In this video I'm reviewing the Rode VideoMic Pro Plus.
Is any good? keep watching!
Welcome to the video so just a quick fYI Rode are not paying us to do this video
review. What we're doing, is we're going to be doing some videos on the
products that we use to help reduce some of the videos you're watching now.
so some of the microphones that we use like the Rode VideoMic or the SL600 USB Microphone just to
show you how we make better videos here at Editors Keys.
Anyway is this microphone any good let's get into some of the new specs and
features of this new mic so shotgun microphones actually come with a lot of
problems usually. So we've got the Rode VideoMic pro plus here and this was the
shotgun microphone where you were using before this is the takstar shotgun
microphone the SGC 598 now there's so many problems on shotgun
microphones that you may not be aware of and I just want to quickly go over some
of the problems we had with a shotgun like this because Road seems to have
listened to the creative community and fixed all of those issues so the first
issue is battery on a shotgun microphone like this it takes double-a batteries
but it uses the power quite fast the road has a built-in battery pack and
it's really easily accessible through this little barn door here which is
really really cool you can charge it with a micro USB and
it goes for hours and hours I just love that in this secondly the thing I really
don't like about this microphone is that the cable is non user replaceable and
this means as you can see here it's become a bit loose and that actually
affects the audio quality of the microphone now what a Road has done is
they've supplied a cable that you can actually remove and plug in as you wish
and this is good for a couple of reasons it means one if your cable gets damaged
you can just throw that away and replace the cable and secondly you can actually
change the cable for an extender cable so let's say you want to use it for a
video show like this you can have the microphone just above my head and then
use an extension cable to get into your camera on the back of the microphone we
have a high-pass filter which we'll test later out in the Manchester markets
there's a three-stage audio game which will also test later and a high
frequency boost while I like about this microphone it also has a safe channel
which is super helpful if you have any peeking in your audio recordings it will
actually record a second version of the recording onto a different channel so
you can rescue some of your damaged audio now another absolute killer
feature on this microphone is the automatic on feature now how many times
have you recorded a perfect take only to realize you didn't turn on the
microphone well now this microphone activates and turns on when you turn on
the camera this alone is worth buying this microphone in my opinion so if
you're thinking about getting this microphone you might be a youtuber a
business person or a travel vlogger so let's get out of the office now and go
down to Manchester's Christmas markets to put this microphone through its paces
right so we're out of the office and we're at their Manchester markets to
test out this rode videomic a probe plus now as you can probably hear the sound
is pretty good when you're about two feet away but there's a bit of a
misconception with these kind of shotgun mics that they're the ultimate
microphones for kind of all work and it's not really the case you know as you
can hear this sounds pretty good from this distance but if we go back say more
than five or six feet in a second you'll hear that it doesn't really work as well
so I'd really recommend it if you're a travel blogger and you're talking to the
camera you're doing some selfie work or you want to record some ambient noise in
a place like this market but let's go around the market and we'll show you how
the mic works in different places
so just to show you as mentioned you know this works alright if you're about
two feet away I'm just gonna walk back from the microphone a little and you'll
see just make sure when you are using the microphone like this that you stay
pretty close to the mic if you want some good crispy clean audio
now in this little test we're testing out the high-pass filter
so what high-pass filter does is it removes some of these of low frequency
noise or surface but air conditioning if you've got traffic noise in the
background it should help to reduce that and then bring out your vocals or you
have a talent a little bit more so we've come to a place just behind the markets
where we've got some diesel generators we've got a little bit of traffic here
so at the moment it's set to zero it's not on at all so now if we switch it to
75 we'll see how well that works
a case that were on the 75 setting now we'll see how well this works sometimes
it doesn't work at all sometimes it works quite well now if we whack up to
150 we'll see if there's any difference in the noise levels at all okay so we're
now on 150 can you hear any difference in the background noise it's hope at all
let me know in a comment section below and let me know if this helped you so I
just want to cut in here at this point and when doing this test of the
high-pass filter we couldn't really hear the effectiveness of it when we were out
at the markets but actually listening back to it in Premiere you know the 75
doesn't seem to do much if I'm really honest the 150 does take down the
background noise a little bit maybe not quite as much as I'd liked but it does
do a good job and I think really if you're looking for something that can
take out the harm maybe some air conditioner air conditioning noise maybe
turn it on but also think about using something like Adobe Audition
or the background noise filters in Final Cut or Adobe Premiere to help you get
that crispy nice clear audio
so another thing I like about this microphone is its gain control features
a lot of shotgun microphones don't have this feature but it allows you to take
the audio down by minus ten or plus 20 so this is really good if you're in an
area where there's a lot of crowd noise there's a lot of music playing and you
just want to bring the levels down so maybe now if we switch to minus ten I
can show you what that does to the audience so this is now minus ten and
you should hear the audio levels of my voice has been brought down quite
substantially so it's super helpful if you're in a busy environment now let's
put them up two plus twenty okay so now we're on plus twenty and you should
instantly hear that my voice sounds a lot louder so this is quite handy if you
need to go further away from the microphone you saw in some of the
earlier tests that these microphones don't work super well when you're more
than sort of five feet away so having this extra 20 plus decibel gain control
really helps if you do need to be a little further back from the camera
so there we go that's our review and test of the rode videomic pro plus now
I've got to say I'm really impressed with this microphone this is a
microphone that we actually use on a daily basis here at editors keys we use
it for some of the studio stuff but mainly in the studio we use the SL 600
or a lav mic system but we use this on the go when we're doing our trade shows
in Amsterdam in Las Vegas things that you might have seen here on the channel
you'll see this microphone being used and it's just a great mic if you're
trying to capture the ambience or if you're doing some close-up pieces to
camera you know if you're walking around airports things like that it's really
really good so I would recommend this if you're creator to have this in your
camera bag it's a thousand times better than the inbuilt mic on your camera or
DSLR so definitely take a look at this I'll put a link in the description below
and let me know in the comments what you think of this new rode videomic pro plus
microphone thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed the video if you did
give it a like give it a subscribe and I'll see you in the next video