DV Camera with Balanced I/O?

[Nerve Nickels]

You guys know of a small/portable camera with 1080p or 720p and balanced I/O on the market? SDHC and preferably under $500.00...

[hbphotoav]

Nope.

Probably the best you'll do without BeachTek or other adapters (XLR-to-TRSmini) is a good, clean, used Sony A1 or Z1, or something similar, 2-3 years old, from Canon or JVC. It will all be HDV and probably well over a grand. Current models with balanced audio will run you $3,500-$6K, new, just for reference.

If you're looking to run a balanced line level input, an adapter probably isn't the worst thing in the world. The unbalanced portion of the line is short (2"/50mm or so) and the level is pretty hot. Trying to run in a pair of good quality SDC or LDC mics is, however, another kettle of fish.

[Nerve Nickels]

Thanks Harry...

[Thomas W. Bethe]

Originally Posted by Nerve Nickels

You guys know of a small/portable camera with 1080p or 720p and balanced I/O on the market? SDHC and preferably under $500.00...

Not too many HD cameras in that price range to begin with.

Beachtek and most other adapters of this ilk are not really good for music and we found that out the hard way. We had one here for a couple of days and sent it back after trying it with our RODE NT-4 both through the Beachtek and through the adapter that came with the microphone. The Beachtek sounded distorted and had some missing bass response when we plugged the NT-4 into the Beachtek and then plugged the Beachtek into our Sony FX-1. I am going to evaluate another of their products to see if this one was defective and will report back to you. The one we had cost about $360. If I have to go that way in the future I will probably do it with Jensen Transformers and an external phantom supply . I am sure that the Beachtek sounds GREAT for most applications but not for what we wanted to use it for. I would rather have something that is a bit bulkier and sounds good for music.

[Dr Bob]

This is probably too elaborate an answer but here goes. Tom is right on the money concerning Beachtek. We have tried them in a couple of situations (last time with Deneke phantom power adapters--about as good as battery powered equipment gets) and they really don't fare well for musical applications.

For non-critical applications on cameras with unbalanced in's I have students use a trusty old m/s electret mic, the Sony ECM MS957. It's unbalanced stereo on a 3.5mm stereo plug but I have had no noise trouble so far using it with HIGH QUALITY cables of up to 50 feet. (Maybe we are just lucky there, but so far so good.) These mics were very popular with "tapers" back in the mini-disk days but they are still available.

Far better is to record the sound separately and sync it in post. Even a Zoom recorder with good mics will sound better than using an inexpensive camera's a/d and sound circuitry. We usually lay in sound during post production that was recorded separately like this even when we use our professional cameras with balanced in's.

It's not too difficult to sync up "by hand" using a clapper or even a hand clap at the beginning of every take, but I am now using PluralEyes (from Singular Software) in Final Cut Pro and it's an amazing time saver. You put in a master audio track and then the software analyzes the audio on that track and on each of the clips you have. It then automatically sync's the clips to the master audio track by "looking at" the audio wave forms and lining them up--kinda poor man's SMPTE. It makes multiple camera shoots of concerts and so on much easier in post.

Bob Miller
UConn

[Petrus]

You need to pay over 3k$ for a balanced mic input HDV camera, and they are not SDHC but tape. And I do not know of any prosumer cam with balanced audio outs, audio comes from the 3.5mm plug along with video. So I can safely say that balanced audio I/O videocam at a reasonable price does not exist.

Sony, Pana and recently also Canon (coming soon) have memory card semipro cams which cost around $7-9000 with XLR mic ins as standard.

Sorry...

[mixedupsteve]

I have used a small mixer to make the balanced to unbalanced change using the tape outs of the mixer. I had to make a dual RCA to stereo mini plug cable.

[Cursed Lemon]

The cheapest HDV cameras are around $500-ish, so I doubt you'll find what you're looking for.

Can you just record the source separately?

[Nerve Nickels]

Great info guys. Thank you!

Balanced in's are out of the question for me. I know that now.

I moved on to a DSLR with a mic/line in. This seems like the way to go at about $1k. Thomas, I totally agree with you on the beachtek selling point. just wow...

For this project, I don't want to do any post work...zero

-Thanks again