Smartphone Recording Options with the SC Cable Range
Hands up if you've ever filmed a video on your smartphone. Pretty much everyone? Great! And why not? They say the best camera for any job is the one you have with you, and who doesn't have a smartphone with them at all times?
The video quality is perfectly acceptable, especially for a quick news grab, interview or vlog type of situation, with some phones now even offering 4K Resolution. Unfortunately we can't say the same about the audio. The on-board, omni-directional and low quality microphones leave your audio sounding distant, hollow and just downright bad.
Unlike your DSLR camera however, simply combining your favourite RØDE VideoMic with your smartphone isn't that simple. The reason for this: TRS and TRRS connections.
TRS stands for TIP, RING, SLEEVE, and is the standard 3-pin input/output cable found on most consumer electronics devices, like your DSLR camera and yes the RØDE VideoMic range.
TRRS stands for TIP, RING, RING, SLEEVE, and is the 4-pin connection found on smartphones, tablets, laptops and the accessories that are designed to connect to these devices, like your standard phone headset. The extra RING is for the microphone input (whilst still giving you the Left and Right audio channels) and this extra ring makes the two types of connections incompatible.
Enter the RØDE Smart Cable Range.
The video below will explain all you need to know about the complete SC Range, and how you can best integrate these cables into your setup!
SC Cables from RØDE Microphones on Vimeo.
As you can see, being able to use something like a VideoMicro or VideoMicPro directly into your smartphone, whether it be from the Apple iPhone, or Android families is extremely powerful in the fields of indie filmmaking, mobile journalism and even Podcasting!
As explained in the video above, you can use a combination of the SC Cables together, to firstly change what would normally be a TRS output to TRRS, and then combine two of these TRRS connections into one smartphone! But be aware as there is still only ONE single audio input on any smart device, both of your audio signals will be mixed onto the same channels, meaning you cannot isolate or edit each individual track in post-production.
In the image below, we see two RØDELink Filmmaker Kit Receivers, with SC7 cables in the outputs, going into an SC6. From here the SC1 gives you 6m of length to run the signal into the iPhone.
If you're using a similar setup, or want to know more about using the SC Cables, get in touch and we will be happy to help!