Nikon D7000 Built-In Audio Capture: Avoid it if you can…

I'm hoping to produce a new round of videos soon, and in preparation for the event(s), I decided to step up my game by moving into the world of DSLR video shooting. I got a good price on a D7000 locally, and shot some tests yesterday to see if it'd help me out.

It did. Kinda…

The video image out of this camera is amazing, and the fact that I can use my wider lenses is very handy—one of the reasons I went this way to begin with. But unfortunately, it seems the audio story isn't good if you're looking for simplicity.

I had hoped to just hook my mixer right into the camera's microphone port, because that'd eliminate the step of trying to align separately-recorded audio with the video. I'd done this fairly successfully with my Canon HF200 camcorder, so it should have just worked, right?

Well, there's no on-camera audio level monitoring, so you can't tell if you're clipping your audio until you've moved the footage to your machine. Thankfully the D7000 records directly to .MOV files, so you can do this straight off of the card reader fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, It took about 6 tries before I was able to tame the audio level in my testing, and once it was sufficiently within range, I wasn't sure about how it sounded.

So I fired up a copy of FuzzMeasure and used the field recording feature so that I could do an offline measurement of the D7000. I sent the signal through the mixer so that I could get a sense of its frequency response. Sure enough, my fears were confirmed in this graph:

I'm not too sure what's causing the two dips at 5600Hz and 6900Hz, but I think that's the least of my concern right now. Just look at the overall curve! The -3dB points are at approximately 300Hz and 3000Hz! That's optimized for the response of speech, and not full-range recordings.

It's such a shame that the external microphone jack works this way, but at the same time I can see why they chose to make life easier for the majority of customers that shoot video on DSLR cameras, and want reduced wind noise with intelligible speech.

I guess I need to finally start doing audio recordings properly now, and synchronizing the audio after the fact. I expected I'd have to go this route eventually…