Zoom H1 tips

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Hello everyone, I've had the zoom H1 for about 2 months now and I've noticed that most times I need to adjust the gain in post because the recorded sound is too quiet.. You are able to set your levels up to 100 but I notice that after around 65 the audio gets very hissy..

Are there any settings that are primary and best to use? does anyone have any experience with this recorder? We are using the H1 on a boom around 2.5 feet away from the talent.
 
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You've run into the limitations of micro-budget audio. Units like the H1 are meant for musicians, not filmmakers. Musicians work at much higher dB levels than filmmakers, and the extra self noise of the inexpensive preamps usually goes unnoticed by musicians.

You can use a low-pass filter to reduce some of the hiss; start at about 12kHz and work you way down - be careful not to take too much high end out of the dialog itself. Proper audio post techniques will also minimize the hiss being noticed.
 
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Thanks for the reply Alcove. The problem is not primarily in the hiss itself, that I can get rid of almost entirely in post production.. the problem is like you once mentioned, getting that "dry sound" which I was only able to do on the zoom h1 by being about a foot away from it.. so that makes voiceovers and ADR great but on the scene shoots a bit shaky.. I'll fiddle with the low cut filter in hopes that it does anything good.
 
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EQs a will not have any affect on the amount of reverb/ambient reflections you record.

That "dry sound" is the result of being really close in to the voices. The further you get from the mouth of the speaker, the more of the ambient sound and ambient reverb of the space you will get. So if that really dry tone is your thing than use lavs, or shoot only close-ups, or do ADR (or dialog wilds) everything. The last option is to do room treatment to the extreme to eliminate any chance of reverb/ambient reflections.
 
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That sounds like pretty much all of my options yes. Thank you. Are there any post production tips in how to at least help the sound get a bit more dry? to just make it a bit better if possible.
 
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If you had a budget you wouldn't have the problem to begin with, and it takes a real budget to even mitigate the problem.

Again, a proper audio post will help a little bit - unless of course you ADR everything, in which case you'll have to do a proper audio post. You can EQ the most offensive frequencies a teeny tiny little bit to increase intelligibility. If you have about $300 for software you can try SPL De-Verb, which does a fair to passable job about 30% of the time. iZotope RX2 Advanced ($1,100) can help in some cases as well. Combining all of these approaches can actually make a noticeable difference more than 50% of the time.

On to reality...

I've already mentioned what you can do during production. You have to work really hard to get good sound, and even harder to get great sound.
 
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