During the Covid-19 pandemic I’ve been editing a weekly Church service, the church band members would record their individual pieces using a supplied audio track, usually on a phone in their living room these would be edited by someone from the church into a single video and sent to me as a finished piece to be edited into the YouTube service, however the band members had asked that as lockdown had somewhat eased locally, if it would be possible to do a ’socially distanced’ shoot at the Chapel / Community Centre.

A few emails later and the shoot was set for a Saturday afternoon, I’d planned on two main cameras, one on a locked off wide and adding an iPhone as a second safety and a tiny Action Cam as a rear camera. I’d spoken to the sound guy and he could give me a master out feed into one channel of my main camera, I’d also record some ambient for atmos.

The shoot went reasonably well and we shot 5 songs / hymns, back in the edit suite I checked the footage then loaded the first song into FCPX and used Multicam, Although I’d used it a couple of times previously, it did take a few attempts to get it right. The main problem I found was the limiting factors of the audio in FCPX, I’d used FCP 7 for over 15 years and the audio was a breeze to master, FCPX wants to use stereo or dual mono and is not as easy to get to grips with once laid down, I also found the limitations of using a single ‘sent mixer track’ and not being able to balance it out to individual singers.

Many times over the past few years I’d considered buying a Tascam DR-70D to be able to record 4 sources to SD card for editing in Multicam later and it would probably have helped with this shoot. Later that night I was browsing Facebook Marketplace (as you do!) and spotted a Zoom R24 for £210, this offered 8 inputs recording to individual files on SD card, I thought this would be ideal for any further band shoots at the Chapel so I contacted the seller and bought it.

I explained what I’d bought to the sound desk guy, he told me it would be necessary to make up some special leads to be able to use the Inserts from his mixer and offered to make them up. A few days later he came round to check the leads with one of my mixers, they worked perfectly with the Zoom R24. Now, on the next shoot I can take up to 8 individual sources from his mixer and record to SD card to add to the Multicam in FCPX and then balance them individually.

Roll on the shoot for the Christmas Carols…..