Video gear + iPad Mini / smartphones

[Wingsley]

For about 15 years, I have been recording occasional video clips for once-in-a-blue-moon video projects. Here are my museum pieces:

Canon Vixia HV40 (tape-based, HDV)
Canon ZR20 (tape-based, standard def MiniDV)
tripods
various Audio Technica microphones
Olympus LS10 presumer audio recorder
Canon EOS Digital Rebel T3, 18-55 kit lens, 75-300 telephoto lens
cheap, consumer-grade aluminum tripod

I edit video on my iMac. I have not updated my editing software in years, and it is getting long-in-tooth. I have Final Cut Studio 3. In the past, I shot high-def video with the Vixia, edited it in Final Cut, and transcoded it to standard DVDs. My biggest project was in 2010, when I shot video of a five-hour public hearing in a huge meeting hall with over 1,100 people in attendance. The hearing personnel provided professionally mixed audio, so I plugged in a wireless mic transmitter and rigged it to my Vixia. The result was perfect audio, which really saved the day. I was able to produce a three-DVD set of the entire hearing.

I have not produced any projects or shot any video with the Vixia for a few years. I really want to get back into it. I have been thinking about either upgrading to Final Cut Pro X or jumping ship to Da Vinci Resolve Studio 15, but I don't have the budget for that right now. I have access to an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but I am touchy about relying on that because I was given it by a local business office that I do desktop publishing work for.

At the end of this month, I am due to go on a unique business trip. I will carpool 700 miles to a history event and I have been asked to record video to possibly do interviews. If I agree to do this, I want to leave my Vixia and box of tape-based goodies at home and go tapeless. I could do audio with the Olympus. Here is my gear:

Apple iPad Mini 32 GB
Lenovo-Motorola Moto G4 Play smartphone (128 GB on-board)
Lenovo-Motorola Moto E4 smartphone (64 GB on-board)

(In the future, I want to buy a tapeless 4K camcorder with zoom capability, as well as at least one GoPro and maybe a new SLR or mirrorless 4K-video-capable camera. But that's down the road.)

For this trip, I'd like to know what gear I could use with my tapeless hardware if I wanted to do interviews. What kind of tripod mounts are out there? I don't even know what the right search terms would be. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Hater]

"smartphone tripod mount" would be the search term to start with for right now.

Depends, most vendors still use the normal screw mount (1/4-20 UNC) which is the same standard that has been used forever and ever - So you won't need any adaptors, and will most probably will be able to use your own tripods directly with the new camera.

Exception is GoPro of course, but there are lots and lots of 1/4-20 UNC to GoPro adaptor mounts out there.

I have a Hero 5 Black, the audio is horrible (I refuse to buy the GoPro $50 adaptor just to plug a mic in) so it just gets used on a gimble to take walk by kind of footage. Works great for my crappy usage (which is 1080p videos on YouTube, not DVD quality at all)

I also have a pair of AS200V Sony cameras I use for taking 99% of my footage (which is in an action format so I can't use proper cameras) which have the opposite problem - mic's plugged into them sound excellent (again, for my usage, for yours probably not) but the image quality just isn't on par with the GoPro's.

I don't know what a better solution for interviews would be, I just don't do that kind of stuff...