Affordable Gear for the Content Creator
Purchasing gear to create can be overwhelming to say the least. What is the ONE THING you need to make a production look professional? What is the ONE piece of equipment you could purchase that is the most bang for your buck?
With the increasingly high-tech devices each of us own in our pockets, the answer may be simpler than we think.
As a High School Media Arts teacher, I have access to thousands of dollars of gear in a TV studio. Students learn how to operate high-tech broadcast cameras, increasingly capable DSLR cameras, and switcher boards that allow us to film a real TV production. But there are two pieces of equipment I bought recently that changed the game for productions on-the-go.
One challenge is remote shoots. When students have to take cameras home, they have a lot of gear to sign out. If they walk to school they have to carry all of that home in all kinds of weather- not an ideal situation.
So I looked at purchasing a piece of equipment that would allow them to use their cell phones to make a high quality piece of video.
Browsing through a Sweetwater magazine, one of the featured items was a creator bundle. It caught my attention because the old school broadcast class is really becoming a content creator class - we have more mediums now than we ever have and students have access to being published daily at their fingertips.
For $249, the Shure MV88+ was marketed as a “Content Creator Essential.” The kit comes with a mini Manfrotto tripod, (my favorite brand of tripod) with an adjustable phone mount and Shure condenser mic. The mic plugs directly into any iPhone or Android and the first time you use it the Shure video maker app pops up for free download.
This purchase gives a new meaning to “plug and play.” There is virtually zero set up time on first use, (only the time the app takes to download) and your video is still customizable. From the app interface you can adjust mic gain, stereo width, and it captures in 24-bit/48 kHz.
A regular set of 1/8’’ jack headphones can plug right into the back of the mic for real-time audio monitoring.
The benefit to this over just using your cell phone audio is that you can import the audio as a wav file, monitor it in real time and have professional quality audio to match the high-quality video. The drawback is the device, whether a tablet or phone, has to have enough storage for any video you capture. All video is stored to the device. I have run into students not having enough storage on their iPads to store the whole video.
Having a mic, tripod, and camera set up be so simple and convertible makes it easy for beginning content creators to have access to recording things and bringing their ideas to life.
The other piece of equipment I bought that helps with remote shoot audio is a step up from using a phone. Also featured in the Sweetwater magazine was the Rode Wireless GO Mic system. For $199, the mic system allows plug and play with a DSLR camera.
The mic is built into the pack that clips onto a lapel. It’s larger than a lapel mic and square shaped so I also purchased a lapel mic to attach and be less visible. The transmitter that attaches to the top of the DSLR has an LCD display that monitors the audio and uses a 1/8’’ connector into the camera.
The pack is very sensitive and I have had zero interference problems with it. The lapel mics also come with two different wind screens.
The ability for a student to take an omnidirectional condenser lapel mic in a small portable pack without a Tascam or shotgun attachment makes for cleaner audio on interviews or stand ups.
The 3.5 mm mic can plug into a camera input or GoPro, iPhone or Android. There is also a three-stage output pad – 0dB, -12dB, -24dB. I have used this kit almost daily as I depend on DSLR cameras. The transmitter and mic pack charge with a USB adaptor.
These easy, inexpensive mics allow for professional level audio to be captured with the cameras most students have easy access to on a daily basis. And for the at-home content creator, these are both affordable purchases that will bring the quality of you productions up to the next level.
Meet the Author, Chelsea Shar
Chelsea Shar has been the Media Arts Career Tech Teacher at Alliance High School for a year and a half. She graduated from Malone University with a degree in communications, and she worked for a few years as a beat reporter for several local newspapers in northeast Ohio where video work snuck into her job description more every year.
She enjoys photography, gardening, reading, writing and yoga when she has the time. She resides in Alliance, Ohio with her husband and 2 year old son.
You can reach Chelsea at sharch@alliancecityschools.org