Tapeless Church Video Camera Mistake

Using a Tapeless church video camera like the Sony EX1 has it's advantages like quicker edit times, not requiring the camera in order to capture video production clips, but as a member of our church's media department found out yesterday, it also has a major disadvantage!

Just before the beginning of our main Sunday worship service two members of the video team went out locally to shoot some clips that was to be used for a church promotion advert, they probably spent about 30 minutes capturing the few images required.

Now we don't have surplus church video equipment so the Sony EX1 camera was need for recording the service which had already started. So this member of our team who was relatively new (couple of months) went through the normal setup procedure for one of the camera positions, but then made the rookie mistake of formatting the media that was in the camera despite this having been done at the beginning of the video shoot!

We didn't need the footage for that morning's service but the lesson has been learnt, if you record unto memory cards, remove the card from the camera once the shoot is over before reusing the camcorder, or at least switch the erase protection tab on! If we had been using tapes, it would be much harder to erase the footage, as you would first need to rewind the tape, then record over it, it this case it was just a matter of going into the menu, selecting format, and before the colleauge could say STOP, the button had been pressed!



We will have to re-shoot the footage next Sunday morning, and I'm sure the same mistake will not be made twice! the joys of working in the house of the lord!

Connecting HD SDI Cameras to Datavideo HS-2000

Here is a short article on how I connect our mobile church HD studio mixer to the Sony EX1 or EX3 cameras that we use to record our church services for TV broadcast.

As I have already mentioned in the HS-2000 review, this HD mixer only uses an SDI interface so we acquired suitable cameras to compliment this in the Sony EX1 and EX3 range since these have the appropriate output connectors.



The first step we need to perform, is to configure the HS-2000 or SE-2000 to work at a particular video resolution, so press the Menu button, go to Mode Settings and select the mode that applies to your part of the world 1080i 60Hz (in the case of USA, see below).

Make sure you save the setting before exiting the HS-2000 menu.

Once you have this setup connect your BNC connector of the SDI cable running to the camera into the appropriate number at the back of the mixer (you can have up to 4 HD cameras  in use on the SE-2000).

Now go to the HD camera position, and plug in the SDI cable into SDI output connector of the SONY EX1 or EX3. Always remember output from one device (camera in this case) goes to input of another device (video mixer).

The final thing you have to do is go into the menu of the Camera and select SDI out as your signal route as well as making sure the video format corresponds to that set on the mixer (1080i 60Hz for USA).

The most common problem I get on a sunday morning during setup is that the camera picture is not showing on the Datavideo HS-2000 preview monitor, and the cause is either cables not plugged in at either end, incorrect output format set on the camera or the SDI output connector on the EX1 is not enabled.

I will talk about connecting other HD/HDV cameras to the Datavideo HS-2000 in a future post, so if you have bought an affordable cheap HD church video camera, you will still be able to connect it in a multiple camera church service scenario.

Directing multi-camera Church Video Worship Experience

Last weekend I had the pleasure of directing a church worship concert featuring world reknown worship leader William McDowell (famous for the song 'I give myself away') in his first UK live appearance.

It was a very simple setup based around our inexpensive HD Mobile studio live production unit, and 3 Sony EX1 cameras fed via SDI cables allowing us to capture the event in full HD.

I also had to make provisions for an overflow room in a building about 100m away, and that was easily solved by running another SDI cable from the back of the Church's Datavideo SE-2000 HD Mixer all the way across the courtyard into one of those $500 SDI converter boxes which paid for itself on this occasion, as the long cable run would not have been possible without the SDI interface which meant there was no loss of signal quality up to the projector going onto the 12 foot screen.

Those who were not able to attend also had a chance to watch via our live church video stream.



It was a very successful technical event for the church video media department team members and our experience from using the Datavideo HS-2000 every week during services paid off.