Rode NTG3 at B&H
Rode SmartLav at B&H
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past four years at Rewatchable, it’s that great audio can be a serious difference maker in helping to convey your ideas. Shotgun mics sound terrific – but you either have to have someone driving a boom pole, or set up a big mic stand. Lavaliers are convenient, but the sound quality usually leaves something to be desired and it’s difficult to use lavs with multiple subjects. Along comes our favorite mic manufacturer, Rode, with the SmartLav, a professional-quality lavalier mic that uses any iOS device (or audio recorder for DSLR people) to capture dialogue.
Now that our first one finally arrived, we put the new Rode SmartLav iPhone Lavalier to the test in a talking head, office setup to see how it fares against Rode’s NTG3 shotgun microphone as a suitable business video production tool. Check out the video above, and please let us know what you think in the comments or on Twitter at @rewatchable!
This is helpful – trying to find a good iPhone 5 external mic. Thanks for posting this!
Hi Jeremy, hope it helped in your decision! My concern with the video was that stacking it against the NTG3 was a little unfair. By itself, we’re VERY happy with how the SmartLav sounds…
ntg3 sounds great here. I have a smartlav but just cant get it sounding very good 🙁 What settings do you guys use? Are you disabling the IOS processing while recording?(found in the input settings)
Default settings are pretty solid. Sometimes I’ll put a high pass filter, but otherwise just the defaults. If it’s not sounding high quality, I suspect you might have a dud lav and want to send it to Rode to get it checked out. Their support has been pretty amazing in my experience.