Equipment needed to record and capture digital video:
AVCHD Camcorder
We recommend using an AVCHD camcorder. Our current recommended units are the Sony XR500 and the Canon HFS100. With these cameras, you record directly to digital video on your camcorder's hard drive and/or memory card. The Canon has slightly better video imaging and uses flash memory, instead of a hard drive, thereby reducing some recording noise. Here are three QuickTime videos that explain how to set up and use the Sony AVCHD camcorder. These were done with an earlier Sony model, but the principles are the same across all of these AVCHD camcorders.
Basic Setup (also you may wish to read the SR11guide and the SR11handbook)
Use of the JuicedLink amplifier (also see the juicedLink setup tutorial at the JuicedLink website along with many of their other tutorials)
Memory Cards: The Panasonic takes a SanDisk Ultra II 16GB card and the Sony takes a similar Memory Stick card.
Backup: After you make your video, you will want to create a backup. For this, we recommend that you purchase a removable external drive that takes power directly from the USB2 or FIrewire port. Good models with 500GB of storage for about $250 come from Western Digital (WD) and LaCie. To back up, you connect your camera as a USB device to your computer. You will see the camera coming up as if it were an external hard drive. Then take the WHOLE folder with the name AVCHD and copy it to your backup drive. If you have to do this repeatedly, rename your old AVCHD folders with names like AVCHD-Tucson or whatever, so that you can easily remember which videos are in which backup folder.
Compressing your video: After doing backup, you next need to compress your video. See this page for instructions on how to do this. You can do compression yourself or send the video to us for compression at CMU. If you want to send it to us, you can send the whole external hard drive or else make copies to memory cards, using a card reader that allows you to write to a memory card. If your camera has both a hard drive and memory stick capacity, you can also copy directly to a memory stick using the MOVIE DUB feature (page 22 of the Sony manual)
Microphones
We recommend using an Audio-Technica U841A unipoint boundary condenser table top microphone ($230).
Phantom Power Supply
To connect the microphone to the AVCHD camera, you need to use a phantom power supply. The two best choices are either the BeachTek DXA-6A or the JuicedLink CX231, each about $300. These units mount between your tripod and the camera. They have a mini stereo output that goes into the camera and take XLR input from the microphone. You will also need an XLR extension cable from the microphone to the phantom power supply. You can get this from Radio Shack.
The correct settings for the CX231 are as follows: Power switch: on. Preamp gains: high. Phantom supply: 48V. Channel 1and 2: on. PAN 1 and 2: C. Use the trim knob volume control to set the sound level to your liking. Watch for the low battery light and make sure to have plenty of 9v batteries on hand.