nickreich

Canare MR202-4AT 4-pair multicore cable. If you want breakaways, the easiest is to use Neutrik 7-pin XLRs (meaning you'd only use 3 of the four cores in the cable - balanced Left and Right plus unbalanced monitor return). I have a short adapter to convert from the 12-pin Hirose connector that Sound Devices use on some of their mixers to the Neutrik, and my little SD302 bag has a small box under the mixer with a panel mount 7-pin on it with short tails coming out to the individual connectors on the mixer. Rugged, inexpensive, and even camera operators know how to unplug an XLR without damaging it. You can then make different camera-end tails (fan-outs) to suit the cameras you work with (ie: 5-pin or mini-trs returns, 5-pin in for Arris, whatever stupid connector Red or Blackmagic are using this year).

It's basically the same mic input as all their current Radio Mic transmitters, so will take any mic wired for Lectrosonics (either electret capsule or Dynamic) or you can wire up a cable to input a Dynamic mic or Line Level. It can not provide 48v Phantom Power for a full-size mic or shotgun - you'd need to add an external P48 power supply box connected with a suitably wired jumper cable.

As you're in Australia - the Australian Sound Recordists and Boom Ops WTB and For Sale page would be best. https://www.facebook.com/groups/982542505103878/?ref=group_header For more specialty stuff like the Soundfield, the for sale section of this site (JWsound) would be good but I think you need a minimum number of posts for it to become visible - maybe PM Jeff, the Admin.

Hi Bouke, I'm curious how BWFmerge would behave if the 'Master' folder contained several short takes, and the other folder contained TC Sync'd longer takes that overlap several of the 'master' takes. This is typically what would happen when one is using one of the new body-pack sized recorders (such as a Lectro PDR, the little Tascams or similar) on some talent who you may be having trouble covering with a wireless mic, while recording other talent with a boom or wireless into your main recorder - such as a Sound Devices 788. . You normally jam sync the PDR recorder before fitting it to the actor, after which you may do several takes and setups of a scene before getting the PDR back from them and stopping it (other readers, please refrain from mentioning the Zaxcom solution to this - it's not relevant to my situation). Would BWFmerge be able to slice chunks out of the PDR Recorder's single long file to merge with the master Poly BWF individual takes from the main recorder? If not, it might be worth seeing if you can add this function. It would be a big deal in making the use of these little recorders something that requires less work in Post, as while it's pretty easy for a proper audio post person to handle, it's a big task for a picture edit assistant, and they may need that performer's track for the edit long before a Sound Professional is involved.

In the Live Sound world, with Powered Speakers (speakers with their amps built in) becoming ubiquitous, combined power+signal cable is very common, carrying line-level balanced audio and AC power together for long distances. Induced hum is rare and considered a sign of bad equipment design. Your application however is likely to be carrying mic-level signals and unbalanced (though shielded) video so I'd stick with DC power - and don't use the overall cable shield (if there is one) as one of the DC conductors or share grounding within the cable 'bundle'. Then there should be no more risk of grounding issues than individual cables. Techflex is great for short looms, but I'd avoid it for longer runs as cables tend to twist and kink inside under heavy use. There are cable manufacturers who will make up custom cables containing power, balanced audio, and Coax in one overall jacket to your specs, or you might find the right combination in one of the manufacturers ranges, and just use the color-coded Techflex to make the fan-outs at each end.

maybe it could be made to switch between record and transmit 96,000 times a second to keep the Lawyers happy...

I record a lot of audience reaction stuff on the jobs I do - the one rule is you always need more 'air' between you and the closest audience members than you'd think. Otherwise you'll have identifiable single clappers in the foreground. Also, steer clear of Coincident stereo mic techniques for most uses - spread either side of stage gives a much less coherent sound which is more useful to post - especially if they want to put it in Surrounds. If this is a sound-for picture project where you can see the audience in shot, and if you can get a 4-preamp recorder, I'd go for a very tall stand on each side of stage, with a Hyper (like the MKH50 you suggest) covering the near-half of the crowd, and a shotgun covering the rear half of the crowd, both on the same stand (I use a very short Stereo bar for each side). If you want the more diffuse (polite) applause popular with Classical Music recordists, a wide spaced Omni pair would give you that sound, but still up at least 3m. If you have the venue to yourself simply to do "Applause Group" FX, many venues like you describe will have a bar or winch lines over the front of the stage suitable for mic rigging, too.

just read the manual online - the faders are not motorised, as you guessed, it uses the channel meters to show you where to move the fader to - you have to pass through that point for the fader to 'grab' control - very old-school! It's not just for Scenes though - the faders do the 5 monitor sends as well, using the A-E layer buttons, so this is somewhat of an annoyance.

