2 hour presentation, 1 hour long tapes... complete audio?
 

Hi there,

I'm shooting a 2 hour presentation with two cameras next week. I'm trying to figure out the best way to capture the audio for the presentation when I'll inevitably have to swap out my 60 minute DV tapes mid-way through. I have only one wireless transmitter/receiver set up so if that runs to my main camera, when i swap the tape, i'll only have the second camera's audio which won't be as good.

Is a solution to plug my wireless receiver into a digital audio recorder (that i don't have yet). Or are there other practices that you'd recommend?

Basically just trying to figure out how people normally capture audio when they're shooting non-stop audio that goes over 60 minutes.

thanks for your help!

max

I have a sony d-50 recorder and with the internal 4gig memory I can get nearly 6 hours of 48k 16-bit audio. I just leave it running and then edit it later.

Thanks Gary. When using an audio recorder is it fairly straightforward if you need to connect a wireless receiver to it, or if you want to tap into a soundboard? how steep is the learning curve for someone who might buy/rent one for an impending shoot?

max

Its real simple to use and the only drawback is it only has small jack inputs and outputs, as for operation the menu system is easy and you can just place it into record and the hold button will lock out any key mistakes. The inbuilt mic amps are superb and the limiter is also very good.
I mainly use it with an ENG-44 mixer and have a sony UHF diversity radio mic to link the sound from the mixer to the camera with the d-50 as a back-up recorder which is always running.
An option for you is to do the opposite as you say and it will be real easy to hook up a sennheiser g2 type radio system to the inputs as the jacks are the same.

Max,

With your two cameras, I assume you'll change tapes at different times so that at any given time you have at least one picture? Then you could rent a second wireless receiver (identical to the one you already have), tune it to the same frequency as the first one, and feed the same audio into both cameras.

Using a good separate recorder can probably give you better audio quality, but it's more convenient to have the sound captured right with the video, already synchronized.

- Martin

"tune it to the same frequency as the first one"

Martin, are you sure this will work?

you can set 1 transmitter to a freq and set multiple receivers to that freq. I've done it many times and it's worked fine.

Multiple transmitters to the same freq and 1 is a no no. (2 receivers to 2 different cameras)

Don

And of course, if you have access to a laptop with firewire and a big enough (approx 13Gb required per-hour) hard drive, you could capture from your camera to that- I'd still use tapes, just in case, but you also get the benefit of being able to transfer to your editing machine quicker than real time, at the end of it.

If you are shooting DV, a variation on this is to get an old "Barbie Doll" Macintosh iBook that they designed for kids. It's a very rugged laptop with a convenient handle. Some models (333Mhz or better) have Firewire 400 and will capture DV video.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1772

Think of it as a single purpose "appliance" in your equipment for capturing tape change footage. You don't necessarily have to capture everything and need a big hard drive. Rather, you just need to capture during the tape change. You can also move it to camera 2 for when it's tape change happens.

When back at the ranch, you can use a USB memory stick or hook up the iBook (using Firewire) to any other Mac and start up holding the T key down (called Target Disk Mode). The iBook will show up as a Firewire drive. If you are a Windows shop, then it's USB memory stick or ethernet file transfer time.

If you are running both cameras from the same position, one wide and one close up as I sometimes do, you might run the receiver into one camera's input, then come out the headphone jack with a stereo cable and run that into the external mic input of the second camera then out of the second one's headphone jack to your phones. Leave both cams on when changing tapes. Just a thought if you want to take some time to decide on what recorder to buy.