Jump to content

Jay Rose

Members
  • Posts

    1,295
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by Jay Rose

  1. Jeepers. The Berkleys were good people, and their flagship - which I believe was the first editor to offer usable scrubbing and things like that - is still a powerful editor. They also were the ones who finally got the UI right on a multiband expansion noise reducer, with their SoundSoap Pro. I wonder what happened?
  2. For the compressors: fast attack, not quite so fast release... and use a multiband where you can make the times faster for higher frequencies. Too fast an attack/decay on LF will distort, as the compressor tries to ride the wave instead of the envelope. The real trick is having a fairly low threshold - much lower than you'd think - but then backing off the ratio, with an eye on the GR meter. Adjust both for the GR you'd expect on louder passages... and the combination of low threshold and gentle ratio will get you there without obvious compression. Limiters are a different story. They're there for protection, and shouldn't be triggering too often. So high thesh, high ratio, fast attack/decay (depending on band).
  3. In case CL cancel's Matt's link: It does mention that lunch will be provided. Tuna sub, probably...
  4. well... sometimes when things start to kindle, they turn into nookie...
  5. Jay Rose

    shockmount?

    A friend asked me to research this with working production mixers: What's your favorite shockmount, either for a hyper or a short gun? For this purpose we can ignore the boom or windscreen... just what keeps handling noise from making it to the mic. Thoughts?
  6. Marc, that quote was actually my wife's take on the trope "on the way down'. She coined it early in my career, when a marginal dealer I'd bought some used gear from (all I could afford) became product manager for a major company and put me in some of their promo...
  7. FWIW, the audio software I use (Nuendo) has no problem crossing midnight. It just adds a 'day' number ahead of the hours. Of course, things usually have to make it through pix edit's software first... but if I'm given production sound that goes past midnight, no problem.
  8. Here in the Northeast, one company is particularly known for "better sound through litigation". You can do a google search (use quotes around the phrase). Only one name will come up.
  9. Rule: Treat the people you meet on the way up properly. They're on the way up, too.
  10. I couldn't live without the keypad either. Why not have a small USB numeric pad along with whatever controller you settle on?
  11. "Every mac I've seen was the same " Yeah, and every car I've seen was the same: four wheels on the ground, user interface of pedals and steering wheel, accessory controls on the steering column... I have four Macs and they're all different. My studio's tower is stuffed with PCIe cards and has three internal hard drives. My desktop machine is a closed Mini running two different OS's simultaneously (earlier OSX and XP) with extra drives on a 1394 chain. My NAS is an older Mac with no monitor or keyboard or user apps. I'm writing this on a laptop...
  12. Was it a full team (mixer, boom, and utility) or did someone do double-duty? I've fit a team inside a tram -- that is, a small above-ground city transit train - but don't think that's what you meant.
  13. Well, yah. I assumed the OP would know enough to pot down when changing phantom settings on the mic. My point is that you might not want anything important going through the mixer - even on other channels - when you activate the relay(s).
  14. I wasn't asking enough questions, sorry. You'd turn on phantom when you wanted to use the figure-8, which I have to assume is a condenser (rather than a ribbon, the only native figure-8 mix but kind of heavy and delicate). So the question is, are you using a phantom mic or one with a battery? If it's a phantom mic, you're got two loads, the relay coil AND the mic. Gotta figure for at least 10 ma. Do some tests with a resistor and voltmeter to make sure your mixer/recorder will supply it. Sorting them out at the mic end is easier. Use one winding of a center-tapped transformer, in parallel with the cable. Ignore the other winding. Pick one with an audio impedance at least 5k so it doesn't load the signal, and just figure for its DC resistance in series with your relay. Or if you're willing to put a battery out there, you could power the mic with it! Or... thinking out of the box... how about two 48v relays, one coil between each leg of the balanced signal and shield. The two of them would use a bit more current than one, but might still fit in your budget. Wire their switches in parallel - they'll both energize at the same time - and you've lowered the contact resistance and/or increased signal reliability. Just consider the effects of the relay coil across your signal. Digikey part C93404-ND, a telco relay, draws 3.1 mA per. So its coil resistance is 16k. A 600 ohm nominal mic would never even know it's there.
  15. It might actually work. There's no particular standard for what a phantom input will supply, but a Schoeps eats only about 5 mA at 48v, and that's one of the thirstier mics. Some other good mics eat only half that. But let's say you've got 5 mil to play with Digikey sells a bunch of small 48v DPDT relays (I assume you want to switch balanced) that want 5 mil or less. Panasonic DS2E-S-DC48V-TB is typical, about $5. So it's worth trying... Just A. A coil inrush might make the power source momentarily noisy. So be careful about switching while there's signal in the system. B. Don't try to fancy things up with an indicator LED... unless you're sure you've got the energy.
