RECORDING Live Video AND 4 Trks of Audio Simultaneously with ONE Piece of Software

[dbbubba]

Could anyone suggest a program (hopefully Mac based) that would allow realtime recording of video and four (or more) tracks of audio?
I am alking about all four tracks (or more) and the video being recorded to one hard drive in one program.

The audio could be in the .mp3 quality range.

Any ideas?

Danny Brown

[dbbubba]

I meant RECORDING video plus four tracks (or more) of live audio to hard disk with one piece of software.

DB

[dbbubba]

No one knows of any software that does this?

DB

[SFTPH]

Only a video camera will record video. You need a separate box to record 4 tracks of audio.

[everyday]

Final cut pro?

[mammynun]

I'm a PC guy, but I was going to say FCP and a firewire AD converter... don't know if you can digitize video and 4+ trakcks of audio at the same time... I'll try it with Premiere and a Firepod and let you know....

[logiclust]

FCP, avid express, media composer, nitris, others...

4ch audio is standard in old school video. interfaces to do this have been around for over a decade....

what are you recording from? i'd just go SDI if you could.... 1 wire.

[dbbubba]

The video will be a live three camera video feed that we already have going.
Our video guyus already records this via firewire to his Mac rig.
The audio will be a mono audio track plus three commentary or critique mics (three judges.)

The guy doing the video and he handles the camera switching and we switch the projection feed.

We already feed him the program audio and announce mic.
The three critique or commentary mics will be the new thing we are adding.

In the end we need to have a DVD that each attendee can buy that has their group's material.
They will be able to watch their performance and select which judge's commentary/critique they want to listen to.


DB

[logiclust]

Originally Posted by dbbubba

The video will be a live three camera video feed that we already have going.
Our video guyus already records this via firewire to his Mac rig.
The audio will be a mono audio track plus three commentary or critique mics (three judges.)

The guy doing the video and he handles the camera switching and we switch the projection feed.

We already feed him the program audio and announce mic.
The three critique or commentary mics will be the new thing we are adding.

In the end we need to have a DVD that each attendee can buy that has their group's material.
They will be able to watch their performance and select which judge's commentary/critique they want to listen to.


DB

firewire to mac rig implies DV, so you've only got two channels of audio there.
If you want them to sync up i suggest doing a down mix all the audio and send it in the dv stream.... music on channel 1 judges on channel 2. is there any real reason you need the 3 judges separated. if it were me i'd just do dual mono. actually i'd rent a digbeta or dvcpro deck and run it all to tape.

oh, just read the last bit about the selectable audio track on the dvd....what a pta. you're going to have a heck of a time syncing the dv with audio from another source. what switcher are you using?.... i'd request getting a program video feed (sdi, composite, yuv...) and rent/buy an aja. blackmagic, avid, pinacle box

[dbbubba]

No, the judges need to be seperate because the ultimate "product" is a DVD that has all of the performance numbers with EACH of the judge's critique.

In otherwords, you can view your performance and listen to each judge's commentary.

Say you have "PERFORMANCE #1"
You would be able to watch the video of "Performance #1" with Judge A's commentary as a DVD ID, "Performance #1" with judge B as the next ID on the DVD and "Performance #1" with judge C as yet another ID.

The commentary is the most important thing.
This is already been done for years albiet with cassette tapes.
We just want to marry each judge's commentary to the video of each performance and it all would be on a DVD.

The judge's commentary can't be married together because the judges commentaries would be running over the top of each other. You wouldn't be able to tell who was saying what.

One of the events that our clients compete with for business already provides this service (the DVD with each judge's commments.)
I can't ask the people that already do this because they'd know why we were asking.
It would be too proprietary.

If software like FinalCut Pro would record DV video AND four audio inputs AT ONCE it would work fine.
It is the fact that it all has to go down to hard drive at once.

Another reason that it all has to be recorded to hard drive is that there are on average one hundred and twenty performance numbers per weekend.
This alone is a fairly complex operation.,

DB

[mammynun]

as a semi kludge workaround, could you record SMPTE TC and the 3 judges on a DAW, then sync them up with the vid when you post for the DVD?

[Geert van den Berg]

Final Cut Pro, can do what you want, we use it to ingest Digi and SP beta's at our facility. (Video + 4 channels of audio)

The Digi audio & video gets read via SDI (with a Decklink card).

