Instruction manual

Multi-camera Shoot: A City Council Meeting

This example takes us on a location shoot, to record an important city council meeting, with numerous

speakers. The event is being covered by 4 cameras, each connected to the SE-800 by DV cables. Audio is

being handled by 4 separate microphones, passed through an audio mixer before being sent to the SE-800.

Each camera has its own composite preview monitor. The main output, the program mix of the meeting, is

being recorded onto a DV record deck, with its own confidence monitor.

The basics of this set up could easily be adapted for a wide variety of situations, such as a church service, a

lecture/demonstration, a sporting event, or a concert.

Many hands are at work on this shoot: 4 camera operators, a sound mixer, and the SE-800 operator. The

SE-800 operator has the job of watching all the camera angles, selecting the shots and making the

appropriate cut or fade, keeping track of the master audio levels, and adding the music from a CD player as

“intro” and “outro”.

This set up provides a way to record a live event to tape as basically a finished program, but there are lots of

different ways to change or add capabilities to this basic set up. One possibility: in this example, we are

recording to DV tape, which means that we can bring the tape back into a post-production environment and

add titles and/or graphics to it by using the SDI Overlay input on the SE-800 and video card that has that

capability, and record that operation to DV tape again with no generational signal loss.

Notes: the A+V function should be turned off to prevent switching among any of the audio streams

associated with the video inputs; the Audio Bus should be set to Aux 1 only, routing the audio mixer’s output

to the recording VCR; headphones should be set to monitor Main; any DV cable runs (from the cameras to

the SE-800) over 20 (65.6 feet) meters should be routed through a repeater (such as Datavideo’s VP-332) to

avoid loss of signal strength.

To DV

Recorder Deck

From Audio Mixer, VCR…

DV Camera 1

Connect CD Player

for background music

DV Camera 2

DV Camera 3

DV Camera 4

Preview

Monitor 1

Preview

Monitor 2

Preview

Monitor 3

Preview

Monitor 4

Moderator mic

Council mic

Audience mic