There's a freeware Mac one called SoundFilesMerger which works well, but only for merging - not with all the timecode and metadata functions we need for Film work. In the WIN world, BWF Widget from Courtney Goodin comes with a merger/splitter utility.

combining different start times isn't possible in Wave Agent. Other Poly mergers can do it but they'd align the files from the front edges which would be out of sync - so yes, you'd need to spot them to timecode (or waveform match them) in a DAW and re-export.

yes, that's the one I saw. The Lectro one looks good too, wasn't aware it existed. Thanks all.

a great way to test the quality of processing (particularly the compander) in a radio mic system. Jangle a ring full of metal keys about a foot away from the mic and listen to the result - then compare it to another brand / model. It's a very complex and edgy sound source that can be a bit unfair on gear, unless you are working on a cooking or renovation show, when such sounds are common!

I thought I saw a photo either here or on one of the FB pages of a multi-bay slot-loading charger for 6 or 8 NP-50 (Fuji) batteries as used in Lectro SSM transmitters (and the new little Zaxcom one, I think). Search as hard as I can - I can't find it again. Does anyone have a link? Thanks, Nick

The other option to interface to a PIX 260 or 970 is external Analog to Dante conversion, the only practical 12vDC capable ones I've seen so far are the Ferrofish ones. The 16-channel one is MADI only, the 32 channel one is available as MADI or Dante. Both are in a 1rack-unit case. I was looking at these for a colleague - I use a 01v96 myself and love it, but always have access to mains power.

Hi PJ, while my own console in Australia is an 01v96 which I use with SD970s via dante as you describe, I did use a QL-1 on a job in LA with rented gear last year. Location Sound provided the rig. I found it quite fine to use for the work I do, but could see the fact it has digital input gain adjustment (in 1dB steps) could be an issue for recordists who are used to adjusting input gain over the top of dialog. The stepping might be audible. It's quite a bit taller than an 01v96, but not as tall as a Digico SD11, which I also use a lot. Other than that, I liked it, the big screen is good to use. Sounds nice and clean.

Poly files are certainly more editor-friendly in normal production situations - only one file per take. Most of my work, however, is very large track count (64 or 128 tracks) and sometimes takes of 90 mins length in concert filming, and in that case Poly BWAVs have a few problems. Firstly, it's still considered wise to limit file sized to 4GB maximum, and on a 64 track recorder like a Sound Devices 970, that means the recorder will automatically split your take into a new file every 7 minutes or so. These seamlessly re-join, but freak out post people who are not used to it. Secondly, the available apps that might be used to extract/split out specific tracks - so you can give a mix track only to the picture editor, for example, only work up to 32 tracks (including Wave Agent - even though Sound Devices make one of the three available 64 channel recorders) . You can dump a 64 Poly BWAV into ProTools and it will split the tracks out, but that isn't quick and simple enough for end-of-day location use really. I don't know what would happen if an assistant editor tried importing a 64-track BWAV into an Avid or FCP. Thirdly, unless your recorder pads out tracks that aren't record-armed, each Poly BWAV take could have a different number of included tracks, and dropping them into Pro Tools can be a little more thought-intensive for an edit assistant as regards getting all the material on the right tracks. For normal 8-16 track film shoots though, Poly's are nowadays more accepted and less susceptible to post losing tracks.

Well, I use QLab for this. Easy to make cues from one or many source files and drag them around in the cue list stack, it's way deeper than it looks at first glance, it's the predominant playback system in Theatre nowadays. Not a timeline like a DAW. It's also quite possible to make ProTools stop-and-recue from clip to clip using a MIDI Track sending via an IAC driver to Keyboard Maestro to convert a specific MIDI note to a spacebar-tab message if you really need to use a DAW. That will work with any DAW (ie Reaper) that can do MIDI.

the Rode iXLR should be perfect for this. looks like a typical plug-on transmitter, except it has a Lightning cable to feed the iPhone, and an onboard headphone amp with direct feed from the mic.

