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Didn't quite roll for some of a take.. What happens next?!


Todd Weaver

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On sets like that I just burn bits all the time.  I too have worked with directors (all LA commercial types) who felt the need to communicate (if that is the word) exclusively with their shooter so that no one else really knew what was going on mostly.  I decided that while they might be making a spot but I was recording a verite doc, and proceeded accordingly.

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Technical question on the subject of pre-roll.

Do recorders generally buffer pre-roll to internal RAM? If not and it is being recorded direct to SD/CF I imagine that placing significant stress on the cards with continuous write/erase. I should probably schedule regular replacement of the cards if this is the case.

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There is a pre-record buffer that contains the data that represents the typical 5 to 10 seconds of audio available before you hit the record button. The A to D converters are working all the time (and there is no stress here, just normal operation) and when you hit record, data is written to the media, and if you have pre-record enabled, audio that exists before you hit record is written. Also, there is no "continuous write/erase" and media is not being put through "significant stress" other than the "stress" that any media has while performing its primary function of storing data. Scheduling regular replacement of media is always good practice but not for the reasons you state.

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11 hours ago, AnuarYahya said:

TRX internal recording is the best thing since sliced bread.. always record on boot up. I had a similar situation where I forgot to arm a track.

Yes absolutely - it's saved my butt at least once. Though this only works if the transmitters are set to continuous record - and not slaved record.

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I encountered the same thing last fall, but  worse.. what a freak'n nightmare, it was like everything's a secret between the cam op and 1st AD.  I think I only actually heard 'roll sound' and action once or twice in fifteen days. The director didn't care either.. or about sound in general. I initially stopped takes due to aircraft or other significant continuous noise.. (director: "that's YOUR problem") I eventually quit. This was with A-list actors as well who understood my dilemma and weren't very happy in general either. </end rant>

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2 minutes ago, Rick Reineke said:

I encountered the same thing last fall, but  worse.. what a freak'n nightmare, it was like everything's a secret between the cam op and 1st AD.  I think I only actually heard 'roll sound' and action once or twice in fifteen days. The director didn't care either.. or about sound in general. I initially stopped takes due to aircraft or other significant continuous noise.. (director: "that's YOUR problem") I eventually quit. This was with A-list actors as well who understood my dilemma and weren't very happy in general either. </end rant>

So many of the people today couldn't work in the film Era of say, 1960's. I had a director who was just ADD. I checked the display, twice he had sound rolling for 2:26 before calling action.  Do you know how much 2:26  of film cost? Holy cow. And the recorder today is in reverse of the tape days, mine is set to go back 8 seconds. So at least I can cover an 8 second mistake by the director.

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Great stuff guys!

I had a terrible moment recording two actors, a young boy and Sir Anthony Hopkins both on lavs.

For an unknown reason my recorder only captured the young boy!

A sleepless night followed.

Next day I asked the DIT friend if he had the takes from location.

In the meal break I removed the video element and re-numbered the takes.

Although I had fed him a mixed mono track all was well and I delivered the late takes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mike

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm quite tempted to send just the boom track out to the Tascam DR-10X permanently: 

http://www.adorama.com/tsdr10x.html

It has XLR input, is ultra lightweight and small, can run a safety track as well, can stick a large SD card battery & will run for hours on its battery (perhaps all day long maybe, but swap batteries out at lunch just to be safe). Thus a set up which will take up very light space or weight in the mixing bag, and not create any extra real hassle for me during the day.

 

And in return I get peace of mind! :-D

However I've never not rolled on a take (knock on wood!), but I do have a bad habit of occasionally forgetting to cut for a little while! & letting it roll on for a bit too long.

On 5/4/2015 at 8:44 AM, ao said:

I keep my cantar at a 30sec preroll,  and it has come in handy a couple of times on drama.  it has been invaluable for documentary work, catching sound bites otherwise lost.

wow, seems like that is quite a long pre-roll length.

