With video recording of practice/performance becoming more popular, I thought I would share my experience with a neat little gadget that I came across. It is a camera mounting bracket for a microphone stand. The one that I am using is put out by On-Stage (Model CM01), and I picked up three of them through Amazon.com fairly cheap. I had been looking at getting one for a while, and, last week, I finally pulled the trigger on ordering them. Here are a few photos:
Camera mount 1
Camera mount 2
Camera mount 3
Camera mount 4
Camera mount 5
The following photos show my old Panasonic video camera, which is attached to the CM01, which is attached to an Ultimate Support Ulti-Boom Telescoping Boom, which is attached to an On-Stage MSA9508 Posi-Lock Side Mount Boom, which is attached to my music stand of an unknown origin or gender (whew, talk about Rube Goldberg-esque!).
Camera mount extending boom 1
Camera mount extending boom 2
Camera mount extending boom 3
Camera mount extending boom 4
This exact setup, without camera and music stand should run about $50 - $60 through Amazon, but you could do about the same thing with the CM01 and an On-Stage MSA8020 for about $25 - $30.
The following photos show my old Panasonic video camera, which is attached to the CM01, which is attached to an On-Stage MSA9508 Posi-Lock Side Mount Boom, which is attached to my music stand still of an unknown origin or gender.
Camera mount short boom 1
Camera mount short boom 2
This exact setup, without camera and music stand should run about $20 - $25 through Amazon.
You can see that, if you have access to a number of cameras, you can easily attach to most any mic stand to get multiple camera angles. And, with the clamp-on booms, you aren’t limited to standard mic stands (thinking water pipes, stairway banisters, etc.). One thing to keep in mind, if you are hanging an expensive camera way out on a boom, you will probably want to weight the base well to keep things from tipping over.
At our last practice session, I used two cameras with one mounted on a standard tripod as the usual wide angle shot and the second mounted on my mic stand (similar to the photos here) for close-ups, and it worked out very well. My old Panasonic has a wide-angle lens (a very cheap one) added to include more real estate in the closer shots.
I have also ordered a few of these brackets through ebay (brackets only for about $4 each - just search for "iphone camera mount" on ebay to find them) so that I can use my Android cell phone (and anyone else’s cell phone for that matter) video camera to add another cheap option:
[video][/video]
This little bracket should attach nicely to the CM01 (I'm hoping)!
Life is good. Hope this helps someone out there,
Hydroman52