Harris K

Copy copy. Thanks for input everyone, its always a difficult balance between being practical and prep for the worst.

Hey all, I know shipping has been discussed elsewhere, at length, but my specific concerns haven't been addressed through "lurk more" and I wanted to ask some opinions. I have a job started next week way out of state, that for long story short has last minute moved from driving gear down to having to ship. This is my first experience with shipping gear, and I'm extremely nervous about it. I know a number of people here have done traveled gear through their airline, with little to no trouble, but this scares the hell of out of me for safety and reliability reasons. The option on the table is FedEx at the moment. Production is unhappy at the high quote I got on the web, and I'm still nervous about shipping. Which leads to questions: Given that I'm green on this, in preparing to have some pelicans shipping through a store that does that kind of thing, what kind of packaging should I be looking for? Is packing peanuts adequate for something of that weight (my 1650 weighs in at almost 70lbs)? What does quality work look like for this? With the last second switch on the always very tight budget, production wants to go ground shipping. I have a shoot tuesday, and could ship wednesday with first day of shooting Saturday. FedEX website quotes two days from New York to South Carolina. In others experiences, can I trust this? Should large packages like this be more of a concern? I'm sure I'm neglecting some angles here, and I apologize for my unorganized thoughts. This is going down last minute and I'm biting my nails at just making this shoot happen, nevermind the idea of lost or damaged packages. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

I built one of those for VO a while ago, and took it apart later. It sounded bad. I agree with the Senator on damping behind the actor.

For what its worth, I just realized I haven't had a set dream since I got my 788 in August. Mine weren't always about stuff going wrong but just endless shooting, moving to fast and just scraping by on set ups. Ive woken myself up a few times yelling "Sound speed!"

FWIW, my personal practice is usually to ask boom to cover everything 100% first take (barring a believable rehersal) and if they tell me they can't cover both, I usually say "cheat towards the sitter and split the difference and I should be happy enough." This assuming I'm working with one of my trusted few, and not an unfamiliar boom. Even balance is best for me, assuming no wires and making the boom work. Camera just bones us plenty and I feel we have to make the shot work minute to minute above all else.

Bought a ton of gear this year, so not much fun in personal realm. But I went up to the 788t this year and, god, it makes the day easy. Everytime the answer is "yup, I can do that" to even the most outlandish requests. Also, guilty pleasure, but Batman: arkham city is just awesome.

Personally, comteks are one of the most aggrevated parts of the job. I have 15 ATM, until another gets murdered, and despite a significant investment and rate I'd love to never worry about distributing, swapping batteries, finding the missing straggler or L and D ever again. Though I don't have a third nearly as much as I'd like, so perhaps I'd feel different if I had the hands for the job. That said, a DIT buddy has a teradeck, loves the ever-growing technical capabilities of the system, hates how much of his day is spent fixing it. If an iPhone IFB appears from anyone but the usuals, its likely gonna be a PITA.

I have never done this, but FWIW I've heard of it in pretty low budget world. I have a buddy who started his kit this way.

The Orange clip is called a Cable Cuff, available at home depot in a varieties of sizes. I keep one on one of the rings of my petrol for the pole or surprise cable, but I always take of the bag to wire. I'm not a reality or docu guy, so my time constraints may be a bit different, but the wiring process is so inherently awkward and delicate as it is.

Hey all, A few months back I upgraded to a 788 and im in love with the flexability, most of all the security of isos for bag work. I have a question for the some of the cart guys : why puts a mixer in front of the 788? It seems to me you'd lose all the flexability gained from the mix track. I'm personaly happy with the pres and options, though I would understand a preference for other pres, but bypassing the 788 faders would, as far as I'm aware, just leave your mix track dirtier than needed. Am I missing a step?

I have, ahem, replicated Robert Sharman's two-step ladder design. Personalally nixed the lower cup as my main boom preferred to pin the boom under the lowest cross-support (I'll post a picture later). I love this design as its a caddy, seat and a height-increaser. I carpeted the steps on mine so it could be stepped on mid take if need be. When folded it hhangs off the edge of the follow cart pretty nicely as well. Er, belated props to Robert for the clever idea.

Hey all, I'm curious how others are transporting and storing sound blankets. I'm a vehicleless New Yorker, with no permanent storage in a vehicle, so everything in the kit has to be on wheels, so to speak. Currently, I have 10 blankets across two big rubbermaid bins, though I'm starting to think I can reduce this number to 5 or 6. The bins end up having a pretty big footprint on the truck, and in my apartment. I was mulling over the idea of a rollercase kind of thing, the upright sort since the footprint is so small and wheels would be advantageous, but it seems a bit overkill and pricey. So, who has the gold star answer for this? Thanks, Harris K

Haven't had hands on myself, but in a convo with some G buddies a while ago, the consensus was they're janky. Don't recall the arguments made, but I feel like if they didn't suck you'd see them everywhere. Like those awful spring loaded gobo heads.

