Speaker 1: Hey everyone my name is Trent Erwin and I am a filmmaker and photographer and have been in the business for nine years. Yeah since 2014 I've had my own business for the last four years. In this video I want to talk about an audio recorder, a lavalier mic audio recorder that I have come to absolutely love. I've used a lot of different brands over the years. I've used Tascam, I've used Rode, I've used Zoom and some of them have been good and some of them have just not been that reliable. There's a lot of different players, a lot of different brands in the marketplace these days and I actually came across a brand a year ago that I had not seen any advertisements for. I had not seen it populated high on any product page or anything like that. I really haven't seen anybody talking about it on YouTube either and so what is it? What is that brand? That brand is Tentacle and so this is a Tentacle Sync Track E audio recorder and this one comes with the lavalier mic as well. You can buy one of these, just the units, and add your own lavalier mic, but I like to get the combo. And I've actually come to find out that the mic that comes with it is actually very good and very reliable. I've not had any issues with it. But why did I settle in on this and why have I continued to use this Tentacle TrackE over the last year in my filmmaking business? Well, it's really kind of twofold. One is the quality of audio. There is 32-bit float audio within this recorder and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second about what 32-bit float audio is. I'm not an audio engineer by any means but I'll talk a little bit more about that. And then the second piece which is a really important part of this and how you actually use the audio recorder and use it and implement it into your filmmaking is the application that they've built. So as you can see here I can use an application on iOS and Android devices on my iPad or on my iPhone and I can check levels I can see everything here I can adjust the recording gain from the application I can start and stop from the application and what's incredible I don't know if you can see that here but you can even add multiple devices to the application sync them all within time code sync all the time code together and record all of them at this just push one button and record all of them at the same time and stop them all at the same time and monitor them all at the same time. Which I did recently actually. I just had a shoot that was a roundtable discussion. I needed to use three of these bad boys. I needed to monitor all of them, start all of them. And you know if you've ever used audio recorders, lavalier mics that you just put on a person and you have to hit record and you don't have an application and you don't have a way to see whether it's recording. You don't have a receiver for where it's you are just kind of flying blind and that's not a good feeling at all, ever. You don't want to fly blind ever. So the application that comes with the Tentacle mic that they have developed, that the brand has developed is, it is good, like really good. It's one of those applications that it's probably one of the most reliable application, like it's more reliable than some of the applications that Google makes, which maybe that's not saying a whole lot for some folks, but the application over the last year has never ever, maybe I should knock on wood, but the application has never given me any issues. I've never had any problems with it starting the recording, stopping the recording, showing me exactly the levels of the microphone and being able to control. I've never had any issues with that. And when I was using the application on my iPad, most recently for that recording or for that filming of three people, where you really are worried about whether audio is clean, whether it's all recording for all three of those individuals, I was able to see all of it and make sure all of it was rolling, everything was good from the one application, which is amazing that you can do that. But if you're someone who doesn't need to use like two or three of these, you can still use the application for just one of these devices and that makes infield recording that much easier, have more confidence in what you're doing because of the application. So, honestly, maybe my favorite thing about this audio recorder is the application. I mean, obviously, if it didn't have good audio quality, then it wouldn't matter. But it has exceptional audio quality as well. And that's what I said, 32-bit float audio. Again, I'm not an audio engineer. I'm not an audio buff by any means. But what that basically does, what that basically is, compare the bit rates to that of like color bit in a camera. So like 8-bit color, 10-bit color, 12-bit color. We know as the bit increases as we go up to 10 bit we get more colors within our image. And then if we go to 12 bit we get even more colors within our image and we know the benefits that we receive from having additional information. And so the same thing is true in audio. So when we go to to 32 bits, we're getting more information into that audio, which yes, it's gonna make those file sizes a lot heftier, a lot more intense. Like I think recording 40 minutes of 32-bit float was about 520 megabytes. I think when I did the math on that, it's about 13 megabytes per minute. So yeah, 13 megabytes per minute of 32-bit float waveform audio. It's heavy, it's heavy. But when you're talking about audio that is closer to like raw audio, that is something that can absolutely change and save you if you have somebody who speaks too loud and you accidentally set your gain or left your gain too high and it's peaking. Or if you have someone who is soft-spoken and you don't wanna bring up the noise floor, you know? You know, we all, we've all, we've all dealt with people who talk really, really soft, you know, and, uh, there's not a whole lot we could really do to, you know, to, to mitigate the noise that comes up when we try to fix that in post. Um, so yeah, for folks who are soft-spoken, you can bring up audio levels without drastically bringing up the noise floor, which is really, really helpful when it comes to doing your audio and post-production. So the 32-bit float audio. Yes, there might be folks out there like you don't you don't need it. It's overkill I get it raw video and a lot of instances is overkill But I still use it for quite a few shoots because it's beautiful and the flexibility that you have in post is amazing So the same thing for audio since audio is not as dense as raw video. I don't care I don't care if a file size is gonna be 100 megabytes or 500 megabytes if the audio has more flexibility for me that's what I want. And if you're a one-man band, one-woman band, or just a two-person band, or three-person, and you can't you can't monitor, you can't check everything all the time, you can't make sure that you know you don't have one person running audio, 32-bit float will save you in post-production if you accidentally made a mistake. So I have actually loved the Tentacle Track E so much that recently I bought another one of them because I realized that I need to have two on hand at all times. And a buddy of mine has another, I think actually he bought another one as well. So he has two. So if we're ever in a situation where we need multiple, he's got two, I've got two. I'm a big believer in this Tentacle Track E for sure. Not sponsored, no brand deal or anything. I just have come to really love it. If you're looking for a really good audio recording and a lavalier mic setup, I wouldn't really look at the other brands right now. I don't think that they're offering anything just as good. Now, it's gonna come with a price tag. It's $350, $350 for one of these units. I get it, it's kind of pricey, but if you want really good audio, and I feel like in filmmaking, that's half the thing, right? That's half the battle. This little thing, it's gonna do it for you. So, worth it. You