to reach down and adjust these levels during a take and quite honestly if you're watching this video you're probably not a professional yet so you know you most likely don't have the booming skill to be able to be on top of things constantly you want to use your booming skills and you want to use your mixing skills to be able to make sure that the levels stay between the thresholds i'm going to tell you between 20 and 12 the entire time but the limiter or comp compressor limiter will help in case those levels get a little bit louder so when your actor gets a little louder than expected turning on that limiter will help and so i'm going to go into that limiter there compressor limiter and we're going to go into input and we're going to go to i'm sorry input one and two input one and two is down here so let me back that up you haven't put either left or right or input one and two or all we really only care about this one and two down here so i will go down to i'm going to recommend uh limit three studio so i'll bring up the list here um this is from the zoom manual all of the different limiter and compressor settings here so i am recommending that you use this guy here the limiter studio and that's going to set our threshold for that limiter at negative 12 and it's going to set the ratio at eight to one uh that's not doing a whole lot of limiting it's just a very minimal amount of of limiting um but it is going to act as a bit of a safety net when you when your actor gets a little bit louder than expected if your actor is really doing a lot of things that are unexpected you might want to step up to this limit one general here that will basically increase the amount of limiting that is done and it does it a little bit sooner so at the limit one general here the limiter is going to kick in at negative 14 and then it's going to start at a ratio of 60 to 1. so it's going to start limiting a lot as soon as that signal goes just above negative 14 whereas with limiter studio here you can see that it's going to give us a little bit more leeway it's going to go up to negative 12 so the actor can get a little bit louder before that limiter kicks in and then that limiter when it does kick in it's gonna kick in at eight to one so that it's gonna bring that level down uh a lot less than that 60 to one so 60 to one is essentially you know every for every one db it goes above uh negative 14 it's going to bring it down about 60 db so it's going to be a you know quite a a big change um so the uh the limit limiter studio is going to be a little bit more of a uh a softer limiting for that um so again that's where i recommend it's not a whole lot of limiting it's going to be just a little bit of an extra safety net there when that actor gets a little bit louder than expected so again that limiter limit 3 studio that is where i would recommend that you go i pressed n on that to save it and you can see it's confirmed here limit three studio so i'll get the menu back out and then phantom power these two are very important make sure that you turn the phantom power on for your boom microphone because most likely it does require phantom power so i'm gonna go in here and turn the on off and most likely i'm just gonna be plugged into channel one here so i can put that input one and turn that on and or i can turn it on for two or all if i wanted to and then i need to adjust the voltage so i need to make sure that i'm at 48 volts for that phantom power that might depend on the microphone you're using but mostly most onset sound microphones or boom microphones are going to be 48 volt phantom power once in a while you will see a 24 or 12 volt that's very rare so you're going to be at 48 volt most of the time let's see here uh then we have plug-in power that's if you need to run power into the usb here not necessarily something i advise because you could get some some noise from wherever that power supply is coming from we also have a pad here so the pad is going to reduce your level by 20 decibels before it gets into the recording so it's going to change things uh quite a bit and that's going to be only for really loud areas of recording so if you're recording a live concert or something like that you might need to put that pad on just to give you a little bit of flexibility without that pad you might have these levels all the way down here and not be able to get to the recording level that you want to the recording range that you want so putting that pad on will reduce the amount of loudness and so you'll be able to dial in that level of recording a little bit more accurately again that's only for really loud recording environments usually like live concert venues or something like that next two we have uh ms matrix and ms raw monitor ms matrix or ms raw that refers to mid-side this is a way of recording music or instruments i should say where the you have two microphones at different positions that are going to pick up sound differently from each of those positions not something we're going to use at all but if you get into you know a studio type recording or music recording you do have some options there for that mid-side recording zoom does make a capsule that is specifically for mid-side recording so that's you know they have some options there for how you listen to it uh next one i do recommend you turn this on this one two mono mix so if i go in there and turn that on basically what that's going to mean is each of the pl each of the microphones i plug into channel 1 and 2 they're going to come into both ears so most likely you're going to plug into channel 1 and you're going to want that to come into your your left and right ear at the same time otherwise you just hear the boom in one ear and that gets a little bit harder to really monitor so that mono mix is just going to make sure that each microphone is mixed to come into both ears you're not left and right stereo there next one line level out so that's where we talked about the line level or line out here in the previous video if you wanted to send the signal to camera or another recording device it would come out of this line out and this is where you would change how loud that line out is most of the time you're going to leave that at zero it can't go up it can't go any louder than zero but it can get quieter it can go all the way down to negative 30 db there if you needed to but again most of the time if you're using line out it's going to be at zero and that's going to work fine let's see here so we'll get back out of that recording these are some