Jessica Russell singing "In His Eyes" from Jekyll and Hyde accompanied by Jaye Churchill

This past Saturday night I recorded a series of performances at the Freeport Performing Arts Center. One performance was done by the very talented Jessica Russell who sung "In His Eyes" from Jekyll and Hyde. Accompanying Jessica was the equally talented Jaye Churchill on the piano.

In addition to the Canon 7D on which this recording was made I was also manning 3 Sony HVR-Z5U High Def Camcorders. Filming and ensuring all the decks were running and reloading tapes made for an interesting evening. To make even more fun I had never touched a Sony Pro line camcorder in my life but I was able to figure them out and get all three setup with the correct white balance, manual camera settings, and audio levels. The funny thing was that after changing just about every setting in the camcorders to do what I wanted I was told that I need to set them back exactly as found them, OOPS.

I was pretty impressed with the HVR-Z5U operationally. The menu system was easy. I had no problem configuring the video mode to 30p, the audio to use and link the shotgun mics and set the white balance. Once I had that set I placed each camera in manual exposure and set the exposure as I wanted them. I was able to establish a fixed exposure set where I could then step the gain from 0db to 9db on the darker moments. All the while maintaining a proper 180 degree shutter angle.