“Is it better quality than a DSLR?”
I wanted to test a new iPad video accessory called the Swivl this week, so I set it up in our auditorium for Music Day student performances. The Swivl is a base into which you set your iPad to record presentations and video with two major distinguishing features: first, the base features a rotating motor which tracks a remote held or worn by the presenter via infrared. This device has earned a lot of attention in education and in business by making it very easy to record presentations since the camera will track the presenter and keep them in the center of the frame. I’d tested it in several of our classrooms with student and faculty presentations already, but in the name of curiosity, I was using it in Music Day to test a second unique feature: the remote has a small microphone in it which transmits the audio signal back to the base to record directly into the iPad. Again, for presentations this is a great benefit since it will get clear audio signal from the speaker no matter how far away the iPad is. I wanted to take the notion one step further and record an ensemble from the stage with the remote mic. The ability to put a wireless microphone on the podium, for example, and transmit to a video camera further back in the hall was very intriguing to me.
I was setting the Swivl up in the Auditorium when a student looked at me and asked, “But is it better quality than a DSLR?” I hear variations of this question whenever I talk about mobile-based audio or video recording, and I think it misses the larger question. Certainly the recording quality of an iPad or any tablet or smartphone falls short of a professional-grade rig. Even a dedicated pro-sumer level specialized video camera or a handheld audio device like the Zoom H2 is going to have better input and be designed to process cleaner A/V. For the really important projects, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of a number of single-purpose devices to create superior multimedia. That said, it is surprising the results that can come from smartphone or tablet video and audio with some of the aftermarket accessories that are available. Furthermore, that I believe that these tools have a place in our recording arsenal isn’t because they can imitate what they aren’t (try and be a professional-grade field recorder, for example), but because of some of the things that make mobile computing so powerful:
Ease of sharing. I don’t think this point can be overstated– the highest quality recordings have very little value if they never get off the recorder. I have stacks of memory cards from projects gone by or rehearsals that I recorded and meant to share, but never took the time to move the files, do any necessary editing or converting, and then think about distributing. Mobile operating systems are built to publish and share content, and can do it in a variety of ways depending on your apps and subscriptions. By the time the audience had left the auditorium, I had created a Google Drive folder shared with our Music Department from the iPad and was uploading the video files to them. Similarly, I could have used Dropbox, or uploaded straight to YouTube or Vimeo if I wanted to publish them externally.
Simplicity. Mobile operating systems are built to be easy to navigate and the devices place a premium on design that’s easy to learn quickly. That aesthetic extends to most of the apps available for mobile devices as well: there are many exceptions, but mobile apps generally tend to do one or two specific things and strive to achieve them with a minimal learning curve and amount of user input. This has a flipside in that many of the apps are more limited in their capacity, but when you find a great audio recorder such as Twisted Wave, its simplicity translates to quick setup and learning curve which won’t bog users down.
Widespread Adoption. Gadgets are expensive, and none of us have large enough budgets that we want to dominate them with recording technology. By taking advantage of the devices that you, your musicians or your colleagues already own, you can build a range of accessories while not having to purchase single-use devices. In many cases, the app that corresponds to a piece of hardware is provided free from the manufacturer, meaning that you can have many people in your ensemble with the apps on their phones or tablets to allow for sectional or small ensemble recording, or to get help with setting up recording for concerts or events.
In the end, some of the biggest determining factors in the quality of audio or video are external to the recorder no matter what the hardware: lighting is going to make an enormous difference in the quality of video, and my tests for Music Day were hampered by not having the microphone in a good location for the often boomy acoustics in our hall. I gave the Swivl an “incomplete” for recording music via wireless remote, and I’ll come back to it in the future with more thought to mic placement. The distinction is significant, though: in this case, I evaluated the device as a way to make capable recordings via iPad because of what that offers (the benefits of mobile computing), not what it doesn’t.
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