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Had that in a musical recording for a tv show with three cameras. There was a musician singing with a guitar. I had all tracks mixed as a hop, but post demanded guitar and singer seperately for adding reverb and dynamics. I had only armed the mix, the presenter, the singer - and not the guitar. I noticed in the middle of the track and cried: "Abbruch!" (meaning "stop" in German). Everyone angry: "Why?" "Sorry, I made a mistake" getting redder and redder (because the musician had been absolutely perfect in that track along with the pictures made). But answer was: "No problem, let's go again". I was stunned ... Later that day and afterwards no one ever spoke about it. I was a little proud that I had been so honest to admit everything immediately.

Well, of course you can't do that on Hollywood movie productions ...

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5 hours ago, Mungo said:

Everyone angry: "Why?" "Sorry, I made a mistake" getting redder and redder (because the musician had been absolutely perfect in that track along with the pictures made). But answer was: "No problem, let's go again". I was stunned ... Later that day and afterwards no one ever spoke about it. I was a little proud that I had been so honest to admit everything immediately.

I go with the thought that it's better for everyone to hate you for 15 minutes on set while you redo a take then for them to hate you forever from the edit room.

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  • 2 months later...
On 10/09/2016 at 4:19 PM, Mungo said:

Had that in a musical recording for a tv show with three cameras. There was a musician singing with a guitar. I had all tracks mixed as a hop, but post demanded guitar and singer seperately for adding reverb and dynamics. I had only armed the mix, the presenter, the singer - and not the guitar. I noticed in the middle of the track and cried: "Abbruch!" (meaning "stop" in German). Everyone angry: "Why?" "Sorry, I made a mistake" getting redder and redder (because the musician had been absolutely perfect in that track along with the pictures made). But answer was: "No problem, let's go again". I was stunned ... Later that day and afterwards no one ever spoke about it. I was a little proud that I had been so honest to admit everything immediately.

Well, of course you can't do that on Hollywood movie productions ...

Could a guitar iso have been achieved, after the fact, by phase inverting all the isos you did have and summing this with the mix?

I know the thread is bit old but thought i'd put it out there.  d r 

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1 hour ago, Mungo said:

That guy played without metronome, so every take was slightly different.

I meant for any given take - I did not mean trying to do this with isos from different takes (this would be impractical as you suggest).

eg: MIX = 'presenter' + 'singer' + 'guitar'. So remove 'presenter' and 'singer' from mix by adding inverted isos of 'presenter' and 'singer' you get an iso of the 'guitar' (depending on much you rode the mix levels compared to the isos levels in any particular take).

 

 

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3 hours ago, Mungo said:

Ahh understand. Guitar was connected via pickup und I hadn't armed that pickup track. It should sound like a music video, not like someone in a movie playing guitar and singing along - which I would have recorded in a different way 

Ahh, now I understand (I think : ): you only had the guitar as 'spill' on the singer's and/or presenter's mic, before the retake and arming of the the 'pick-up' track. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I like this thread. We're all in the same boat, brothers and sisters! It has happened to me, too, and the seconds while deciding whether to call out on your mistake or wait for the next take can seem endless. I did realize that the few times I did not roll on a take was mostly because of bad communication on set. In one case during an interview the director would call cut but the camera would keep rolling, then the director would just ask another question, without announcing that we roll again, and I missed the cue. Once I realized, told them technical problems (the interviewee, a big manager guy, was listening and I didn't want to attract too much attention) and we re-did the question. Got a call from post later why that part of the interview is without audio, explained what happened and all was fine.

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2 minutes ago, Christian Spaeth said:

I like this thread. We're all in the same boat, brothers and sisters! It has happened to me, too, and the seconds while deciding whether to call out on your mistake or wait for the next take can seem endless. I did realize that the few times I did not roll on a take was mostly because of bad communication on set. In one case during an interview the director would call cut but the camera would keep rolling, then the director would just ask another question, without announcing that we roll again, and I missed the cue. Once I realized, told them technical problems (the interviewee, a big manager guy, was listening and I didn't want to attract too much attention) and we re-did the question. Got a call from post later why that part of the interview is without audio, explained what happened and all was fine.

