chrismedr

yeah, I haven't seen many projects in europe where you get the wages of an US feature film production. In germany, rates for general TV productions are negotiated with the official tarif list: https://filmunion.verdi.de/++file++56fd5d176f68440706000508/download/TV-FFS_2016-Endfassung-160331_web.pdf so a sound mixer should get 1537EUR per week, the assistant 1121EUR. that's for a 50hours where each day should be no more then 12h. up to 60h get a 25% surcharge and the ones over 60h are plus 50%. night work is also 25% extra, sundays 50% and national holidays 100%. a lot of companies will try to pay less then that, or not pay any overtime (which nobody should agree on cos otherwise the days get really long really fast). the union for sound also has a list, which also lists daily rates: http://www.bvft.de/wordpress/?page_id=6777 there's quite a difference if you are "angestellt" (employed) or work "auf rechnung" (self-employed through invoices) since if you're employed that will also cover health insurance etc. if you are self-employed, then rates are 400-492EUR per 10h day for a sound mixer depending on the budget of the production. for equipment, kortwich is a good reference to start with: http://www.filmtontechnik.de/fileadmin/tontechnik/Mietpreisliste/PL-Kortwich_2017.pdf so a lectro set with lav is 54EUR net atm. usually I'd expect rental prices to be higher in places with higher living cost, but we had a shoot recently where rental for high-end camera gear in london was like a third lower then it is in Berlin, so that was odd. chris

would be interesting to know if the DR-70 has a "true" line level in. Some of the cheaper recorders basically pad things down and then everything goes through the mic-preamp anyway - that would explain if you don't hear a lot of difference. also I take it you compared the two with playback on a studio grade system and not through the recorders pre-amp (which also might level things). that said, I'm sure sound quality is good enough, so time to focus on the recording part.

Probably none of the sound mixers problems, but I'm curious: How does production address the issue of privacy in a shoot like this? Are they just asking the passengers for permission for the footage on the end of the ride and tell them that they won't use the footage if they feel uncomfortable? I could imagine some people getting quite upset when they hear they've been filmed and recorded secretly (I think I would). chris

yeah lovely unit. But I'd also have to buy a zaxcom transmitter while I usually have a spare G3 TX around.

Yeah, I wonder why Sennheiser doesn't make a G3 receiver with TC generator for 500bucks. I think that would sell like hot cakes. chris

I recently had a case where we nearly couldn't get some NiMH on board. The responsible person was digging for an hour in some folders, and then announced "no batteries over 12V are allowed". Asking for a supervisor didn't help as she was the one in charge. After standing helplessly around for an other half an hour, eventually she said if the security check is ok with it we can take it, but "only 1 per person" (we were 6 persons and had 3 batteries total), so we didn't argue with this logic, took care that everybody only carried one battery and hurried on board. But this could have been a real problem because we arrived at a weekend and wanted to shoot right away, for future projects I'll try to always rent a battery locally or ship one of ahead of time as a backup. chris

Very different every day and every project ; ) What I recommend is doing a day or two of test shoots ahead of the real recordings. Ty to be as realistic as possible, i.e. shooting with camera and on real locations etc. If you don't want to bother the actors, then do it with friends and minimal crew. Then sync up the sound and do some post production work on the audio, find out where your problems are (low presence? handling noise? wind? buzzing? missing room tone or wild tracks? etc). Be critical and honest with yourself. That will tell you a lot more then reading a lot of books. It's also helpful to listen to the audio every few days if you have a day off shooting, but I find it's harder to fix things if the production is rolling since time becomes scarce. chris

