While planning my trip to CES I was trying to think of an easy way to enhance the ability to take decent pictures of products and decent video. My camera takes decent videos but doesn’t have mic input. On my budget I settled on keeping my existing Canon camera to take pictures but as you can see from our Island Tech 2009 coverage the audio was horrible. I also wanted the ability to shoot HD video if I wanted, I selected the Canon Vixia HFR10 camcorder which records directly to SD memory cards and has a mic input. I will be feeding audio into the camcorder from a Zoom H1 microphone, a 1/8 inch audio connection between the mic and camcorder will be used. Since he H1 is also a stereo recorder I have the ability to record to the built in micro SD card and sync the audio and video in post production. Hopefully the audio and video quality will be better than what is was in the past.
Now that I have a way of taking pictures and shooting video I wanted some way to carry it around that wasn’t very cumbersome. I know that the camcorder could live on a tripod and the camera could be slung around my neck but I didn’t think that was very appealing so made up a quick and dirty bracket that would allow mounting to the tripod mount and give me two spots to attach the camcorder and the camera. The bracket was designed in CAD and cut on my V90 CNC machine out of 1/2 inch plywood. The bolts are normal 1/4 inch bolts and the large nut that gets bolted to the tripod is a 1/4 inch threaded nut that is 1 inch long. The nut was fixed in place with 2 part epoxy followed by a quick sand and a blast of black spray paint. I could have made it look much better but this was built the night before I left. I was also going to grind the nut to 1/2 inch so it would be flush with the bracket on the top and bottom but since it isn’t in the way and can’t really be seen when the cameras are mounted I decided to just leave it as is.
