Tech question: Audio signal strength into a camera - any danger?

[Erkan]

I'm thinking of getting a Canon EOS 550D to bring back an old hobby of mine - filming and photographing. This camera has a stereo microphone input so that you can hook up a couple of mics into it. What I'm planning to do instead though is to run either a pair of the outputs of my Profire 2626 or one of the headphone outs of the Profire 2626 into the mic input of the 550D camera. This would allow me to record the sound real time without having to apply the sound later through post-production whenever I do some studio log for example where someone sings etc.

Is there any danger in doing this? I don't know much about the signal strength coming out of stuff and going into other stuff. The camera is meant to take a stereo mic as its input but I have no information regarding phantom power so I assume if you want to use condenser mics you'd need to feed the mics power externally. Anyway, if anyone here has knowledge about electronics and these types of things, please chime in and enlighten me about if it is dangerous to run the outputs from an interface into the mic input of a camera.

Cheers

 

[Norris-wf]

nice choice of camera! I used to do this with an old video camera and it never worked out well. I used to connect a discman to the mic input, and it always came out terribly distorted. The problem is you cant "monitor" the sound that's being recorded so if its clipping you wont know. For this reason I'd add audio afterwards. If you keep the output low from the headphone out on the profire you should have no trouble, but you will need to find that sweet spot level and just remember to make sure that its set at that. Things have probably changed alot since I tried it on my old video camera so maybe someone else has tried it on the 550d, or 500d or 50d, I think they all do HD video now

 

[spioraid]

As long as you have a mixer and ample power for everything, you're good to go.

 

[Erkan]

Good point Norris-wf, I hadn't even thought of the fact that I can't monitor the sound at all. I guess the good thing is that I can always replace the sound if it gets distorted and add in the sound afterwards. One thing that sprung to mind is that these cameras don't have a way for you to set the level of the mic input so you are very correct about the possibility of distortion

spioraid, I don't have a mixer. All I have is my Profire 2626 and a headphone amp so I guess I could run one of the outs from the headphone amp into the 550D camera and control the signal strength from the headphone amp? That way I can leave it set at that level since I never use more than one of the outs on the headphone amp anyway..