Kit Laughlin Offline Upload & Sell: On
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It all depends on the church setup, and what system you edit with.
I would use the camera's own mics to capture what's called reference sound (so, don't buy a better mic for the camera), and import this sound along with the video from the camera. Depending on which system you edit with, you will be able to view the waveforms of the sound files (the camera's and the recorder's).
At the time of the event you are recording, you select 48/16 (48KHz/16 bit) sound recording on your recorder, and place that in front of the performance (well in front; you want all voices to be roughly the same distance away; if you are too close, the inverse square law I referred you to above will favour the centre voices); the width of the choir away is a good starting point from which to try positioning the recorder; listen in the headphones you will plug in to the recorder for monitoring and adjust positions). Doing it this way will allow you to make a single stereo recording of the balanced/amplified sound that is set up for the audience; recording this will allow you to record the ambience of the church as well (the singers' mics will not) as well, and it is both simple and accurate.
The mics on the Sony and the Roland do a very good job, but if better mics are available, you can use them instead, but don't be bamboozled by ultimate quality: the PCM-10 sounds really good, and you will have difficulty getting sound from the singers' mics to your recorder. The exception would be if you can get line out sound from the mixing desk—but frankly I would try my suggestions first, and compare the sound out of the desk (because my approach includes the ambience; in this case the effect of the size of the air space and the natural "reverb" (reverberation or echo); it is this aspect that makes in-venue recordings sound the way they do, among other things.
Again, I stress that this advice is dependent on the final use. From your questions, you are a beginner, so use this approach first and learn as you go. No less that Deutche Gramaphon uses single mics (although they use the mid-side technique) to record full orchestras, and for many of the same reasons.
Make sure you turn the recorder and the camera on, and record the image of someone making a single handclap; you will see this spike on both the camera's reference sound AND the recorder's sound; sync the recorder sound spike to the video image of the clap (at the point the hands touch), and delete the camera sound. This is a quick way of achieving sync; some editing programs will do this for you (they analyse the wave forms and sync automatically).
In my experience, using second system sound with only the cheap technology I have mentioned will give you better end sound than any on-camera mic/camera setup you can use. Please do more study; this is an immense subject—over and out from me.
I sincerely hope Fred will start a video forum here: I have been a filmmaker and videographer for 30+ years, and would like to write some formal primers like this one: how to get good sound into videos!
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