After 2 days of wind, and I don’t mean little gusts here and there, we’re talking grab on to your toupee, the Shure VP89M shotgun came through with flying colours! It did a great job of rejecting an ambience that was trying to kick me and my audio to the curb.
I’m in Brazil shooting for Child Fund using Shure shotgun microphones for the first time on location. The shoot is going well but the locations and talent have been a challenge. Soft spoken children talking into their shoes in louder then normal locations does not bode well for recording quality dialogue. Even in a quiet location, it’s often impossible to dig out those tiny voices, but the VP89M was impressive! It honed in on the voice and rejected unwanted gusts of wind shaking the trees and tall grasses. It responded beautifully to slight pitch and angel adjustments allowing me to control the ambience.
I was also impressed with the volume of the VP89M. I was able to operate my mixer at unity with these tiny soft voices (impossible with many shotguns) and there was still more gain due to the mics high output.
The VP89M was also easy to boom with – no handling noise what so ever! This could mean the mic is mid and top heavy? It was tough to be 100% sure what the bottom end was really doing in these conditions, but even with the wind blowing the zeppelin all over the place, I couldn’t hear any handling noise – I’ll find out in post.
The first real test of the Shure VP89M was under some pretty tough conditions, and it did very well for an entry level medium priced short shotgun. I’m going to reserve my final thoughts after I’ve posted the audio, but it was an impressive outing.
Talk to you in a couple of weeks!
