Advice for small studio setup...
 

Hi all,

I have been charged by my Church to set up a small production facility. Since my degree is in Radio-TV-Film, they asked me to do this. Never mind that the last time I edited video was on 3/4in Tape.

Anyhow, I thought that we could possibly use cameras that could double for location shooting so that we could minimize purchases.

The Cameras that I really like are the Canon XL2s, but I am wondering if anyone has used them in a studio setting and using them with a switcher?

Thanks for all the help

John Gibson

Hello John,

The church that I attend has 3 Canon XL2 cameras which they switch live during service and and also use in the field.

Oh, I miss those 35 decks (A.K.A. anchors).....

Good luck!

Stephanie

John,
I work a similar setup for our church. We have two XL1 cams and an XL1s feeding a live videomixer. The videomixer gets audio directly from the soundmixer in the main sanctuary. Unfortunatly, we send S-Video out of each cam to the videomixer because we have an analog videomixer. From the videomixer we go out live to the local cable TV office and onto TV. We have a TV in the video booth hooked up to nothing but cable to see the quality of our output to the cable office.

Our video booth has a small window overlooking the sanctuary and our camera director communicates to each cameraman via ClearCom headset/mic. The 16x lens is perfect for reaching across the long distances of the santuary and permits the cameras to remain unobtrusive.

The A/V director is coveting my XL2 with its 20x lens. We do infrequently pull one of the church cams off the tripod and use it for capturing other church activities (Bible School, picnics, etc.). This footage I edit down to an abbreviated video for DVD playback or for hosting on the church website. We have been quite pleased with the performance of our XL cams for broadcasting our services.

Hi John,
The XL2 seems to be a popular camera for this. We have been looking at them to replace our analog cameras. Some people are using converters to send the firewire over cat5 to a switcher. I have not looked into digital switchers yet.

We capture the selected camera feed with Matrox RT.X100 and Premiere Pro 1.5. The other camera goes to an SVHS deck in case we miss a shot. Well they both still go to SVHS with a splitter to the computer for the main shot but that's not necessary.

The only problem with not using studio cameras is that white balance and aperture are at the mercy of a volunteer who is not experienced. It is also easier for the director in the control room to be sure skin tones ect. match between cameras.

Think about what you want to do with audio. It is better to mix in a seperate room with the inputs not affected by FOH (use a slpitter).

Sam

Do you have any problems due to the XL2's not being genlock capable? I'd expect a momentary glitch or breakup of the image when cutting from one camera to another since the image fields won't be locked together to scan in synch. Multi-cam studios usually have a system master sync clock and the cameras, switcher, title generators, VTRs, etc all lock to its signal.

Steve,

We do live cuts, fades, and overlaps, and have never had any 'glitches' when switching from one camera to the next. Myself and another gent take the broadcast footage home and edit it down to a 30 segment for rebroadcast later in the week and I've been down to frame level editing and never seen any artifacts similar to what you are referring to.

Now we do have some camera glitches (wrong place, not tracking speaker, cutting off speakers head, forgot to WB, etc), but they are all human error and not technology error. We correct those by docking the volunteer's pay. ; )

The cheapest video mixers you can get have frame stores to solve the not-having-genlock problems.
The very first mixer that did this was the Videonics MX-1, MSRP $1000. It's discontinued and the cheapest new mixer you can get now is by Edirol/Roland, about $1500 or something.

If you're ok buying used, look for a Panasonic MX50.


Mixers without frame stores do need genlock-able cameras.

Yes. Glenn is correct. I switch multiple XL-1 systems with the MX-50 with no issues as far as camera TBC sync. In fact, any camera system with a composite or Y/C output will work. However, there is an inherent buffer issue with this switcher which may or may not have been resolved in the newer MX-70. If you try to perform what I call a linear cut with the MX-50, you will experience a loss of sync or very quick freeze frame. This occurs by performing a direct cut from left to right or right to left on either bus. But, if you set the auto take frame rate to zero and use auto take from one bus to the other it is a perfect cut every time. It has been that way for the last 10 years on every MX-50 I have ever used. I heard that there was a company that could correct this with internal changes but it costs almost 900.00. Not worth it when there is a free fix like using the auto take set at zero frames. Other than that it's a great switcher for the money. I sure hope the newer MX-70 has solved this issue.

As far as studio configurations for the XL-2, there are plenty of threads on this board showing camera accessories to create a studio kit such as LCD monitors and remote lens controls.

Here's my setup. These are 5 years old and I know that there are alot of new advances and newer products but these have served me well.

www.jefcommunications.com/camerasystems.html

Wow! Thanks for the information!
 

I am actually happy to be getting back into the arena after being out for so long.

We were thinking about three cameras with a switcher, recording both to VTR and to digital capture for web broadcast.

Some of you suggested a couple of switchers, which one would you guys purchase at this point? Also are the cameras hooked into the switcher via firewire, Svideo, or BNC? Like I said it has been years since I actually stepped into a situation like this but we are wanting to do this for awhile.

Also, We may be actually looking at actual studio cameras or remote control cameras so that we don't actually have to have people in the sanctuary doing the camera work.

This business has changed that sometimes I am at the point of imploding over all the new info.

John

You could get remote-control tripod heads that would allow the event to be filmed without camerapersons. It may be that the heads won't give smooth movement like a human on a fluid-head tripod would, but that shouldn't be an issue if you aren't trying to do camera movements while that shot is on.
There are ways to control the camera's lens and focus and such remotely.

There's some professional monitors that allow loop-through connections of the remote cameras' feeds, so you can see what's happening. Three black&white monitors in a single unit might be the cheapest?

Switcher: If you want to connect through firewire, you'd get slightly better technical quality. However, it costs more and you'll need special cabling. I'm not sure how you would monitor firewire feeds (some monitors have optional add-in cards which may be the answer).
I'd probably just stick to S-video inputs. For the cabling, use BNC or co-axial cabling and grab some S-video-->BNC/co-axial adapters (may be hard to find; try cablewholesale.com or digikey??). S-video cable is more expensive and not better than high-quality co-axial.

If you have the money, you can also look into the Video Toaster for live switching.

You could also look at doing the switching in post. Final Cut Pro 5 has a nice multicam feature. Advantage would be cost and better quality because you can cover mistakes. Disadvantage is speed.
You could setup some cheap PCs to record each feed, and then attach them to a gigE network to feed the editing machine with each camera's footage. It may even be possible for the editing machine to access each camera's footage over the network and not have to transfer the files over for editing.

Having the PC sit beside the computer and capture via firewire is the cheapest (long firewire cables are expensive). You may even be able to position a camera closer to the action unobtrusively?

Hey John,

I run a small cable access channel, and we are switching 3 XL2's just like you are looking at, using a Panasonic MX-70 switcher. Works great. XL2's have BNC outs, which are nice and durable, plus you can connect a computer to the switcher for graphic overlays. Makes a nice little setup. Good luck with yours.

Dan

i'm going to chime in and agree with alot of these people your best bet is most likely the Panasonic MX70 (we use this in our studio and on in our production van for a small goverment acess station). Camera wise XL2s are prolly the best bet. now if you need CG i'm not sure on that since i'm researching the same thing myself