On the plus side they say it has improved mic preamps and even better, it features AES in and 48/24 sampling, so a camera feed from say a 633 should be pristine. They mention 4 channels audio but from the info I've read it's unclear how channel 3 and 4 will be input. I guess either it's two from the built-in mic and two from the XLR, but would be cool if they included two dual channel AES. Timecode is mentioned to drift less then 1 frame over 19hours. From the camera person side the most important thing is built-in ND filters with IR protection and swappable mounts. Pretty amazing camera for the price. colours are still a bit problematic but which digital camera other then Alexa isn't. chris

well, to be fair: They don't need TC to record pictures either (at least not accurate one). But editorial does need TC on video, and preferably the a matching one on audio (unless of course everything is done old school with manual slates), so some sort of coordination between the two departments is needed. I could imagine the reason that sound often takes responsibility is because a) the camera crew is already stressed out with a million other things and b ), if editorial has a problem with synching often the sound department gets blamed. If I'd have to deal with a crappy camera crew which refuses to cooperate in the necessary way I guess I'd also report it to production and let them handle it. luckily that has never happened so far.

I'm often guilty of assuming that people are lazy too, but in this case I did research this and did read the specs, in fact I even stated this in post #21: so good to know that it works for you, and thanks for reporting back with your experiences. From the test I did I bought a MKH50 in the end because the hiss on this particular 185 was way more then I felt comfortable with.

well, that might be simple on bigger productions in the US, over here smaller production companies often have to insure equipment separately and need a part list. Then if something goes wrong and insurance doesn't want to pay (or the production messed up), I'm still the middle man who signed for everything. As said, probably a good way for people who don't mind paperwork.

ah I see, that also would be a good option. The relationship with the rental place is certainly useful, but personally I'd be reluctant to carry all the risk for insurance of gear and non-payment of the producers, so I'd have the production rent the gear directly. But for those who don't mind some paperwork there's probably some extra money in this model and helps to get into the serious productions faster.

I'm not sure about that - how would you invoice this? day rate 600 + one shotgun 15 + kit from rental house 500? or more realistically if you're starting out: day rate 300 + one shotgun 15 + kit from rental house 200? I'd rather have a cheaper fully working kit that I know inside out for lower budget jobs, and rent a full kit for bigger productions (and bring the low tech kit as backup). then get experience, find out what kind of jobs I want to do and which gear I like and then upgrade bit by bit (either selling the cheap stuff or keeping it as backup if it's useful). People laugh at the F8 but it's a mighty nice machine if my 633 just fell into the river and people want to continue shooting. chris

I like the baseball form because it look not very threatening, so it would be a good choice for documentary projects - a small windjammer would be nice since it might allow to keep in on even on semi-open areas.

well, buy an old T-powered mic then? won't cost you much more then a converter.

do a google search, it will have something

I don't really understand the question here... you obviously decided to approach this as a (dedicated) hobby project. nothing wrong with that, it allows you to go ahead without waiting endlessly for funding, you don't have to justify anything to producers, and you'll have a great time with friends and family. If all goes well, the result will be better then an average commercial film because the spirit will transfer into the final film and it will fun to watch. sometimes it will fail completely. Now you're asking a bunch of professional sound mixers who take pride in their jobs and need to account for professional audio every day if this is a good way to record audio. Obviously to them it's not, because they can't just say "sorry, yesterdays audio is not good enough, we will have to reshoot that". you on the other hand can take that risk. Simply said, you'll have to option to keep financial commitment at a bare minimum, which has it's limitations and also it's benefits. Or you can get some more funds and approach it differently, which also has some benefits and some limitations. you'll never get to a situation where you get neither of the limitations and both of the benefits. All that said, if it were me and I would that much time and energy into something, I would invest in slightly better gear (say a Zoom F4 or a used 744T which you can sell again). I would also spend some days on technical training on everybody involved until everybody is feeling comfortable and I'm happy with the technical quality. And then the things who are much harder to control then sound quality start.. good luck, and remember that filmmaking if done as a hobby should be fun : ) chris

one vote from me. would be very handy

sounds to me that you did all your homework and from the technical side there's nothing in the way that would prevent you from recording decent audio. so now focus on the room acoustics, and even more so on the task of directing/producing/camera operating at the same time as inspiring the actors for a great performance ; ) chris

