Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Dr. Nathan Mollick, a professor here at Stetson University in the Digital Arts Program and I'm doing this video to provide a quick start introduction to our Zoom audio recorders, which look like this. We have a new model at the time of this recording. We just recently updated to the Zoom H4 Essentials model, which simplifies some of the features of the Zoom recorders, but it also changes the workflow just a little bit. So I'm doing this mainly as an introduction to students who are new to audio recording with these Zooms, but I also mentioned a few of the changes that have occurred for those that may have used some of our previous models, checking them out from the library. So the basic concept is that it records audio to an SD card, much like your digital camera would record photographs to an SD card. It looks a little like this, okay? They're quite small and you can hold, the ones that we have for these Zoom recorders actually hold 256 gigabytes. So there's plenty of room for recording stereo sound files and capturing things that way. To get started, you want to power on the unit and you'll do that by finding the on-off switch here on the side panel. You can simply take this switch and pull it toward the power icon and the screen will light up like that to let you know that it's powering on. When it first powers on, you'll actually see some of the newer features. The new display actually has a live waveform that it draws for you, so you can actually see how it's recording over the last few seconds. It's a much faster startup time than our previous recorders, previous versions of the Zoom recorders. And a couple of things that you can notice to let you know that it's not recording yet. So the waveform is being drawn here. The waveform is in white. That's one signal that you have that's not recording. There's also numbers here counting time and currently it's just a bunch of zeros. The fact that it's staying still at those zeros and not counting up means that it's not recording at this time. There's also a light just above the record button here and it's not on. That also tells you that it's not recording. So those are some things that you can look at to confirm that it's not actually recording at the moment that you turn it on. When you are setting up and getting ready to record, you want to make sure that you've got the input level set correctly. What's different about this model from previous models is that it does not have a recording level setting. So you don't need to set the recording level. You don't need to check to make sure that it's clipping if you're used to that operation. You can just simply hit record and go. There is a volume control on the side here and you'll see that it says volume on it. This is simply the volume for your headphone level only though. It will not control the level of the recording. The recording level stays consistent throughout. You can set the input for the microphone here and you see how there's a light just above where it says mic. If I turn that off, you'll notice that the waveform goes away. That tells me that it's actually not going to be recording from the internal microphones here on the top. So a good thing to keep that lit up and keep that waveform drawing. You also do have two XLR inputs on the bottom that can be used for external microphones. You would enable those by using the one and the two and you'll see that those light up as well as start a waveform being drawn on the screen as well. So if you're not interested in using those, just simply keep the middle mic light on and that will record with the internal microphones and you'll see the waveform being drawn just in the windows one and two to signify the left and right channels at the top with the internal microphones. To start recording, you just simply press this big button in the center of the interface. It's got a red button but it's the large, it's got a red circle on it, excuse me. It certainly is the largest button on the interface though. So when you press this, you'll notice that the light turns on to let you know that it started recording. In addition, the waveform turns red. That lets you, that's another signal that you have that it's actually recording sound at that time. And then the numbers will start counting up just after it flashes a file name there for you. And the file names on this are actually based on date instead of being counted in order like our previous Zoom recorders were. So once you see the red light here, the red waveform here and the red numbers counting up there, you know that recording is actually going on, okay? And so a few tips for getting the best sound out of these recorders, one, you want to take these microphones, you want to point them toward your source. Make sure that they're pointed toward the thing that you're actually interested in recording. And so the mic orientation is important, okay? It's going to give you a left and a right signal there and capture a stereo recording of whatever it is that you're pointed at. So if you're recording someone with speech, I find that a good distance is about a foot away from their mouth to get a good clean signal from their talking if they're talking at a normal conversational level. You might need to experiment with some other distances if you're recording louder sources. We also in our kits have a windscreen that looks like this, okay? This looks kind of funny, funny looking haircut. But if you place this over the microphones, it will still pick up sound through this cover, but it just simply prevents the wind from buffeting up against the microphone diaphragms and interfering with the sound and giving you a cleaner signal. But it's still good to point at the actual subject that you're trying to record. The other piece of advice that I'll give is that handling noise. So when you actually move your fingers around on this recorder, although it's a lot more sturdy this recorder than the previous iterations of the Zoom recorder, but moving your fingertips around and kind of shuffling your hand like this, this will all be picked up via the microphones as handling noise, and you want to avoid that if at all possible. So try to keep your hand still, try to keep a firm grip on it while you're recording, and simply point it at the subject that you're trying to record, okay? It is also, let's see, it does a better job of recording a little bit louder sources than it does quieter sources, although with the new 32-bit recording, you can easily recover quieter sources and boost the level a little bit, boost the level quite a bit, actually, in order to capture and hear those sounds that you captured, okay? When you're ready to stop recording, you just simply hit the stop button, which is just to the left of the record button, okay? You press that and you'll notice the light goes out, a little update spins on the interface, and the waveform goes white again. Those are ways to tell that you've actually stopped recording at that point. You can play back the file that you immediately recorded with the play button, which is just to the right of the stop button, okay? You hit that and it'll actually start playing out of the internal speaker. You can always hit stop as well. And then there is a file list to see files that have been recorded on this. You get to that by using this toggle wheel on the side, it's a blue toggle wheel on the right-hand side of the recorder, and then there's an enter button just below that. If you take the toggle wheel and you'll notice that the menu on the bottom changes selection. When you hit file list, go ahead and hit the enter key and it'll bring up a list for you of all the files that have been recorded that are currently saved on the SD card that you can use to pick something and play back and make sure that the thing you've captured. And this is actually a good view to show you the new file naming structure actually uses a date and time format. So these numbers are not random. It's a matter of the year, the month, the day, and then the time in this number scheme, which makes it a lot easier for you to go back and correlate that with any slating details or early times that you've recorded and actually know when it is that you picked up that recording, okay? I'm going to toggle back out of this menu. So I just toggle up to the back button, I hit enter, and it'll go back to the main screen where it's drawing the waveform as well. In addition, these menus are helpful for getting things off of the card as well. So if you are in our lab on one of our computers or you're on your own computer and you need to connect this and offload sound files, you want to scroll over to the USB option and hit enter. And you're going to see there's an option that says file transfer. If you click enter on that and click PC Mac, it will put the recorder in a mode where it actually can be connected via USB cable to your computer. In our kit, we've included a USB cable that has one end for USB-C that you would connect to the actual recorder itself. The other end has a little switch, I guess a little cap on it here where it's USB-C without the cap. And then if you place the cap on it, it'll be USB-A for your older computers and make sure you have the ability to connect those, okay? And again, put it in that file transfer mode, connect it with the USB cable. It should show up just like an external hard drive and you can copy files off of there for projects that you might be working on. And when you're done, do turn off the recorder just to save batteries. It's the same switch that you used on the right-hand side to turn on the recorder. Just slide it toward the power icon and you'll see a goodbye message before the unit turns itself off completely. But that's my quick start introduction to the new Zoom H4 Essentials that we have for checkout in the library here at Stetson. Hopefully that gets you started and gets you rolling with going out and doing some field recording with these awesome new recorders.