really important ones so uh we'll take a look at recording format here so recording format you'll see that we do have a bunch of different formats we have mp3 and wave you're going to stay the how away from mp3 that is going to be completely useless for what we want we want wave quality and we want wave quality at at least 48 24 kilohertz so in the stereo mode on this machine you can actually go up to 96 kilohertz and 24 bit but we want to be at 48 kilohertz and at least 24 bit 4824 is the industry standard for onset sound recording it's also the industry standard for final mix of movies so we want to be at least at the level our final mix is going to be at if you wanted to you could go up though to 96 kilohertz basically that will give you a little bit more dynamic range it will make you make bigger files so your file sizes will actually be larger but it won't really make too much of a difference in quality so not really required it is certainly an option but at least uh 48 kilohertz and 24 bit is uh requirement and quite honestly that's the main reason that these things became popular recorders in in general they were one of the first low budget recorders that allowed us to record at 48 kilohertz and 24 bits uh that was the zoom h4n but either way this this line of recorders this is basically this option here is what makes it famous and what makes it really useful for onset sound because we're already recording higher quality than most cameras can so this is going to be a fairly high quality uh recording here so again 24 48 24 bit 48 kilohertz wave wave quality sound we never want mp3 uh audio auto recording auto recording is basically you can set a threshold for uh when a sound gets loud enough it will automatically start recording and when a sound gets quiet it will automatically stop recording basically that's you know if you need to record yourself in a band situation or something like that you could turn that on not something we would ever use an onset sound pre-recording is another option kind of like that if you turn that on uh it'll basically start recording before you hit that record button um essentially what it means is that the machine is just always listening and always wasting batteries so it's not really something that we would use unless you're in that documentary situation and you don't know when people are going to start talking as soon as they start talking you hit the record button and you got a few seconds before they started talking again though that's just going to be kind of a waste of batteries because the machine's always going to be on and always listening so i leave that that option off file naming only two choices we have there are default or date default is going to call everything zoom zero zero one zoom zero zero two date is going to be the date and time that you actually repressed record and then counter setup you can either count up or count down i don't really know why you would count down in recording so for the most part we're just gonna leave that in count up and then sound marker you don't really need to uh mess with any of that stuff um that's for making marks in your tracks um not something that is going to be really useful for anything we do though uh then we have player setup um if you're gonna if you use playback at all you can have the track repeat or you can have it play through continuously not something we use too often tools that's only for music so tools we have a tuner which if you go in there it allows you to tune or check the tuning i should say of your guitar or a bass or some other instruments there or just individual notes and then we also have a metronome there again that's all for music recording that's stuff we use it all and then we are back to system so that's pretty much all of the menu options you need to set up then we can go ahead and take a look at the levels here so i'm going to plug in a microphone real quick and we'll go back out to our main screen everything is set up here and let's see our microphone is going to be plugged into channel one here so test one two one two three one two three one two three four one two three four and so you can see we have it on mono mix so that means that this microphone is coming into both channel one and two or left and right and it's coming in at that same level so ideally with the microphone in position here i'm gonna talk into it and try and dial this level to stay between 20 and 12. test one two one two three one two three four one two three 4. so at that distance in my speaking level or my voice my loudness here right there is a pretty decent level you see i do go past 12 a little bit every once in a while but that limiter is keeping me from clipping from going all the way up into zero and i'm not coming too low here most of my voice is staying between that eight er i'm sorry 18 and 12 or above 20 and 12. so if i change that even just a little bit you can see now i'm way above that 12 or crashing up against that limiter a lot or if i bring that down now all of a sudden i'm pretty low there i'm way below 20. so it's very subtle here the amount that you actually have to change that level is uh very very delicate you have to be careful there so you are going to be doing probably a little bit more mixing with the boom with a machine like this it's going to be hard to ride those levels as your actor gets louder or quieter when they start whispering you got to turn them up just a little bit or when they start talking really loud you got to turn them down it's going to be hard to kind of keep that in check so you do probably want to mix with the boom a little bit more with a machine like this which means when the actor gets louder you move it a little bit further away when the actor gets quieter you move it a little bit closer but between those two techniques there that's essentially how you're going to manage the loudness for this recording device so i hope that was helpful for you please let me know if you have any questions uh go ahead and throw that in the comments there i'll try and get back to anyone that does and check out uh all the other episodes we've got uh some episodes on lavaliers and uh some episodes on microphones coming up uh some other recording devices so if you have any questions throw those in the comments there and uh like subscribe to all the other things and whatnot thanks for joining us [Music] you

Channel: FauCast

Views: 4,421

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Id: CqDBw7Ug5OA

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020