Know your Zoom F8n (Pro)

Know your Zoom F8n (Pro)

To improve readability, we will refer to the Zoom F8n and Zoom F8n Pro as the 'F8n' for short. Any differences between the models will be mentioned explicitly.

This is about one of our most frequently used recorders and contains some tips and tricks that you may find in the manual, if you can understand the engineer's perspective. 

As it is also useful to have as a cheat sheet, it will be made into a downloadable tutorial. We will start with this article, and once it is ready, it will be converted into a tutorial.

F8n-settings on your SD cards

The F8n offers powerful yet hidden functionality. Presets! Or, as they're called in the F8n: "Backup/Load Settings".
We won't explain how to access this feature on your F8n, but we will explain how to use it to its fullest potential. For the details, please look in your manual for "Backing up and loading F8n (Pro) settings (Backup/LoadSettings)"

The magic happens afterward. 
Once you format an SD card, all settings will be deleted. In our opinion, this is a design flaw in the firmware, but that's just the way it is.

Once you return home from the set, you should always start a "3-2-1 backup" of your recorded files. You should also copy the settings from the settings folder into a "common" settings folder.
This is an example of one of our SD cards for a F8n.

As we also still have an Zoom F8n we keep the F8nP as a leading tag. But you may change this on your on decision.

After formatting an SD card, you should copy the contents of the "common-settings" folder into the "settings" folder on the newly formatted SD card. This will be useful for future jobs. You simply copy the *.ZSF files into the F8n_settings folder of the SD card.

This will not only make the setup of your F8n a breeze, but ensure a constant workflow, naming and order of channel for the use in post.