RandyHall

Well, we differ on technique, but the result is the same. I still like doing it my way better, go figure.

I find you get better joints by using some extra paste flux, regardless of rosin core. Much, if not most, of the flux in the solder itself gets burned off when melting it to the tip of the iron. YMMV, but this works really well for me. And of course tinning connections helps, but certain connection points (solder cups for XLR, as an example) are harder to effectively pre-tin and be able to get a clean joint.

I would add: 6. Paste rosin solder flux. Dab a little (or more) on the contact and on the wire. Once they are mechanically stuck together (with vise and/or tweezers and/or clips), melt solder onto a very fine tipped soldering iron. Then touch the glob of molten solder to the wire and once the wire and contact are heated enough, the solder will flow quite nicely. On small gauge wires, and with a lot of practice, shouldn't take more than 1-2 seconds to get a good joint. And don't breathe the fumes if you can help it.

Lesson learned. Never give yourself only 30 minutes to look over your gear and make sure it's in working order before the gig starts. That said, once you are familiar with it, it shouldn't take you 30 minutes to do that check and be certain that your gear is set the way you expect.

I think that in an industry where production equals gambling in many respects, throwing tax dollars to court producers to shoot in one state or another is suspect. That said, if one state is doing it, and then another, and another, it becomes the de rigueur thing to do; if your state isn't doing it, then people leave, your tax base continues to erode, the downward spiral of budget cuts continues, and so on.

You really can't get enough of pimping the BWF Widget, can you?

Yes. Camaro-grapher has me weeping. Why not Cameragrapher instead, if not "camera operator"? Why aren't we audiographers? soundographers? phonographers (even though vinyl is phonograph)? recordographers, the list of bad made-up names goes on.

I would say go ahead and upload some test recordings. This looks cool, esp. the Sugru "ears".

Bartering for CSA is thumbs-up in my opinion. Puts food on the table, and makes a friend of a farmer. If I was anywhere near NJ, I'd pick this up.

I've used an Rode NTG-2 for a couple years as my beater shotgun. Works great with a AA and doesn't cost a lot, but the screws sometimes need tightening in order to quiet it down on a boom. I've used it as an on-camera mic, but only when I absolutely had to. I can't say any on-camera mic will be adequate all the time, so Chase's answer of "it depends" really ends up being the best advice. I've seen DSLR folks swear by the Rode VideoMic, which also does an adequate job at picking up sound in front of the lens. I'll say that if your distance to the subject moves much beyond three feet, then any mic is going to sound meh.

Camaro-grapher. Someone who draws Chevy Camaros, apparently. I can't even believe this pulls search results on Google. I weep for the English language. http://www.google.com/search?q=camarographer

And having done this for the first time, I have truly come to appreciate what a sound cart is good for. I'm starting to plan one out for myself.

I just did playback on a music video for the first time, and this advice was particularly helpful in the day leading up to the shoot. Being able to hand them a BWF of the song with timecode metadata and an audio track with the timecode waveform (suitable for AuxTC or Avid timecode reading) worked famously. The one thing I hadn't figured on was the repeated back and forth that the director wanted to go between MOS and playback, and then looping the playback because the "extras" needed umpteen takes to be able to lip sync. So, good that I had properly prepped the song (i.e. striped timecode to a multitrack version of the song, tracked BPM, aligned measures to the start of the song, synced timecode on screen to timecode on slate, marked out regions on the song, created a thumper and a count-in track run through a mixer to the PA) only to have the timecode portion become relatively useless because they wanted me to cycle certain measures over and over and over. Eh, live and learn. Was a great learning experience.

If it's at least eight hours, my guess is that the charger is charging the battery at 1A until it reaches the threshold voltage (in this case, 12.6V), then hold at that voltage until the current draw drops. So a 6800mAh battery would take about 8 hours that way. With a bit more information inside the battery (temperature, mostly) you could probably find a 2A or 3A charger that would do the job much faster. But if you're wrong, you're likely to burn your house down, so you didn't hear the idea from me.

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