External Mic and better AGC revelation?

[DeCeccoNET]

The automatic gain causing the "hiss" has been beaten to death here and on the cinema 5d forum...

I've gone through a few shotguns including 2 of the ones reccomended by B&H in a newsletter a while back, and although the results are better than the internal mic, i am not sure they are worth the investment and still putting up with the "hiss"

I tried a cheap old mono lapel mic i had lying around however, and the sound was MUCH cleaner. I tried testing it at similar distances from the shotgun element, and this little toy of a mic beat my senheiser and azden hands down in terms of clarity.

One thing i noticed is that the mono shotguns i have used use a stereo connector (outputting same sound in both channels). My lapel is a mono mic, with a mono connector (sound is recorded on the left channel only). Not only did this seem to fool the AGC enough to give me a less noticable "Hiss" it also left me with a compleatly empty (except for the "hiss") right channel which can than be used as "room tone" or be fed into program as reference audio to clean the sound in my used left channel.


That all being said, has anyone else come across similar results? (or am i just going crazy)

[joove]

I am also interested in seeing what responses people have.

Last weekend, I had the Rode Stereo Videomic with the dead kitten on at a beach. The AGC was terrible. You can tell that once it picks up someone speaking, the bg noise/rumble/hiss/static just fades away. The mic is doing it's job but the AGC kills it for sure.

The videomic is also supposed to reject audio from behind, however when other people are not speaking, AGC again aplifies it messing the whole thing up.

I have had to put a separate music track and reduce the gain on the actual audio tract selectively in Vegas. Still don't like it. The 5DII's video impl really needs lots of extra accessories to use properly I think.

I am thinking of purchasing an external recording device (Tascam DR07 or similar), mount it to my L bracket and plug the mic in.

I think a next firmware upgrade could bring gain control in. In the meantime, I think I am going to get a recorder and see how easy it is to work with. I use video rarely for family events but even then, the quality and the impact is definitely worth it.