A/V Recording Box

A

Alyosha

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 1, 2003
Messages
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I'm responsible for the tech stuff at my church and the camcorder we use to record services just died after five years of putting two tapes a week through it. I'm thinking of trying to put together a PC based recording system to save on tape cost in the long run as well as storage of tapes upon tapes upon tapes. So a number of questions:

1. Camera? Do I get a regular camcorder and just hook up the video out to a capture card in the PC or is there such a thing out there as a video camera without recording features, designed to be hooked into a separate recorder?

2. Capture Card? A standard video card with VIVO slapped on, an AIW card with video capture actually in mind in the design or a dedicated video capture card like a Huappage DVR type card?

3. Audio? I'll just be pulling audio from an output on our sound board, is it worth it to get a nice M-Audio card or is "an analog in an analog in"?

Any other suggestions are great, thanks for the input H.
 
Well, it all depends on how big of a system you need and how much money, and the quality of stuff you'll want to be doing. Some churches I know go all out with thousands of dollars of equipment, others just go small and cheap.

I have a secondary part time job in a TV studio and am responsible for building their non-linear editors and fixing the kinks out. It gets pretty intense if you don't know what you're doing, and things can go bad real quick. NLE's are picky.

I really need more description on what they will be doing. If you want to record live with one or more cameras, you are going to need a whole bunch of stuff, like really expensive equipment.. It can reach upwards in the tens of thousands very easily for single components, into the hundred thousands for a small studio. You would need something like a Grass Valley switcher, DVE, genlocking, CCU's, vector scopes, sound boards, routing switcher, editors to capture to, tape backup (or digital), etc.. By the sounds of it, you would have no idea how to set all this up, what to buy, or where to buy it from. :p

Camcorder - If you are just doing a small setup with a camcorder and not recording live to non-linear editors (NLE's), you could just get a decent DV professional camcorder. I'd recommend a Canon XL1, Canon XL2, or something in that range. If you use a mini-DV consumer camera, it will look like total garbage. Even though you may not think so, it will defiently look 3rd rate like a kid made it. You will be using the firewire to capture pure digital to your video editor with the good canon cameras. I'd recommend a 2 camera system so you could get multiple angles and edit the footage together. It would look very nice. Get a good tripod as well that has a smooth fluid head on it. ($300 up)

For the editing component aspect of this, you will want something to capture and edit the footage on? Then burn to DVD? (if you don't take it off the hdd, you'll literally need terabytes of storage after a while. Full DV footage is huge)

Computer - I'd recommend either building a decent non-linear editor, or buying one. You'll need something pretty fast with lots of storage space and lots of ram. A Dual AMD Opteron, or dual Intel Xeon would be ideal, but if you are on a budget, a *high end* P4 or AMD 64 will work pretty well. Go with AT LEAST 2GB of good ram. That is really important. Also, you'll want to seperate the OS drive and Video storage drives. Get just a 80gb drive for the OS, and a 250gb SATA1 or SATA2 drive for storage. This is crucial for good video editing performance.

Capture Device - You won't really want a PCI or PCI-e capturing solution. I've used/built plenty of them all the way from the old Pinnacle's up to the new Matrox RTX100's. They are REALLY picky on the motherboard you use, and mess up terribly all the time. The drivers are picky, they lose audio sync, and are super expensive if you want a decent one. What you WILL want is an external Firewire capture box solution. Go with the Canopus ADVC-110. Its a good price, and we even use it in our TV studio on our NLE's. You can find it at B&H Video for under $250. It has firewire in/out, composite in/out, svid in/out, and audio in/out. You can pretty much hook anything up to it audio/video wise if you know what you are doing and use DA's or video switchers.

Software - For editing software, the main top 2 we use in our studio are Adobe Premiere 1.5 pro (2 is now out) and Canopus EDIUS Pro 3 (4 is out this month I think). I'd go with edius since its quite a bit cheaper, and I actually like it 10x better than adobe. You can use the Canopus ADVC-110 capture box with either. You can set it up so it records back to VHS/SVHS/DVD so you can give your customers a wide variety of formats to choose from. Its very easy to do.
 
Err.. now that I think about it, you said you guys have an audio board? This might be getting a bit over your head now if you don't know how to setup anything I mentioned in the post above.

This means they already have an existing audio setup in place.

1) If they have a tv studio with a master control, you could just tap into that and use professional video cams to record live to your NLE's and ditch the whole camcorder idea.

2) If they just have an audio setup only, you have 2 or 3 options.
a) Run the audio to the canon XL1's as well as the speakers people hear in the church so it records their audio on your tape. (DO NOT use the shotgun mic for anything but ambient sound, you MUST use microphones or direct line in for audio)
b) You could get a small lavalier wireless mic setup ($500 up for anything decent) and also attach one to the person talking and hook it into your camera to get audio
c) Run wires from your Canon XL1's to the video editors for video, also running audio wires back to the video editor and capturing everything live like a immitation version of a TV studio.
 
Thanks for the info, but that's way, way bigger than we can go. It may even be way, way, way bigger but I'm not sure.

We can in no way afford a pro-level camcorder or fancy editing tools, I know mini-DV looks 3rd rate but we're a small church and we're not looking to impress anyone, just get our services recorded.

My idea for the setup was to use the computer like a HTPC DVR but instead of capturing TV, be capturing video from the camera. Is this a workable solution or is there a better way to do it (which doesn't involve wheel-barrows full of money, say $2000 tops).
 
Well, if you are looking to edit the footage and throw some graphics in with the date and stuff, then burn it back to DVD and archive it to save your HDD space, you can just build a cheap editor. Its the best way to go, and allows tons of flexibility incase you messed up the footage so you can cut edits. You'll also get better quality video out of it because you can apply filters, change contrast, etc. A HTPC DVR is definetly not the way to go in your situation. I guarantee you would run into more issues than you could imagine. You need a real editor to capture, backup, then archive the footage.

1) Camcorder - consumer quality mini-DV camcorder with Firewire. ($500?) Run a splitter off the main audio board lead to the camcorder so you pick up good quality audio, don't use the shotgun mic. This main audio can probably be ran from your existing audio board output back to the camera's line in for external mic. This way, you'll get good audio and video to put in your editor.

2) Editor - You can probably get away with a socket 939/AM2 AMD system, then just throw in a x2 3800+, 2gb of ram, a 250gb hard drive, DVD-RW, etc. Just make sure it has a good 6pin firewire on it. ($1000 max)

3) Software and Capture - Get the Canopus ADVC-110 firewire capture box ($220), it will work 10x better than a PCI capture card, or better than using a graphics card's build in VIVO/capture. For the edit software, you can call canopus and ask for their stripped down version of EDIUS. I called them the other day, and they want either $200 or $300.. I forget. It works GREAT. It has an option to export your timeline to DVD after to captured your footage and threw a title page on it. It will burn automatically to your DVD-RW drive. You would want that Canopus ADVC-110 capture box because its has room for both digital and analog. You can use the video out on it to have a VCR record your footage, or a standalone DVD player/recorder. It has many options for inputs/outputs. Your firewire camcorder also plugs into the front of it for pure digital capture.

That should set you at around $2000 and get you up and running. You can always expand from there if they wanted. If I was just doing a cheap budget setup, thats the route I would go. To save even more money, you could cut down to a cheap single core like a 3500+ and drop down to 1GB of ram and a 160gb hdd, that might be pushing it though. For the hard drives, still stick with SATA/SATA2 though.
 
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