The RØDE Mobile Interview Kit is a new product for smartphone video producers which allows for two smartphone microphones to be connected to your iPhone to make capturing professional audio much easier.
One of the biggest challenges when shooting professional video with your smartphone is recording high quality audio. While microphones on smartphones are getting significantly better, particularly on the iPhone, they still have their limitations. While the phone itself has three microphones, front-facing, back-facing, and one on the bottom of the phone, most shooting apps, including the iPhone's native camera app, only allow for one microphone to be used at a time -- in the case of the native app it is the microphone on the side of the camera that you are using. This can make getting perfect audio a challenge as you may want to hear something that the camera may not be directly pointed at.
This is where the The RØDE Mobile Interview Kit will come in handy. The kit includes the SC6-L adaptor, which plugs into the lightning port on your phone and then has two mobile microphone 3.5mm ports and a 3.5mm headphone port for direct monitoring, and two RØDE Smartphone+ lavaliere microphones. The kit is built for the RØDE Reporter app, but is also compatible with the camera app and any other app that recognizes microphone's connected to the Lightning port.
The kit is designed for interviews on the go, that is you can wear one of the microphones to record your questions and place the other microphone on the other subject, but can be used in many different ways. You can put the mics on two subject and record dialogue, you can use different microphones that have 3.5mm connection, such as a shotgun, to ensure fuller sound, and many other uses.
The one major draw back of this kit is that you will be tied to your microphones wire length which would limit your shooting, but if you have smartphone radio mics you could fix this problem.
You can buy the The RØDE Mobile Interview Kit from your local retailer. Find yours here.
Whether or not this is the right microphone kit for you, there is no doubt that there are plenty of smartphone accessories for shooting video that are coming out all the time to help make your video produced on smartphone more professional.
Check out more about smartphone accessories here.