I'm a newbie at sound recording (and I really suck at physics, so still can't get my head around the technical part of sound) Anyway I own a Zoom H4n and Røde NTG2 and I found tge recordings extremely quiet, like I have to put rec levels on 100 and it's still not enough when recording dialogue on set. So after finding out that ntg2 and zoom h4n the worst combination that was made in hell, I purchased Fostex FR2 and I really hoped that my problems with "not loud enough" will be over, but after recording dialogues and sounds on FR2 and NTG2 I found out that it is also not loud enough. (I recorded some sounds of traffic and early morning birds using fr2 and ntg2 and even after I tried to save it in iZotope RX4, it was still unusable as after gaining volume on recording the noise level gone up too). I don't have a field mixer, (also don't understand fully what exactly mixer does!) Does that mean that my NTG2 is the problem? Would getting NTG3 solve the "recordings not loud enough" problem?
What else can you suggest to improve the loudness of recording? I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong :( please help!
Thank you.