Here's a question . .when you are shooting Weddings . .where do you get your sound source. I was thinking about gettinga feed off the mixing board . .but would you do that for all cameras ??

The last wedding I shot my 2nd camera man's lens cover was taping the camera and it was very noicable. To get around this I used audio from the other camera when needed. At the points where the noise problem was present I would cross fade the two cams audio so you couldn't really hear the difference as the audio source changed, it works very well. To answer your question fosko, at a point before the vows are said I have the 2nd camera man insert the wireless mic into the cam. The reverend is usually loud enough for the mics on the cams to catch him clearly. Both cams run without stoping once recording starts, unless I have to change tapes.

Clapping is using either a slate board (like they use shooting film), or a flash. This is usually done at the start of the shoot. All cameras shoot the same slate and roll all the way through the performance. In post, the slate mark on all three isolated shots are sync'd. Everything should be locked once the three are grouped.

I'm trying to find out if this is the recommended way to do this within Vegas.

Thanks!

jp

Intersting !!!
I personally like the idea of one audio panned right and the other panned left to sync, but slapping sounds like it would work too.
I'm not only new to a lot of this video stuff, but I've never even owned a camera before. Is there ever a problem with calibration. for example, 3 cameras start shooting EXACTLY same time, but when all is done (say after an hour) and loaded into VEGAS maybe one is a few seconds off ??
Wondering if this is something to look out for.

When the 3 cameras start and when they stop isn't important.

This is what's important:

1. All 3 cameras must be rolling when slate board is "clapped." (you see it all the time on movie sets when the director calls out "mark" and the assistant D.O.P. slaps the clapper board down in front of the camera).

2. All 3 cameras MUST keep rolling all the way through the performance. If tape runs out, all 3 cameras must shoot the marker again after the tape change.

There are other ways to ensure sync across multiple cameras. You can use a timecode slate, which has a timecode display (hours:minutes:seconds:frames) that runs constantly from the start of the performance to the end. The same timecode data is also fed to the master audio recorder (multi-track, DAT, etc.) As the show progresses, camera operators are free to start and stop their own cameras as they please. However, each time they re-start the camera, they must shoot a couple of seconds of the timecode slat again. That way, individual pieces of video can be sync'd in post by simply matching the SMPTE timecode numbers. This is close to what I'm trying to do...and is also how virtually all live performances are shot on motion picture film and edited nowadays. Film cameras have one drawback that video doesn't: a roll of motion picture film is typically 4-11 minutes long. So, when you're shooting a 90 minute concert with 3 different cameras, you're talking about quite a few film re-loads.

My question is: how do I sync the 3 cameras in Vegas using timecode? It seems as though there's only one timecode display, rather than one for each video track.

jp

If the timecodes on the source material all match exactly, you could show timecide in the events and sync them that way. This requires that you slave all cameras to a master timecode clock, which I don't think you are doing (?).

Syncing audio tracks and their sibling video tracks is the easiest way to line things up for multi camera editing. Audio is real easy to line up, and once that's done, video will be aligned.

Once all the tracks are synced up, its a matter of trimming away unwanted video on the 3 separate vid tracks until you get the look you want. I'd probably start with the master/wide shot as the top track in Vegas- remove the problem areas (with ripple off) and you'll be able to see through to the track beneath.

Alternatively you could solo each video track and cut out the "definitely unusable" stuff one track at a time, then turn all the video tracks back on and make your final trims.