Jump to content

IronFilm

Members
  • Posts

    2,123
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    30

Everything posted by IronFilm

  1. Using RF Explorer and turning on/off equipment and noticing what spikes are there or not, and moving your RF Explorer around in the space, can really help you quickly detect if there is any faulty cabling spraying out excess RF. If that doesn't work, building a little faraday cage around your recorder could be a last resort attempt to try.
  2. My boom(s) have been the Sony DWX Digital Wireless since the start of this year, have been very happy with them. For instance, I did a shoot last weekend when I ran my transmitter at 1mW the entire time, never had an issue! Just finished up a film tonight where I was the Boom Op for a Mixer, and we were using my 2x Sony digital boom transmitters (2x because we'd use the extra one for plant mics, which we'd do frequently. Usually running this at 10mW) instead of his normal Lectrosonics Digital Hybrid transmitters for the boom (although, Lectros bodypacks were still used). We used my Sony DWX wireless for the previous film I boomed for him earlier in this year as well. He's been really liking the sound of them, and he has a very discerning ear. (far more so than my own) He's considering Sony now as his next upgrade, either that or Lectrosonics DPR-A or Shure AD3 would be his most likely options he's going with. Now is a great time to get into Sony wireless! As they've finally released their first ever Superslot receiver (the Sony DWR-S03D) and just very recently released their third generation plug on transmitter (Sony DWT-P30). Hello Senator v2.0 😉 I can assure you, I've gone through the Sony manuals! No mention whatsoever anywhere of this smartphone app to control the Sony transmitters with. And as you'd imagine, other sources of information online about the Sony DWX series is rather thin on the ground. I've never seen this app mentioned before, other than in this brief off hand comment by the Sound Audio rep in the video I shared. Am not surprised some people love it, it does seem like Sony has been putting out incredible wireless for years! ( I think Sony was the second ever to bring out Digital Wireless? After Zaxcom. And in general, Sony has been making wireless audio products for over half a century I think?? Sony was originally founded as a purely audio company! Many many years ago.) But we've all be sleeping on it, & Sony hasn't been registering with us. I think Sony deserves more attention from us than they get.
  3. I would worry about the USB-C connection being damaged, how did you keep that safe?
  4. Does anybody know anything more about this cellphone app you can control the settings of your Sony wireless with that is mentioned in this video? I can't seem to find it in the app store, or any more info online.
  5. GT1660 is a rather old and budget level GPU. Great to learn on though! But once you're ready to tackle the audio project itself, you might want to look into getting one (or two!) secondhand RTX 3090 cards from eBay. Or even better... rent it? It is shockingly affordable to rent GPUs by the hour: https://vast.ai/ For instance, right now you could rent a 3090 for just 16 cents per hour. Or a 3070 for just 10c/hr! Yup, I reckon it worth trying recording a single source simultaneously to two tapes (one in bad condition, the other not) is a good way to acquire some source data to start with.
  6. Give it to the cat to play with? I jest! But I think this is a fascinating project idea, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses. (what's your home setup to train this on, a couple of RTX 4090 GPUs? Or maybe something more modest, like a secondhand RTX 3060 12GB would be a good way to do it on the cheap??)
  7. https://www.newsshooter.com/2023/07/06/tascam-dr-10l-pro-with-32-bit-float-recording-timecode-support/ Battery life has gone up from 10.5hrs to 24.5hrs (based on two AAA lithium batteries) Has a high-visibility OLED display, with lots of physical menu buttons for navigation. Has a headphone output so you can monitor the audio before/during/after recordings. Has an app for Android and iOS phones, you can add metadata (including project name, scene name, and take number) to the audio file. The app also gives you visual confirmation of the input audio with a waveform display over time. You can name each DR10L Pro via the app, for easy identification. The DR10L can now take MicroSD cards sizes up to a massive 512GB. (previous limit was 32GB) Comes with a free copy of iZotope RX Elements. Available now to preorder: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1773575-REG/tascam_dr_10l_pro_personal_recorder.html
  8. All the Sound Devices 8 Series as well (all of them will have at least 10x AES inputs if you're using the XL-AES accessory).
