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Philip Perkins

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Everything posted by Philip Perkins

  1. I hated the sound of the dishes indoors, they made it all worse in every way. You have to tell the filmmakers that if you can't get a mic on the coach you aren't going to be able to record what he says a lot of the time. If you can be in close with a boom mic that's good for part of the time (a small part) but being close enough to hear him well (in speech vs yelling) would be much more distracting for everyone (and mess up the shots of other cameras) than getting a wire on him. Don't forget to freq coordinate with the venue/team/broadcasters etc!
  2. Yes, SW does kind of keep after you. But I had pretty good luck with them otherwise. Ditto VK--they were a little more hands-on about complex shipping issues and they are into real vintage gear in a big way if that interests you, w/o any pitching afterwards. SW is a general shop--I think they deal with a lot of amateur musicians, sells guitars etc.. VK is more of a pro audio dealer I'd say.
  3. I would ask: how much fidelity do you really need in such a high noise environment? More than a regular Comtek can deliver? In my experience with this kind of thing the listeners were most concerned with accuracy of line readings and performance, they assumed that the recorded audio was good just like they assumed that the recorded picture was better than what the portable monitor was showing them? Any more, getting the audio directly to a camera attached to the rig is how I'd go, probably from a dropped bag. I'd want to transmit to myself in a chase car if there is time to rig all that (not a given), but getting audio to a camera solves a lot of issues in one go, esp re: monitoring, video assist etc..
  4. That is a crackerjack little doc--really well done. Good on these folks--they did the old-time hang-with-the-subjects verite thing and got a great story.
  5. I recall that the whole speed control apparatus on a III was pretty different from the later Nagras. To do resolved playback with my III I had to find a specific Kudelski resolver that only worked with the III, not later recorders, and was very different from the SLO-type resolvers. So my guess is that a IV-series accessory like this won't work with a III?
  6. This is pretty exactly what I did--the shoe-caddy thing on a stand placed near the "client corral" on larger jobs. I found that in general the peeps were pretty good about placing their Comteks back in the pouches when we made a move, for which I was grateful. For years before I started doing this I would bitch about how careless the users of the Comteks were--this rig seemed to solve about 90% of the "left-behind" issues.
  7. You could try an AAF export from Resolve. I've had mixed luck with these but worth a try. A great tool for helping with exports is AATranslator. https://www.aatranslator.com.au/
  8. Very common in TV news conferences etc back in the day, and used as a boom mic on Fisher and Mole "perambulator" booms for TV shot on stages for many years.
  9. This. It used to be that a "25" was a "25" no matter what film camera it was on, so you could develop a feel what what the "cone" of various lenses were. Not so true today. This and no rehearsals means that if you want to try and boom a dramatic scene you need someone with eyes on the picture guiding you.
  10. You kind of have to wing it no matter if you have monis or not. I've always preferred to swivel my look between the mic, the talent and ( on a doc) the cameraperson. On docs you kind of have to guess about how the camera op is covering the scene. On drama with multiple cameras you can't boom and watch 3 or 4 monitors at once so it's up to the mixer (watching monis) to talk you through it. Cam ops of today don't feel like they have to communicate with sound at all, and get exercised very quickly if they see a mic, they expect that the sound dept can see all the shots. (Stupid.)
  11. (this re: recent discussions of vertical cart center of gravity...) My (old school) vertical carts all had a biggo battery on the bottom shelf. Sucked on stairs but helped keep things vertical when rolling (yes, big wheels first).
  12. And 5 trafo preamps, which is why I got one to use with my 664.
  13. I assume you are recording the 2-mix on the 664? If so then it doesn't matter if the levels match, you just make a mix that you like and meter off the 664. The 552's meter is sort of irrelevant, you could turn it off if it's a distraction. Are you going to the 664 from the 552 direct outs in prefade?
  14. Ditto. Although I will admit that it might just be oldster-former-analog-user paranoia...just what I'm used to.
  15. Without meaning to diss anyone, I don't buy the argument that its ok to work for an employer who is a well known bad actor because if you don't someone else will. I have worked for political causes I didn't agree with (pretty tame stuff) and political figures I wasn't behind (Arnold, McCain, Deukmejian, etc etc) but then I donated the money they paid me to their opponent or the competing ballot measure that I did support. But I drew the line with Scientology, EST, and various other predatory orgs. If you close that door another will open, or so I have found...
  16. If I could get away with just needing 2 speakers I'd have Neumanns already.....
  17. It can work, have done it in a pinch. You just have to get your cables and levels together, and be ready to live with some interference on the track.
  18. Well, I did a great deal of recording to Beta, SP, 3/4", 1" etc DECKs, as opposed to camcorders, and with those I took the balanced line level outs as a return to my mixer, so I had a very good idea of how the tracks would sound. No, the HP amps in the camcorders weren't great, but I didn't notice a substantial diff between what I heard on return from those and what I heard in edit rooms. Yes, Nagras and pro DATS and pro file recorders had better headphone amps...obviously? I did and still do a lot of audio post, so I hear production tracks in a studio environment all the time. I still get archival audio from those analog video formats and can tell you that they require a great deal of work to make sit in a track with more modern recordings. The "PA system" in a real movie theatre is a highly calibrated setup checked by Dolby (if the owners of the theatre are honest), and are made on purpose to be as consistent as the owners can afford. A decent theatre B chain highly magnifies flaws that a TV set sound system might conceal, if only because the audio will be played at a much increased volume level vs how people listen to TV.
  19. There is no comparison at all between that FERCO harness and my Versaflex....!
  20. I had one that was sold by FERCO. I didn't like it much, since it made it hard to put the recorder down when I had the opportunity to do so...
  21. I worked all of those network shows at one time or another, and have to say I was not impressed at their interest in or understanding of recorded audio beyond what an exposed clip-on lav mic gave them. I'm talking about the highest-end feature news shows of the time. I didn't argue, I figure they knew what they wanted and what worked for them (feeding audio to the cameras of that time), but my headphones listening to a return from the camera told me that the audio being laid down was not at all close in quality to what my Nagras, DATS and eventually file based machines could capture. I get it, they were in the content business, and good-enough was just that. But if you heard that Beta etc audio in a theatre at theatrical levels you would not be happy. I DID hear that sort of audio in theatres, many times, while working on some indie movies that were shot with those camcorders. A WHOLE lot of NR etc in post...
  22. Yes to pan pots. And yes to something that sounds good and is less fiddly for those of us not mixing Big Movies off Big Carts.
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