That would be great - would make it possible to use a G3. I understand that would probably be a hardware upgrade though

at me, or at plural eyes? : ) 100 clips of 2 minutes length? (i.e. over 3 hours of footage) depends on the codec used, the speed of your hard disk and machine, but I'd say something like half an hour max with decent hardware. but for ENG, why not just send over a good clean wireless hop and use that as production audio? if you do a scratch track from the same audio as the recorder I'd say 95-100% success rate. If you use an on camera mic, like 10-80% well, when did you try last? and how did you record the camera audio? you want identical mix on both the camera and recorder for best results. yes and we all know that every camera does reliable time code and there is never any operator error... and if TC goes wrong and there is no scratch audio on an ENG shoot, then better run and hide. I do a fair bit of post and I use plural eyes frequently, thanks for asking. all that said, personally I prefer TC (even audio TC) to plural eyes, but there are many small productions where plural eyes does just fine (which, I think was the original question) chris

agreed, a G3 on the scratch track and plural eyes works nearly as well as timecode. if I'm feeling really paranoid, I send a scratch on one channel and hook up a Tentacle on the other, so if one gets messed up for some reason there's a second sync option.

well, you could probably use the key code of the film to help, but you still need a way to expose a TC stamp in camera, and a system in telecine to read and translate that stamp back to numbers. well, TC on audio is no problem (most professional recorders have it built in and others can be used with external sync boxes and audio LTC) and neither are video cameras. The problem with film is that you have to go through an optical system which is tricky and needs special hardware (or *a lot* of DIY skills). I experimented with synch audio on 16mm cameras a while back. the best way I could find without TC reader on telecine or clapperbord was: 1) attach a light portable audio recorder to the 16mm camera. on one track I record scratch audio (either with an on camera mic or a wireless hop from mixer), on the other I attached a contact mic to the camera motor, so that I get a nice loud motor rattle noise with minimal ambient sound. 2) then I sync the on-camera-recorder audio with production audio using plural eyes. 3) then I put these two synched audio files into a timeline and examine the waveform of the contact mic track for the start of the motor noise, and align this again with the flash frame from the telecine footage. I've found that i get about 3-4 frames offset because the camera needs a fraction of a second to get to sync speed, but the offset was fairly consistent. So it's basically a two step synch process. You could do a similar workflow and record audio-LTC from an external TC box to one of the on-camera-recorder tracks, sync that with the production audio through automated TC synching (on Resolve or Avid etc), and use the motor noise waveform for visual sync of the footage again. or you could even send the contact mic on the camera with the motor noise wirelessly to the mixer and record the motor rattle directly on a track there, this way you could skip the step of aligning the two audio files. of course in a normal production it's much easier to just use a slate, but for documentary projects it's actually not as bad as it sounds hope that gives some ideas chris

the problem is that what you see here is the manufacturer key code, it has no reference to what time the footage has been exposed, so you can't use it for time code. with film, what you would need is a machine that exposes the timecode on the film while shooting (usually the camera), then another machine which uses this optical information back into computer readable numbers (the key code system on the telecine). if you're missing either of those components then there's no way to have things synched automatically. so try to find a lab that still has a machine that can read your systems timecode (aaton or arri). and shoot a test, since these things often don't work (or are handled improperly) chris

Kortwich has several 5V USB adapters (and I'm sure they make many more if you ask them) http://www.filmtontechnik.de/en/products-from-kortwich/power-supply/usb-5v/ but if you're aiming for under 30bucks, then DIY with some chinese ebay components is probably the way to go. random links: http://www.ebay.de/itm/DC-DC-Converter-12V-Step-Down-Modul-5V-3A-15W-Power-Adapter-mit-Mini-USB-Kabel-/262766040412?hash=item3d2e13955c:g:XrgAAOSw5cNYVLvu http://www.ebay.de/itm/1PCS-DC-DC-Converter-Regulator-12V-to-5V-3A-15W-Car-Led-Display-Power-YS/182243122407?_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D2%26asc%3D20140117130753%26meid%3D83918d976c65488c9b21886fe95c1089%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D4%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D181591369076