  9. Exactly, it is possible (but not certain, nothing is) that in the future the audio you hear will be entirely (or at least mostly) AI generated. Won't just be for an odd word or two here or there being replaced (but that is how it will start), but for entire scripts! The primary question for me ("if" this will be happening that is), is what will this timeline be like of this complete takeover? Within 5yrs? Very unlikely I think. Within 10yrs or 20hrs? I dunno. Within my working lifespan? "Probably" I suspect. Pinning down a specific time for when this shift will happen is very tricky though. Who knows. No different than the relationship between a Director and a Color Grader (or any of many other post production roles). They don't give specific detailed instructions for how each pixel looks at each and every second of the footage, they give broad instructions for how the feeling of the scene should look (or in our case, sound) and feel. And the Color Grader executes that vision. Then if further changes are needed, extra feedback can be given.
  10. Might still be a need for lav mics / earwigs / etc due to the demands of a scene, and the need for the director and others on set to be able to hear the performance. And no matter how powerful postproduction techniques might get benefiting from AI, it's a different matter to have them done live. (as the computational demands for it to be done instantaneously vs taking a minute or two, is massively higher) Plus there are cultural effects too, just because something is technically possible doesn't mean it will necessarily happen. Work culture tends to change a lot slower than technology does. That's why I'm very confident that 5yrs from now we'll still be needed and our jobs will still be mostly "more or less" the same. But if you ask about 10yrs, or 15yrs, or 25yrs from now?? That's much trickier for me to predict. It wouldn't shock me at all if within my working life span that our job radically changes to the extent people no longer care about quality. So long as they can here "something" (and even then, the live "something" on set might be radically cleaned up to the extent quality doesn't even matter for that either) live on set then that is all that matters. Because it will become the norm that not even one second of production audio will be used in the final edit. Now, this is by no means certain to happen, I don't have a perfectly working crystal ball. But I would not be betting against (& for the status quo) that this outcome will be happening during my life time. But what if the tools make it is so easy a monkey could operate it? (even a cameraman...) Take for instance portrait painters, a huge demand for them in the 18th century! As how else could you capture someone's image?? A quote: " in 1669 the Secretary of the French Academie des Beaux-Arts proclaimed portraiture to be the second most important genre of fine art. That proclamation, needless to say, drove many of the greatest painters of the time towards the art of portraiture." https://www.chairish.com/blog/complete-history-portraiture-artists/ But once cameras arrived in the 1800's (especially as they got better) the need for portrait painters & sketchers quickly plummeted. When the first reports about photography came out in 1839, one Dutch periodical published a letter warning of “an invention…which could cause some alarm to our Dutch painters. A method has been found whereby sunlight itself is elevated to the rank of drawing master, and faithful depictions of nature are made the work of a few minutes.” Of course a few such artists still exist today, but nobody would seriously suggest portrait painting as a viable career. Thus the decline of the traditional painted portrait. As today you'd just snap a photo of yourself with your cellphone, rather than commission a portrait. I disagree, as it might be the mega budget productions which will have the money to put into R&D to develop innovative new AI techniques. Just like how CGI effects first happened with mega budget films such as Jurassic Park before filtering down to low budget films. Such as Gareth Edwards and "Monsters" (2010), which was shot with the Sony EX3 and he did the visual effects himself in his bedroom! But who knows, it is tricky to accurately predict which niche of the industry will embrace all of the new AI audio tools first. Not at all, AI can reduce the workload of actors. Personally, I suspect Reality etc will be one of the early adopters of new advanced AI techniques. Look at the terrible quality they have to deal with already, and how often you see subtitles you used in reality tv!! They'd love to replace that with crystal clear audio on the cheap. Will the director prefer having full creative control during the edit? (which AI can give them) Or will they prefer being locked into only being able to choose from the five perforfmances/takes that the actor gave then during the shoot itself?
  11. A little surprised that they're more expensive than the inspired energy batteries. Although yes, the Deity battery has a meter on it, but I still expected it to match (or even beat) the price of the competition. Their charger though is priced quite sharply at US$68: https://shop.aputure.com/products/dqc1
  12. Am curious as to what their reasonings are as to why? Because I'd feel that a light touch of it used smartly could be quite handy for a live broadcast. (unless they're already heavily doing this on their end??)
  13. AI video just keeps on getting better and better: The video to video feature is especially interesting, I could imagine a very rough video being made cheaply, then being heavily stylized to create a much more polished output for use in an advert. A longer look at AI tools for video:
