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Is there a tally light I can controll from my camera?
Hey, Y’all.
So I’ve got this set up where I’m filming talking head type product videos with a big ol’ teleprompter in front of the camera. I can say “Rolling” and “Cut” and all that, but I’d love a way for the whole room to be able to see if the camera is rolling or not.
I’m not very familiar with tally lights or any kind of external recording light if there is such a thing. Is it possible to hook up some kind of indicator lamp to my camera that’ll turn on automatically when I’m recording and shut off when I stop?
I have a Sony FS7.
Corbin Gross | SANMAR
Photographer/Videographer | Marketing
http://www.sanmar.com -
2 Replies
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Tally lights are easy to hook up if you’re using a switcher: there’s a built-in relay that trips the lights when you switch –
Without a switcher, just using a camera by itself, you’re talking about extending the camera’s own tally-light to an external repeater, and that can be quite a bit more work if the camera doesn’t have something for that built into one of its connectors. So a deep dive into the camera manuals is your first step, to see if there is connectivity for that.
If you’re into Rube Goldberg solutions, and you’re a whiz with a soldering iron, I suppose you could mount a sensor to detect a physical tally on the camera and build a circuit to relay that to an external light.
Or, tape a Push-on, Push-off (not momentary) thumbswitch, next to the camera’s start/stop thumb switch, wire it to an LED puck light with red gel on it, mounted to your prompter frame, hit both switches when you are recording…
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Somebody figured out how to do this punk-rock-style for the FS7 using the Hirose connection: https://community.sony.com/t5/FS7/REC-status-indicator/td-p/481663/page/2
I assume you could probably do it with a bigger light.
As an FS7 shooter myself, I don’t know of an off-the-shelf solution, though.
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