Hello forum members, I’m hoping I can get a few suggestions from the wealth of expertise I see on this forum. Here’s my situation… for the past few years I’ve been video taping concerts at our local park, some really fine musicians come through there and I have run of the area/permission to pretty much setup anything I wish. I started with an on camera mic, it was terrible and graduated to a Zoom H5 with the built in XY capsule. This does a pretty good job if placed closer to the speakers, if father back I tend to get too much bass and a reverberant sound I don’t like. At any rate, I want to improve upon this, one of my bigger issues is that I cannot see the levels on the recorder once it’s up high on a stand (I use a photography lighting stand to get it up over crowd chatter). In addition to this scenario I also have the opportunity to record artists at a very small music room but in this case I need to have something attached to my person/camera that won’t block views anymore than myself. The venue is totally ok with taping, in fact they encourage it because I share the videos but using something not attached to my person would be a trip hazard and too intrusive. So here’s my question, is there something for around $500 that I can attach to my camera for a simple setup that would be an upgrade from mounting my zoom H5 on my hot-shoe with an isolation mount and that would also be used on a pole as well when that’s an option? One of the mics I saw talked about was the Audio Technica AT-8022 stereo mic. Would this or another option be superior to the Zoom H5 or perhaps a Rode Stereo Videomic? Also, how do all in one stereo xy mics compare to using a pair of separate mics on a bar configured XY sonically? Lastly I should mention the camera is a Sony A7 dslr, however I can use the Zoom H5 to record into or as a preamp/interface before plugging into the A7Riii. I realize the quality into the Zoom will be better but it’s often very convenient to also have decent audio attached to the video files that doesn’t need synching for immediate uploads. I've also attached two photos of the "venues" I'm speaking about.
Thanks for any direction, suggestions or comments.
-Robert Wasilewski