[Don Greening]

Get the MA300 mic adapter from Canon. It’s made for the accessory shoe. You’ll need to buy the XLR adapter from Sennheiser for the wireless and plug that into one of the XLR connections on the MA300. Use the other XLR on the adapter to plug in your directional mic. Make sure your MKE300 has a battery in it for power because the MA300 doesn’t have 48v phantom power. This will be your best case scenario for getting clean audio from the groom and for any speakers/readers during the ceremony if have only one camera.

Or you can get a BeachTek piece that accomplishes the same thing and is adjustable. This route might cost you a little more money, though.

https://www.beachtek.com/dxa4p.html

– Don

[Don Greening]

That’s because the presenter on the street is probably using a mic that’s much more expensive and is also much more discrimminating about what sounds it’s picking up. The mic that your XL1s uses is made to pick up everything. Notice the holes up and down both sides without the windscreen on it. Unfortunately, anything I suggest is going to cost you more money.

First of all, you need to get the mic as close to the person’s mouth as possible without it being in your picture. This means attaching it to the end of a boom pole and employing a boom operator. You will get better dialogue this way and not quite as much ‘out ot frame’ audio muddling the mix if you’re still using the Canon mic. What you really need is a mic that’s designed for this type of work.

An alternative is to buy a good wired/wireless lavali

[Don Greening]

As far as I know, when you want to have a choice between a small and a larger movie you have to create two of them in the different sizes and have them available on the server with links called “small version” and “larger version”, or whatever you choose to call them.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Hi Don,

How about this workaround: decide which NLE you want to use and find out what cameras it supports. Pay particular attention to the one chip consumer MiniDV cams (read:inexpensive) that are supported and buy a new or used one so you can use it as a VTR deck. Now all you have to do is load your XL2 tapes and capture away. I’m sure you already know that the media on your tapes can be played in any MiniDV camcorder without quality loss, so therefore it doesn’t matter that you’re using a really cheap one as a deck. Now you don’t have to use your expensive aquisition cameras as decks and wear out the tape transports prematurely.

I use a cheap Sony one chip camcorder hooked up to my Mac via firewire and I capture all my media with it just fine, including audio channels 3 and 4 from my XL2. The little Sony also plays the tapes from my GL2 and my Sony PD170 without issues.

Or you can get an entry-level professional deck like the Sony DSR-11 that is made for this purpose. There’s a ton of them out there doing duty with all the popular NLEs like the ones from Avid and Adobe, etc.

Just a suggestion.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Hi Bob,

Since I don’t have any experience with capture cards I’ll have to defer to someone else who’s willing to help you. I can only advise from my own experiences with FCP.

Good luck.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Todd,

Thanks for your reply and suggestions. I’m going to order a G5 tomorrow and keep the G4 around for word processing, accounting, etc. The FW 400 ports won’t support a hard drive, either. When the new G5 shows up I’m going to connect the two of them together via ethernet.

Thanks again for your response.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Hi Bob,

It’s been my experience with FCP that when things have been humming along just fine and then suddenly the program starts doing strange things the first thing I try is to trash the program’s preference files. Have you tried that yet?

– Don

[Don Greening]

The Sony DSR-11 is probably the most bang for the buck. It’s an entry level professional deck and there’s a ton of them out there doing their duties.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Glad to hear that your problems fixed themselves. I’m sure it has to do with the fact that you live in a cool place like Manitoba.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Sequence settings should be DV NTSC 23:98 so FCP can add the pulldown on the fly over firewire, allowing you to see your sequence playing on a standard NTSC monitor. You can choose from various pulldown patterns in the audio/video settings which will determine the quality of the video as it plays over firewire and out to the monitor. The speed of your particular computer setup will determine what pulldown pattern you choose. Make sure you’ve selected video playback to use high quality, otherwise you won’t be able to access the different pulldown patterns for playback.

– Don