Christian, I just had something interesting happen recently that's related partly to what you're saying. I had an editor say that said he was missing two audio files. First thing I say is send me a picture of the slate, the actual clapping and the bright flash of the Denecke slate. That does two things, one it tells me what time code to look for, and 2, if they can't send me the picture of the slate clapping,  there's no file for me to have to give them. So, for whatever reason they had misplaced the files and I gave them to them after looking at the time code. I realize I should just be able to go by the slates scene and take, but I'm going to give them exactly what the time code says that just makes more sense to me, and of course it should match up anyway. So, I get another call, we are missing another file. Ok, great, send me a screenshot of the slate clapping. This of course does something else also, if I see fingers in between the slate and Clapper, I know I can stop looking. Keep in mind there was a bit of a language barrier between the editor and myself and the editor and the director. This time when I asked for a screen capture of the slate the answer I get from the editor is "there is no slate, it's in the middle". This was a message sent to both the director and myself. We both had a pretty good laugh over that because we didn't know what to do with that information. I asked the director what does that mean he said he didn't know. So finally the director actually sits down in front of the computer with the editor. And he decides that he will just go through all the files and listen. We had a very experienced sag actor, an older gentleman, who had screwed up his lines and he said cut. Well I'm not cutting because an actor says cut. So I kept rolling, I look over at the director and I asked "are we cut"?. He says no. So I keep rolling. So what happened is the editor had heard that actor say cut on that file and he stopped listening. The director was actually looking at the wave file and he was curious what all that was after he hears the actor yell cut. So the director kept listening to the file and he asked the editor why he couldn't simply find that and he just said that "I stopped listening after I heard the actor yell cut." And I know there's so many things wrong with everything that I just told you, the actor yelling cut, the editor not paying attention and on and on. 

Sincerely, Martin 

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On 12/26/2016 at 0:53 PM, MartinTheMixer said:

The director was actually looking at the wave file and he was curious what all that was after he hears the actor yell cut. So the director kept listening to the file and he asked the editor why he couldn't simply find that and he just said that "I stopped listening after I heard the actor yell cut." And I know there's so many things wrong with everything that I just told you, the actor yelling cut, the editor not paying attention and on and on. 

A lot of this crap happens just due to a lot of bad habits seeping in to some crews, and a lack of discipline required to do things in a structured, orderly way on set. Even on a "loose" documentary, they have to call for rolling sound & camera, then slate the scene just so that everybody is on the same page and knows they're in record. I particularly hate directors who don't yell CUT loudly enough that everybody is aware of it. Way, way too often I have called out, "are we still rolling?" or "sound still rolls!" and it takes much longer than necessary to get an answer. Very sloppy on the part of the people involved.

One wishes there was a little transmittable red light (like a Wi-Fi tally light) that would light up whenever the camera surreptitiously recorded, and the sound department would know that camera has rolled without anybody knowing about it. 

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On 29.12.2016 at 10:59 AM, Marc Wielage said:

A lot of this crap happens just due to a lot of bad habits seeping in to some crews, and a lack of discipline required to do things in a structured, orderly way on set.  (...)

One wishes there was a little transmittable red light (like a Wi-Fi tally light) that would light up whenever the camera surreptitiously recorded, and the sound department would know that camera has rolled without anybody knowing about it. 

 

23 hours ago, ProSound said:

There are certain folks I work for that I just never cut once we start rolling because of issues like this.The lack of proper set protocol is terrible though 

+1 to lack of set protocol. Some people seem to think that actors' performance was impaired by yelling out "roll sound" or "cut". Well you don't need to yell, it just needs to be loud enough so all involved can hear it, huh? IME that usually ends up with actors complaining that they don't know if it's a rehearsal or a take, and sometimes don't even know when to start performing - because nobody said "action".

I've found that I really need my monitor screen on discipline-lacking sets. You have the rec/standby indicator (1), frame rate, and card/clip number (2) displayed, always correct since it's what the camera is actually set to, and more than once I've discreetly asked AC if it was on purpose that cam was still rolling.

--------------

(1) that's basically that portable tally light

(2) on discipline-lacking sets usually there's also a lack of proper slating. Naming my files so they match cam card/clip numbers then.

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