As Ambient explained to me last year...with Blue ACN series lockits, if you are in ACN mode, the slave lockits will kind of tune themselves in real time to the master unit in a set (but only for the time they are being used). Therefore tuning a set of lockits before a project is less important (even if some of them are hired in, and may have been tuned to a different reference), but Ambient still suggest tuning each one to a known reference (i.e. GPS or one of the Lockits) every year or so, which makes each pack need to 'deviate' less using ACN.

Here's their reply to my thread on the Tentacle forum. They gave the same reply to the OP from this thread we are in now, in his similar thread on the Tentacle forum. Doing a bit of a web trawl about this question, the only posts I could find where people specifically had trouble with a Tentacle being used to BOTH TC lock and Genlock an Alexa Mini, it would appear the users were unaware that Tentacles do not automatically change their TC Framerate when they are jammed (from a Sound Recorder, for instance) and they were subsequently sending TC at 25fps into a camera who's framerate (project timebase) was set to 23.976. They had jammed from a recorder set to 23.976 so they thought they were good to go. They needed to manually set Tentacle Framerate using one of their control apps. This mismatch is likely to cause the facility of 'tuning' the camera's internal clock to the sync timing implied by the incoming timecode (which is how Arri and several Audio Interface manufacturers do this one cable TC and Sync trick) to fail miserably - no matter if the source was an Ambient, Denecke, Tentacle, or Mozegear product. Interestingly Tentacle still think there will be a one-frame offset with the camera genlocking off timecode, it'll just be more stable as regards Drift over a longer time. This suggests it's actually caused by the processing time inside the camera of the TC data (not uncommon). They just recommend setting an offset in the camera as a matter of course. My regular clients don't question static offsets, even of several frames. Drift, on the other hand, given they're usually editing in a 'Multicam' workflow and cutting to music, is a big issue.

In the case of the Amira, you have both options available, a dedicated tri-level sync (genlock) input or you can set it to sync from the TC input. Ambient recommend the latter, actually. I have certainly done this on Alexa Minis and Amiras on a 2 week shoot with up to 11 cameras using a mixture of Ambient ACL204s and Tiny Lockits, with no reported problems. Several other one-day one or two cam concert shoots with ACL204s only. I recently asked in another post here if anyone had done it with Tentacles, with no positive replies, but Tentacle themselves say they have. I've noticed that it does confuse ACs that they have to set this up in two different menus.

you don't need to mod the Alexa Mini's SDI 2 connector to be a separate Tri Level Sync input to achieve this - like the other Arris, you can choose the TC Input as the Sync source in the Sensor menu - in which case it Clocks/Syncs/Genlocks (whatever you want to call it) off the incoming TC feed from your Lock Box as well as getting the TC time from it. It might not be quite stable enough for a 3D rig (which is what they offer the SDI connector mod for) but should be fine for the purpose being discussed here.

Hi Csaba, do you have the camera set to Sync to the TC connector (in the Sensor menu) as well as reading external Timecode in Regen mode?

I'm talking about Tri-Level Sync, actually clocking the camera as opposed to just jamming TC. On many cameras, this requires a separate Sync or Genlock feed in from a suitably equipped Lockit box. On Arri cameras, they can be set to Sync (as well as accept external TC in Regen mode) from the one incoming LTC feed. This is done in the Sensor menu from memory, separate to setting the TC to Jam or Regen. On the Amira you can source the Sync signal from either a dedicated BNC or from the TC in BNC. This is how I work with Ambient Lockits on Arris, the purpose of sync is to keep the camera in time with the audio recorder over long takes, not just when the TC was stamped. I'm wanting to know if anyones doing that with a Tentacle. As it takes over as the camera's 'clock' it's a bit more unforgiving than just reading external TC.

As Alexas, Alexa Minis and Amiras can Genlock or sync from the incoming timecode stream, they can be genlocked to a Tentacle Sync box just as they would any other brand. I'm wondering if anyone has experience doing this successfully as I have a gimbal cam operator who'd prefer one, but a client who's a little unsure of the tiny Tentacles, and I have no direct experience with syncing from it. We can't get the cameras in advance for a meaningful test. These are long-take concert recordings where sync is required to reduce TC drift.