New Guy - Question about Audio capture

[jmooney999]

I am video taping my daughter singing Karaoke.

I am trying to get the audio from the Karaoke player.

I have tried a connection from the line out to the Mic input on Camera
also through a DJ board

Camera is a Canon Elura 100.

I tried capture with bot Windows Movie Maker and Pinnacle Studio 10 plus

any advise is appreciated

Thanks

[filmboss80]

Are you trying to capture the Karaoke audio live, along with your daughter's voice, or are you trying to add it back into the soundtrack during editing?

There is a major impedance mismatch between a line out and a mic in, so don't do that anymore. Depending on the model, the DJ board may give you the option of a low-impedance (mic) output, which you could run into the camera, but never run its high-impedance (line) output to your camera.

If the Karaoke music is on a disc, you can always rip a wav file to your PC and add it back to the video footage in Movie Maker or Pinnacle. If the music is stored on a chip inside one of those newer Karaoke microphones, you will have to run the audio plugs into the sound port on your PC -- Line Input only (not mic input). To do that, you will need an adapter to get the RCA audio plugs down to a 1/8" stereo minipin plug. (They have them at Radio Shack.)

[jmooney999]

audio live with daughters voice, I am also capturing straight to computer.

The software does not let me change to audio inputs.

Is there a way to convert high to low?

[stantheman1976]

You would need an adapter that takes the signal from the board and converts it to a signal the camera can take. Beachtek makes some nice ones but those are about $200 or more. Even if you do that your camera probably won't let you turn off AGC (Auto Gain Control) for your audio so even if you do this it probably won't sound that great because AGC will constantly be cranking the signal to max.

Are you capturing video live to a computer? If so I'm assuming you are capturing via firewire? I don't know if you can capture only video from firewire and take a separate audio signal live or not. If one of the better NLEs like Adobe or Vegas would let you do this you could plug the mixer out directly into your PC or laptop and it could combine it live. If you are using a capture card into your PC you could easily do this. I have just never tried it with firewire.

It would be more to learn but they best results would be recording the audio separately onto a laptop or protable audio recorder and syncing in post. I don't know if Pinnacle is capable of this or not.

[filmboss80]

Years ago, I had to rig up mixing board output to a consumer-level camcorder's mic input, and I succeeded by purchasing inline hi-lo attenuating adapters from Radio Shack. They were RCA female to male (one for each channel of the stereo signal), and they were plugged into an adapter that had left and right RCA female inputs, going out to a 1/8" stereo male output. It was a pretty cheap, but very successful rig. The sound was perfect, without any overload distortion. I just went looking for those inline attenuators on the Radioshack.com site, but didn't see them, so I don't know if you can still get them.

UPDATE: Okay, I found some Harrison Labs 12 dB RCA Line Level Attenuators at Amazon.com and this link:
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=266-244

However, they are not the same as the ones I used in my rig. (I think mine had a 20db reduction and were much cheaper.) The link is just to give you an idea of what you may want to look for.

From there, they plugged into the camcorder's external mic input with an adapter similar to one in this link:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103710

[Verify]

Having reviewed the manual for your camera, it would seem that you will need an external microphone mixer such as:

http://www.adorama.com/VDAZCAM3.html?sid=1229988865772011

(with your daughter using one microphone and a second placed near the Karaoke speaker).

Or you can use the audio-dubing feature of your camera and add the Karaoke sound to the tape after the fact (which will probably be a bit tricky to synchronize properly and has other restrictions - see page 94 in your manual).