  16. Unless you've got really good equipment (SD, Zax, etc), 24 bit acquisition doesn't really present any advantage. A lot of the mid-level gear being marketed as 24 bit really has only a 94 dB or so dynamic range, because of limitations on the analog side. Even the best stuff won't give you more than 108 dB or so under the best circumstances. Call it an 18-bit signal. The other bits, or about 36 dB of resolution, are filled with very low level analog noise. Once you get into post, however... you'll be doing a lot of math on that data, and those extra bits can make a difference in pushing rounding errors down to where they don't matter. But it doesn't matter whether you get 24 bits from the field, or convert a 16 bit production recording to 24 when you ingest it. --- Practical example. Zaxcom's Nomad is a pretty darned good new machine, recording 24 bit files. It's spec sheet boasts "Dynamic Range of ADC: 135 dB". But it also says "THD+Noise = 0.0015%". Expressed as decibels, that percentage equals -96.48 dB... essentially a 16-bit signal. I'm not complaining. It's a very clean 16 bit signal, one that any recorder with mic inputs can be proud of. (Where do the other decibels in the "ADC dynamic range" go? I'm not sure. Most of them are probably lost in the analog circuitry leading to the ADC. But until somebody makes a mic with a digital diaphragm, you can't avoid those circuits. Some might be reserved as analog headroom, but that's not how you usually measure digital THD+N percentage...) If a manufacturer wants to chime in, I wouldn't mind being corrected.
  17. Cool. A technology to mask (not eliminate) the artifacts caused by its own upsampling, artifacts up in a range where double-blind tests (and theory) say they're inaudible, and which wouldn't exist if the signal stayed at its native 48k. I'm not sure what the "True" stands for... . . . Reminds me of a time, many years ago when software was distributed on multiple floppies. I was hired to come up with a suite of sync sound effects and a splash screen theme for a major-label kids' software product. My total data budget was in KILObytes. When I asked what happened if I needed more data, the product manager / lead programmer told me "If you make us need another floppy for installation, it'll add 50c to our manufacturing cost. Since we only make $5 per on the list-price $80 product, it would cut our profits 10%. No way." I managed to develop the suite. Used every trick in the book, which consisted mostly of careful trimming and looping when possible (re-cuing latency!) , plus limiting the sample rate for sounds that didn't have any highs. Maximum would be 22 kHz s/r, or a 10k HF cutoff. Fortunately, it was aimed at computer speakers. The only available data compression was IMA 4:1 delta, which I used whenever possible. It was noisy, of course, on any sound with a percussive attack that required more than a 4-bit rise time... At least careful trimming (manually) to zero-crossings helped there. I fit everything in, leaving just enough for the rock-style splash music. Which I carefully tweaked to sound awesome in its 22 k 4:1 delivery. Sent off the data. (On a new-fangled CD-ROM. Via Fedex.) Here's the point: Client liked the project. He liked the splash music so much that he up-sampled the music file at 44.1 kHz! Didn't ask for new source material, just ran it through a file converter and doubled each sample. I didn't find out until I got my retail-package sample. I immediately called him and asked WTF??? Why did you cut out other features just to double the amount of data to deliver the music? His response, "Everybody knows 44.1 sounds better. So we made sacrifices elsewhere." Grrrr... Sort of like TrueHD...
  18. Here in New England we use Good Ponytailers ("hair balls") a lot for cable management, standard is to put one on the boom near the blimp: Balls In Back.
  19. Very nicely done! (Wouldn't be too hard to lower the HVAC level in post. Nicely steady, and voices (and paper sfx) riding above it. Kind of thing multiband expanders are good at.)
  20. My experience has been like RPSharman's. We posties get to hear a lot of production sound, can tell when somethings been done very well, and can ask who did the location work. So producers ask who we like. Production mixers, on the other hand, rarely get to hear what post contributes until it's in the theater... and by then, it's kind of hard to know who did what.
  21. Post's POV: when the director or producer says MOS, it means Make Others Sync this scene.
  22. I just built a couple of them to feed balanced +4 into a computer tower. As Matt says, easiest and prettiest way is to use a cheap prebuilt cable for the unbalanced mini end. In my case, I made two separate RCA to XLR female and use a separate cheap RCA/mini for flexibility. But don't forget the level difference. -10 dBV standard on most unbalanced ins is ~12 dB less than the +4 dBu on most XLR outs. (The other 2 dB get lost in the translation between dBV and dBu.) Just lowering the unbalanced input level won't protect you from distortion in some input circuits, and kill you if the input has AGC instead of a control. Just lowering the balanced device's output will throw away s/n in most output circuits. You need a pad. You can handle this easily with a couple of resistors. In my case I put 1k from pin 2 to pin 3 (jumpered to pin 1), and 3.9k in series from pin 2 to the RCA. Standard 1/8 watt resistors fit nicely in a Neutrik XLR shell/clamp and leave room for shrink tubing over the splices and cable shield. More and various other details at http://dplay.com/dv/balance/balance.html#cross By the way, star-quad won't give you any additional noise protection in this kind of adapter, and just makes things more difficult to wire.
  23. Gosh. Speakers high center _and_ screen center. Sort of like the Imax stuff I was mixing in the late 90s... --- The press release talks about "64 speaker feeds". Other than costing a lot of money, I wonder what they contribute besides different phase or delay and level info, all DSP'd from the original 5.1 or 7.1. I'm sure there aren't 64 discreet tracks on the film.
  24. Funny, I don't have bad dreams about production situations. But every now and again, I'm back as a disk jockey in analog days... On the air. I look at the turntables and absolutely nothing is cued up. And no records stacked waiting to play. This one keeps coming back. What's it mean, doctor? I should have never left radio? Or maybe I should have never been it it?
  25. Jim, a really good dream would be if you get credit in the main title...
×
×
  • Create New...