  14. AES will have far broader appeal than Dante. (but pro line level output would be even more important than either of those) Outside of the USA, all THEOS bodypack transmitters will be able to transmit and record. Nice!!
  15. Not in this case, but audio is the relatively easy part of generative AI video. For example: https://time.com/6273529/drake-the-weeknd-ai-song/ Clearly that audio is miles better than the visuals from that beverage advert. It is the visuals which need to catch up.
  16. On the topic of generative AI, check out this beverage advert made by AI: It might seem hilariously bad right now, but compare this to what AI video looked like 6 months ago vs 12 months ago vs 18 months ago vs 3yrs ago? The pace of improvement is ASTONISHING!! Look at how fast AI photos improved over the last five years. Look at how good they are today. (basically, stock photography is going to be DEAD) You might laugh at this video for being the garbage it is, but if you blink for a second and take your eye off the progress being made you might discover its become better than what many humans could do. Here is MidJourney v3 vs v5, only merely 8 months apart: Not difficult to foresee how fast this will improve.
  17. Just read a good article that presented the optimistic side of why AI won't be immediately replacing all of everyone's jobs: https://www.understandingai.org/p/software-didnt-eat-the-world I'm a little bit more pessimistic myself, as I think AI is going to have a huge impact over the next decade. But the author did a good job covering what jobs will still exist and why.
  18. I am just pointing out that people will eventually end up choosing the cheaper and better option. (and believe me, in the eyes of directors/producers/editors then the AI voice will not just be cheaper, but overall "better" too!) Back in the day of painted portraits, then portraits had both a utility value and an artistic value. If a painting was the only way to accurately preserve a person's image, then that utility value was very high! Once photography arrived, the utility value of painted portraits dropped to near zero relative to their artistic value. Thus why we saw in the 1800s and early 1900s a radical shift in painting styles, no longer was there the same value generated in perfecting your artistic craft in realism, but instead painters would lean more heavily into a more abstract artistic style, to set themselves apart in offering something unique that cameras didn't. That's why Academism / Realism saw their peak in the 1800's and didn't last as a dominant force into the 1900s, because as photography got better and better we saw instead the rise of other non-realistic painting styles such as Impressionism, Symbolism, and Cubism that painters could use to set themselves apart from photography. That was an understandable reaction to the rapid rise in technology and the threat it posed to them, I'm not so sure what is the right response right now to this new wave of technology, but people will need to figure out how to pivot into a new niche if AI takes over their current niche. For myself, I'm just glad I'm not a Voice Over Artist or a Stock Photographer! (but I'm consciously aware that in the long run I won't be immune to feeling the impacts of AI either, one of the many reasons I'm back part time at uni to upskill myself) Yup, I read that a couple of days ago. I told my mother (who is almost at retirement age) many months ago to watch out for scams, and told her about how these AI methods are going to make scams 1000x more powerful than they used to be. As although I regard her as well above average when it comes to technological savviness (heck, she even was a COBOL programmer in her youth!), I was a little worried for her safety and wanted her to be aware of what is coming. And I keep on reminding her, every few weeks, I sent her for instance WSJ article after I read it.
  19. Sure, there will always be some people who prefer the old way vs the new. Just like there are still some people who prefer the human touch of an artist doing their painting for their portrait. But most people will end up preferring the approach which costs 1% as much and is 100x faster, of simply snapping a photograph to create their portrait.
  20. I highly doubt it. You can measure what voltage the D-Tap is at when fully charged, and compare that against the specs for the input(s) of what you're using. I doubt it is higher than the range it is designed for.
  21. Well as @mlohninger pointed out, the total load is well under 10A. But 6A is greater than 3A. Why not just go from the V Lock straight from the D-Tap into the PSC Power Distro?
  22. That's a damn heavy bag! 😮 Personally I'd put the Scorpio on its own eSmart battery (which the Scorpio can natively read the info of from the eSmart battery), and put everything else on Deity Distro (which I'm pretty sure it could handle fine, once the Scorpio is removed. Which PSC product are you using? Not sure 100% which one it is, but it looks like the PSC PowerStar Mini Triple Play which can handle 10A, same as Deity).
  23. Perfectly nifty compact size to mount onto cameras for TC!
  24. That unreliability would be largely due to using the 2.4GHz frequencies, which has some pros, but a lot of cons too. To be fair, Lectrosonics SR receivers don't have true diversity either. Dunno about the Deity wireless though?
×
×
  • Create New...