The SP video goes via YUV via a Decklink card, but the audio goes via a Digi002.

I am not sure though if you can have a firewire video input and another audio input source, but I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work. It's almost the same as the 2nd situation we're dealing with.

[logiclust]

i stress again, request a composite, component or sdi video source and NOT DV (firewire). dig the video at the same time you dig the audio. If even possible, you will have a tough time syncing wild audio to a DV stream. i just checked with my version of FCP (5.0) and you cannot separate capturing DV video and any other type of audio. this is also true with our avid adrenaline so i'm thinking you're a little SOL if you continue down the DV path.

seriously, rent an aja iola or something... they're less than 1k to buy so they must be cheap to rent.

[logiclust]

Originally Posted by mammynun

as a semi kludge workaround, could you record SMPTE TC and the 3 judges on a DAW, then sync them up with the vid when you post for the DVD?

the good old days....

are you saying record the TC as an audio track? he may have to, i have a feeling he hasn't got anything that will slave off of LTC. Can FCP, avid, whatever even take a PCM-audio-ized version of time code and turn it back into a time code track?

i think that i'll post that question to my blog so all of my nonexistent viewers can pitch in... never mind...

[everyday]

This is probably not what you want...

However, I had to try...

Rosendahl

[logiclust]

Originally Posted by everyday

This is probably not what you want...

However, I had to try...

Rosendahl

neat box. i wonder what the files are on the drive and how long it would take to import clips into an editor. it'd be sweet if it were omf, but they would have advertised that....

[Geert van den Berg]

I agree with Logiclust that DV/firewire would be a pain in the ... to deal with.

What it all depends on is, what does the videoguy use to switch his DV streams?

If it's a box like this one
Datavideo SE-800 4 DV Input DV Switcher Mixer

He can capture the SDI output with his computer instead of the DV output (in FCP you can still capture using a DV codec if the uncompressed video takes up too much space) and then you can have 4 seperate audio streams as well.

Though you'd still need to seperate the audio from this device, because from the documentation it appears it doesn't output the 4 audio streams seperate but mixed, or switched along the camera feed.

Which isn't such a problem because to capture the SDI into the computer you'd still need an external box, but there's a couple of those on the market with SDI and 4 XLR audio inputs.

[DrDeltaM]

http://www.aja.com/html/products_Io.html

With using this maybe?

[Geert van den Berg]

Some more thoughts. Like I said before, it all depends on the video gear that is currently used.

Assuming the video guy is not using the switcher I linked to earlier, which is one of the few DV video switchers on the market, he is using a switcher which switches composite video and then he'll be using a video interface to capture this into his computer already, if so all that is needed is an extra audio interface or as a combined solution something from Aja like Mathijs mentioned here above, but then the HD interface is probably overkill. (and offcourse Final Cut Pro, if that's not what he's already using, or maybe his software is also capable of recording more audio streams)

[dbbubba]

Hey guys... THANKS for all of the ideas!

You know, I am sure that the video guy could provide a composite video signal just as easily as DV. We do all of our projection video using composite and we even have a cheap Edirol switcher in the sytem, so there is plenty of composite to use.
To be honest, I got on the DV path because an earlier post said that Mac kinda' implied DV video (paraphrasing, but that was the gist of the post.)

Another twist may come up and it might actually benefit the whole scenario...

The event/seminar that our client is "competeting with" GIVES the schools a DVD with the judge's critiques and accompanying video split out. They also offer an additional DVD that is the performances without the judge's critique, but with audio from our feed (music, announce, etc...) They SELL this DVD for $75.00 (remember that the critique is free because these people are already spending thousands of dollars to attend the event.)

The twist is that while our client is definitely going to start providing the critique DVD, the whole thing may cut into the video guy's business. He may get upset and bug out of the whole event.
I am also not sure (and there is no garantee) that he will attend all eighteen of the events. We have several cameras and may end up doing it all ourselves.
The reason I bring this up is that we won't have to interface with any existing video and can do it however we need to inorder to make it work.

Again, thanks for the ideas!

Danny Brown

[dbbubba]

Thanks guys!

We have Final Cut Pro (2? 3?) available, so we can do some tests.

The AJA Io LA would work as an interface.
Not a bad price at approx. $1K.

We now need to see if the client wants to utilize the video guy's HD capabilty.


You guy's have 'splained it to me real well!
Thanks a bunch!

Danny Brown