LAV vs BLIMP
Had Laura read a paragraph standing in the living room.
I'm having fun comparing a Lav and a Shotgun.
LAV
She's wearing the Lav, it's the Sennheiser ME4, (not the 104, just the 4). Proper placement, wireless to my H4n.
BLIMP
Inside the blimp is a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic. I'm holding it on a pole, realistic placement above her head. Wired to the 2nd channel on my H4n.
By the way, so thankful for the firmware update with independent control over the channels.
So, I ran the file through Audacity to split it up for some examples. Normalized them. There are four exported audio tracks to hear.
SPLIT
Basically the original file, normalized and still panned. The LAV is the Left and the BLIMP is the right.
MONO SUM
Both mics, normalized and summed together, for kind of a realistic "MIX" of the two sources, trying to get the best of both worlds.
BLIMP
Just the blimp, again this is about 3ft overhead, she's not moving.
LAV
Just the lav, wireless, so if she did take off the audio might be more consistent.
Notes?
The LAV sounds great. It's a bit "chesty" and but it's isolated on her voice quite nicely. This may sound a bit unnatural for video without hearing anything else, but it's doing a great job of recording just the one person.
The BLIMP gets a lot more extra noise in, but it may be more realistic of the environment. The blimp also has a thick deadcat windscreen, so if we go outside I don't think we have to worry about wind, the lav is harder to wrangle.
Conclusion?
I like the mix of the two. If she was walking, the LAV could dominate, if we're outside, maybe the BLIMP.
The LAV is too isolated and the BLIMP catches too much extra noise. Together, I love them.