A/V question regarding the upcoming HCAG open mic

[kwakatak]

My wife took our older kid to the store and I put the baby down for his nap so I have a little time to prepare my hodge-podge A/V setup, but I'm having a little trouble. Here's what I'm trying to do:

 

Audio setup:

Inputs: K&K Pure Western for guitar signal, Shure PG57 mic for the vocal signal.

Preamp: Pure XLR Preamp

Mixer: Behringer Eurorack UB1202 12 track mixer which runs into the 1/8" line in jack on my Dell Inspiron 6400 Laptop (via a homemade 1/4" to 1/8" cable that's about 3' in length.)

 

Video input:

Canon Powershot A560 digital camera which runs into the laptop via a USB connection.

 

The audio has worked for me well in the past, though I've never had two inputs going live into the mixer. I know from experience that this is not the way to get two independent tracks into my audio editing software, which in this case is going to be Audacity.

 

OTOH, I've never done video capture before. I'm wondering if it can be done with the Canon digicam? If not I've got my FIL's old videocamera and one of those A/V to USB adaptor buses - though I'd have to tear the house apart to find it. Which one of these sources would be better though and would Windows Movie Maker be up to the task of capturing the video and audio in realtime?

 

BTW - I'm running Windoze XP Home SP2 with 1GB of RAM. I can't recall what kind of A/V hardware I'm running but I doubt it can handle much. I just want to real-time capture a basic video with a second audio source - the camera has a tiny microphone with no gain control whatsoever.

 

If not I'll just upload each channel separately and edit them together in Movie Maker.

[daklander]

What you'll need to do is get an adapter cable that adapts two RCA fittings to 1/8" stereo plug. Plug the RCA end into the stereo outs on the mixer and the 1/8" plug into the 1/8" line in jack. Pan the mixer channels hard right and hard left. Set Audacity to record 2 mono tracks. That should get you the two separate tracks.

On the other hand, for this particular application you may want to center the pan controls or only slightly separate them and record into stereo. I think that's probably a better way to go for a one take. The two mono tracks way to go is going to require much more in the way of processing. You'll probably have to dup tracks and move things around that way and then do a mixdown for the final product. If you go stereo off the bat it's a matter of setting levels on each channel to get them where you want. and you won't have to do much, if any, post recording work other than the mixdown to a stereo wav and subsequent conversion to mp3 or, I think you can export as a mp3 from Audacity.

The video stuff I can't help with and though I've used Movie Maker quite a bit, it was only in making movies from still photos.