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Rain Damage


curleysound

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I've read those melancholy posts from mixers before on RAMPS and here about their worst fear becoming reality. I am now a member of that club, and thankfully, it's not my gear that was affected. The craziest thing is that in spite of the fact that there were over a dozen leaks in the Occidental stage where our set lives, the only piece of gear that was damaged was the Yamaha DM1000 board. Water dripped from a light fixture down onto the display screen, and into the rest from there. When the crew arrived on Saturday morning, they heard our stage announce/playback speakers gargling noise at max volume. The mixer had been left on as normal, and shorted out badly. We got a replacement rental in by 11AM from VER and I spent a few hours setting things back up. Some lessons learned are that even though your mixer is in a sealed control room doesn't mean that you can't get rained on, so turn the power off at night! Another is that this thing has a backup function for a reason, so use it! Third is that fried circuit boards look cool, especially when you're not replacing them out of pocket!

Tom

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Whenever I leave gear set up in a studio overnight I always cover it with garbage bags or a tarp. I did a film a few years back where we went directly into Final Cut Pro so i was set up on a large moving cart right next to the computer and large raid arrays.I insisted every day we tarp everything which the Computer operator thought was over kill and ever day mocked me for doing it. About a week into the shoot they had severe weather and the roof leaked on our day off. It only stained the wall of the set but could have been much worse.After that every night we set up a pop up tent with tarps gator clipped to the sides of the tent over the equipment.

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I had a simillar experiance with a cube truck that was at a certain location for a couple of days. The AD wanted us to do a complete walk-away I insisted on putting my electronics away into pelicans, I got an earfull from the AD for "milking the clock" etc. Well it so happened that camera dept did what they were told and well apparently the F900's dont perform well under aquatic conditions. Guess who "milked the clock" the following day as we waited for the new cameras to be delivered to set. All I got to say is that common sense wins out everytime!

Cheers

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You gotta know that if it can happen, sooner or later it will. If you own it, take care of it like it was your child, cause no one cares for your child like you do. I have been lucky w a few close calls, but no disasters so far. I seldom leave my gear on stage or location cause I never know what may come over night. We can shut down n load up or unload and set up in 5 mins max, so I see no reason not to. Of course if I crash my van w the gear then thats a different story.

CrewC

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It's totally fine with me if the camera and lighting and video dept.s want literally to walk away from their stuff overnight on a stage or even just for lunch on an exterior location.  They can call a rental house and get duplicates of more or less what they have delivered to the set.  There is only one of my cart (such as it is) or bag--it is something I've carefully built up and replacing it would be a lot of time and trouble, and it is not directly replaceable from a rental facility, even in LA.  We cover it all up, thanks; and often take it all home even when we are back the next day, esp. if anything looks fishy.  Years ago a friend of mine's Sonosax mixer got caught in a storm of water from the building sprinkler systems (nasty stuff) and fire retardent (REALLY nasty stuff) on a day off.  There was a long painful bow-wow with the insurance people because the fire retardent turned out to slowly, relentlessly eat away at the circuit board traces, making the board fine one day and unreliable the next.  It was finally a total loss--too unreliable to use.  Inasmuch as insurance will only cover the equipment on my cart, not the time and labor to hook it all up and make it work, I cover everything up even when it is in my shop.

Philip Perkins

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