Running long video camera cables to mixer

If you are interested in running long cables between your church cameras and your video mixer in your sound booth a far distance away, then here is a solution I used recently to solve that problem.



It is not usually ideal to have your church video mixer in the main santuary or place of worship because not only can the director/vision switch engineer's instructions be distracting, but it also becomes difficult for the camera operators to hear on their talkback headsets since the main sound will be picked up especially during the load music of praise and worship, so most churches will have a seperate room to the side of the main auditorium.

This sometimes creates the problem of having to then run long camera cable lengths, which need to be chosen wisely, especially if you are outputing low quality composite video from your cameras for recording.
Most video equipment on the market today supports the Digital Video format (DV), so the solution I'm proposing should work for most ministries even if you are only using an analogue mixer such as the cheap Sima 2 channel device.

First let us deal with running a long length of cable from a DV camera to a mixer capable of accepting DV inputs like the Datavideo SE800 4 channel digital video mixer and switcher.
In this case all we need is one 4pin to 6pin DV cable adaptor, the 4 pin end will plug into the DV end of the camera (the slot below the red socket in the picture), while the 6 pin end goes into one end of a Datavideo DV repeater, we can now plug into the other end of the repeater a DV cable upto 20m long which will then reach our SE 800 mixer in our video switching gallery. If we need more than 20m, we just use more repeaters and 6 Pin DV cables, in my situation, I needed an extra 10m run.


We can use the same solution to run long cables to an analogue mixer like the Sima Video Mixer, but in addition to the cables, we will need a DV to analogue video converter.



The work of the DAC is to convert the DV video signal to a format that can be used on an analogue device, in this case we want either an S-Video (better quality) or composite signal to feed into our cheap church mixer.

This is not the only way to achieve a long video cable run, but this is what I have used recently to solve my own situation.

More Reading
Connecting equipment to video mixer Includes pictures.

Recording church video from mixer

If you are using a multi-camera church video setup to record your services then you would have a video mixer and the output of that will go to a recording device of some sort, but what equipment should you use? A DVD recorder, MAC or Windows Computer/Laptop, VTR or someother device.



The type of church video equipment used will depend on budget and the final requirements of the recorded video production.

DVDs for home bound members of the congregation can be produced directly from your chosen DVD recorder un-edited, and if you have chosen one with an inbuilt hard drive, simple edits might be possible depending on the features added by the manufacturer.

If you are recording the service for post event video streaming on the internet, then you could either record onto DVD, rip the DVD content using a computer, then edit and compress into a suitable format for streaming.
You could also use the same process for producing a podcast (as long as HD quality is not required).

If you are recording for broadcast on TV, then you would need to connect the output of your video mixer to a suitable VTR to forward to the broadcasting facilities (you might need to do some editing or they could charge you to do it if ou don't have the skills or personnel to do it). Remember if HD is required, then your cameras, mixer and VTR all have to support the format.

Some of you might have a spare Apple Mac or Windows based computer and might be wondering if you can connect your laptop to a video mixer and record your church video on it, and the answer is yes, but let me warn you, that this is probably the most unreliable way of capturing video, especially if the computer has not been specificially built and dedicated to video post production.

First of all you will need a suitablely speced machine, then you would need a video capture card to interface between the mixer and then you would need suitable software (the capture card might have a basic application included).
In sort a lot of hassle, not forgeting that 1hr of SD video will take 13GB of hard disk space (HD will consume more), personally I wouldn't recommend a computer based church video recording system, as it costs a lot, there are too many variables that will make it un-reliable, there will be a step learning curve for the recording workflow as well.

Tip: If you have a spare video camcorder, you can use it as a VTR to record instead of buying one, especially if the lens portion is broken. Other devices that you could use include the Firestore, Datavideo Recorder, etc. There is always something available to suit every budget, you just need to look for it.

For live church podcast production and recording on an Apple Mac computer platform, you might be interested in BoinxTV.