Sennheiser Wireless Evolution G2 Tutorial

Hi, Guy Cochran, here to bring you another session of the DVeStore Theater.
In this one, we're going to do a little tutorial on how to use this
Sennheiser Wireless G2 Evolution series. There have been some discussions
on the boards, how do you set the AF out? How do you adjust these levels
I'm getting over modulation? We're going to take a look at the few of the
things that you could change to make your sound even better.
Now this first piece that we're looking at is the receiver. Now you can
tell that this one's the receiver because on the top it will say AF Out.
Now if you open up the door inside, you will see a couple of buttons. One
says on and off, we'll go ahead and hit the on/off button. The other one
that you see here is called set and then you also have two up and down
arrows. Now the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go
ahead and reset this unit. So we're going to press set, we're going to use
the up and down arrows to scroll up to reset. We'll say set again. It says
no. We are going to scroll up to OK, hit set again. So now we've just reset
the unit and it is back to its factory defaults.
Now when you first fire up this guy I want you to have the transmitter off,
so keep the transmitter off if your transmitter is on, go ahead and turn it
off right now. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to press set
and we're going to scroll down to scan. We're going to scan for available
frequencies, so we'll go ahead and say set. It'll say start and we'll press
set again. It scans for open frequencies. It found four channels free.
We'll go ahead and press set again and now they're stored.
To get out of any menu, you can also just press the on/off button. That's
like escape, so the on/off button here will jump you right back to the main
menu. We're going to scroll over to AF Out which is here. We'll go ahead
and say set and right now it is way high, as it's default it's way, way too
hot so we're going to go ahead and take it down and we'll first try it at
about negative 18. All video cameras are going to be a little bit
different, but we'll go ahead and set this one for negative 18. It's
stored. We'll go ahead and press the on/off and we're done setting up the
receiver.
Now we're going to move on to the transmitter. So now we're looking at the
transmitter. You can tell which one's the transmitter because it says on
the back transmitter and it also has the handy little clip. Now, we'll go
ahead and turn this guy on because remember we had it off. You're actually
seeing the VU meters kick in right now. Let's go ahead and reset this guy.
We're going to say set, we're going to scroll up to reset, we'll say set,
reset OK. It resets itself. So it defaults to 518.150 megahertz.
Now we're going to go ahead and adjust our levels so we're going to scroll
down to sensitivity. Now for most people between negative 10 and negative
20 is going to be pretty good. What will happen is if you adjust this
sensitivity and you have it up too high, what will happen is when somebody
starts getting really loud it will peak and you will clip and you will have
bad audio. So what we want to do is we want to bring this guy down while we
have it on somebody's chest. So right now I want you to visualize having
the microphone placed about halfway down the chest, right where the sternum
is, the breastplate. Don't put it up on the collar. We're going to adjust
this down to about negative 20 DB is good for people. For most interviews,
negative 20 DB is going to be about right. Your mileage may vary,
depending on how loud the speaker actually gets. We'll go ahead and say
store and now our sensitivity is set and we can press the on/off button and
we're back at 518.150.
We're actually looking like we're a little bit low, check, check one, check
two. For me we might actually want to go back into sensitivity, say
negative 20 and let's bring it up to negative 10 because you want to ride
those levels. Let's go ahead and escape out of here. You want to ride those
levels so that you're getting the numbers to be about halfway. So that's
looking pretty good right there.
Now the other thing that you might want to do is tune. Maybe, maybe
somebody is also on this frequency and you want to retune. So what you can
do now is you can go to set, and let's go ahead and go to bank. Now you
have eight banks and one user definable bank. Basically, what these are are
groups of channels, so you have eight groups of channels. So you can see
that if we go to bank one and we go over to channel that we have one, two,
three, four channels for this bank. So this is bank one and it has four
channels in it. These are the four.
So let's say we wanted to go to 520.950, we'll go ahead and say set and now
it's stored and we can get out of here. Five twenty-nine fifty, now we'll
jump back over to the receiver and we'll set it up. So what we're going to
do is we're going to jump onto bank one, so we're going to hit set, jump
over to bank, we're going to go to bank one, set. Then we're going to go
over to channel one and it was 520.950, set, and you see the little RF light
light up.
Now on the receiver unit you might also want to adjust your squelch. The
squelch should always be at low unless you are getting a ton of wireless
interference. Say, for example, you're at a trade show, you might want to
bring this up to something a little bit more like mid or high, but you're
going to decrease your range. So we'll bring that back down on low.
Another interesting feature is pilot tone. With these units you always want
to leave the pilot tone on. Basically, what the pilot tone does is it looks
for the transmitter and if it doesn't hear its pilot tone and it's this
super high frequency that not even dogs can hear, if it doesn't hear that
pilot tone, what it will do is it will automatically mute the unit. You can
also name each unit. Maybe, you have different talent and you want to name
each one. This one is called the EK100. You can change this name to
whatever you want.
So the last thing that we want to set is the levels on our camera. So we're
going to first set the record level to manual. Then what we want to do is
we want to take this guy down to about 30%. Now if you notice that the
levels are way too hot on your camera's VU meters, go into the AF Out on
your receiver and bring the levels down to something like negative 30. So
right now I have it at negative 30, and this seems to be a good match. The
other trick that I like to do is I like to change the balance. I like to
bring the balance a little bit down so what you have is one side a little
bit lower than the other. So this way if somebody ever does clip, if they
go really high, you still have some level to play with.
Hi and thanks for tuning in to this tutorial on the Sennheiser Evolution G2
Wireless Series. If you haven't picked one of these up, there's nothing out
on the market that is under a thousand dollars that sounds as good or is as
reliable as these new units. Here we have one mounted onto the Canon XL-1S
via the hot shoe. You can see that it's highly portable, it's very small
compared to the camera. It's lightweight. I've been using one for the last
couple months and the unit is awesome. It hasn't failed me at all. It's
just working great. I even took it to NAB. All those interviews that you
hear from NAB are all using this wireless unit or the wireless handheld
with the ENG kit. So the standard kit contains just the transmitter and the
receiver, and then if you add the ENG kit you get the plug-on transmitter
as well. You can do so by clicking that little buy now button down below,
and hopefully you guys pick one up if you don't already own one and you
will enjoy it as much as I do.