Two Cams One Mic
 

Any recomendations for a quality mixer that will send the audio signal from one mic to two video cams?

[QUOTE=Scott Ellifritt]Any recomendations for a quality mixer that will send the audio signal from one mic to two video cams?[/QUOTE

Are you planning on recording on 1 channel in each video camera or putting the same signal on both channels of each camera? Battery operation or mains?

Thanks for the response. I want to record both channels on each camera.
Battery op preferred.

I may only need an XLR splitter. Is there any noticable signal loss or interference?

Thanks.

I can't say for sure but I would expect taking one mic feed and splitting it 4 ways (2 cameras, 2 channels each) would lead to a noticable loss. Take a look at the Behringer MXB1002 mixer. It has more inputs than you need (10 channels) but it's very inexpensive, and has tape out, monitor out, and main out so you can input one mic and feed it to up to 3 stereo, 6 mono, outputs. And it runs on battery. And it provides phantom power. I don't have any direct hands on experience with it but check it out and see if it will do what you need.

http://www.behringer.com/MXB1002/index.cfm?lang=ENG

Thanks Steve.

I use a mains powered Behringer 20 channel board quite often to feed two tripod mounted cams. Line out from the XLR or 1/4 inch jacks. Works great!

Yes. The Sound Devices 442. It has four inputs, two separate balanced stereo outputs, a third steeo unbalanced output and a mono mic level output.

I feed two cameras (and my laptop) the exact same audio simultaneously all the time with it. It's truly a beautiful sounding piece of gear.

Regards,

Ty Ford

The Sound Devices products are outstanding. Only drawback is price - BH Photo lists the SD 442 at $2495.95 while the Behringer is only $99.99. I'm sure the SD is worth every penny but it might be out of Scott's budget.

You mention you're feeding your laptop as well. What are you using as the audio interface there? Have any suggestions for a quality audio interface for a desktop that is going to be used as a video editing and audio recording/editing/mixing workstation but not so much for music creation?

Hi

Any mixer that has outs will do. I would personaly use a mixer with "aux sent" , most of them have two "sents" so its easy to control your output.

Anthony

Hey I just remember what I did on a similar situation with audio gear. Maybe you can apply it here.
Feed one camera, take the phones/line out and sent wirelless (or cable if you can) into the next camera. You will only need good head phones and yous eyes on the levels.

Anthony

Was just re-reading this thread as someone has posted something new and something obvious suddenly occurred to me - in a multi-camera shoot why would you bother feeding the audio to both cameras anyway? Unless your issue is to avoid the loss of audio when you change tapes on one camera by keeping the other one rolling to cover the break, you could just concentrate on recording a clean audio track on one camera and still intercut the video from both cameras over the same audio track in post without too much trouble maintaining sync. You didn't mention what camera you had but with cameras like the XL2 you even can sync both cameras to record parallel timecode by using the remote to simultaneously start their clocks at the same code before shooting, making intercutting even easier.

Apart from the points that electronically, the headphone out from a camera is not what an audio input wants to see and that headphone outputs are notoriously noisier and more distored than the "regular" audio, you micght have something there.

However, any camera you don't listen to is a possible disaster waiting to happen. If camera 1 screws up and that screwup is sent to camera 2, you're cooked.

Work arounds are just that and there's always the price when the something doesn't happen just the way you expected, which is most of the time.

Regards,

Ty Ford

There's also the SoundDevices 302. Balanced XLR outputs for the right and left channels and an unbalanced stereo output. You would need to attenuate the unbalanced output to get it down to mic level though. Since you apparently only have one mic, couldn't you just use the stereo output of any mixer and feed the left channel to one camera and the right channel to the other? Your XLR adapters (which you will need anyway) should be able to send the mono signal to both channels on the camera.

I have a Rolls splitter by the way that they claim doesn't degrade the audio at all, and to my ears they're right. That would be the cheapest route.