Having some extra foot foam or air conditioner foam be surprisingly effective on clangy metal parts.

Having some extra foot foam or air conditioner foam be surprisingly effective on clangy metal parts.

Agreeing with Jan. I've decided on an arrangement for this specific show, which decided to use cheap shotguns attached to reds to accommodate the SlateSync workflow (avid equivalent of pluraleyes), given the high volume of handheld and crane shots, and lack of budget for wireless hops. On my 788t I'm now using mixL for Acam and mixR for B cam, with careful documentation and an email to post at the end of the day. Post dug the idea, and we'll see how it pans out.

So, this was confuddling me. Two cam shoot, where at times the cams were doing completely different shots, like medium of different characters not directly interacting. My mix track, which feeds my comteks, contained mixed and timed audio for both shots. Made sense on the day looking at the monitors, everyone heard what they were seeing. Now for the dallies, this suddenly didn't make any sense. How do you win there? What would you have done?

Hi all, I suspect this has been discussed before, but I can't seem to find anything on the new site. I just finished week one of a feature, on which the short prep period was kind of a whirlwind shitshow and no workflow tests were conducted. A few days in, I'm getting scatching angry feedback about the dailies. A little digging eventually reveals that the assistant editor is somehow not seeing my tracks correctly. They are using Avid, not sure of version. I'm delivering 48khz, 24bit, 23.976 poly wavs, per post's request, from a 788t. To the best of my understanding, syncing is happening all by hand to the sticks. Post is seeing, from what I understand, only 4 tracks on import, all of which are apparently a combo of all my isos and NOT my mix tracks. All 4 tracks are identical. No metadata appears with tracks. I'm guessing the issue may be stemming from the poly format, and I did a test file today in mono foormat but haven't heard feedback yet. The AE hasn't really contributed so far to the solution, and as a not post guy I'm a bit befuddled as to where to even suggest to start looking. I've advised post to use wave agent to split polys to monos for the offending days. Has anyone encountered anything remotely like this before? The fact that they're getting the bizarre tracks that they are REALLY confuses me. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Copy that. The unanimous "nuh-uh" from y'all has been heard. Thank you guys for your input.

I'd considered the wireless overlap, and FX team assured me they were on their own block, designated by FCC for explosives use, but didn't know their operating frequencies. Is this possibly untrue, or irrelevant? I'm thinking more about this now, away from the confident FX team, and I'm beggining to feel that I can even conceive of intermodulation or harmonics posing an issue, it's not safe. The style of the DP isn't very coverage-y, but I'm starting to feel that I should be having a conversation with producer types and the DP, separately, regarding issues of safety for the actors as well as the edit.

Hi All, I'm starting a feature next week with much more heavy firearms, blood FX and stunt work than I've done before. The finale scene of the picture has 17 speaking parts, almost all of whom will be "shot" at some point in the scene. Camera's coverage will definitely at points mix squibs exploding and dialogue in the same shot. Some of these shots, based on conversations at tech scouting, look like they'll be extremely difficult to cover without employing wireless. Also, everyone's going to be in tuxedos, obviously. Has anyone had experience with having to make a wire work with squibs? My assumption is that I'll be safest setting levels for safe side of dialogue and living with overloads on the squibs exploding, as it would be NG anyway, and doing my best to get some wild coverage of death screams, though this may be difficult to convince some talent into. Already taking bloodproofing gear into consideration, should I be concerned about damaging lavs mics from the SPL involved? I've already started a healthy conversation with FX and stunt, and we'll be working together on the day to ensure safety when wiring up actors and placing mics, though my guy feeling is there will be a learning curve for each other's processes at first. I've also made it clear to AD department we'll need a lot of time for these days wiring and dewiring talent. I'm positive there's a mountain of considerations I haven't taken here and I defer to the wisdom of those more experienced than I. Thanks in advance for any thoughts offered.

As a follow up in case anyone else can use it as this post as a resource. The situation was fairly rough, but not the worst. Plane traffic was minimal through most of the day, though picked up around 9 and 5. Wireless on Blocks 20 and 21 was pretty hairy for exteriors, though we did some work in the hangars and it worked out well enough. I don't know what frequencies he was operating on, but the steady cam ops wireless monitor set up was essentially bricked. Watching the cam intern run BNC for 100ft steady shots was rough. Further more, two days we were there the helicopter traffic from the NYPD hub was really intense. Helicopters circling over our sets for 20 or 30 min at a time. That was the biggest rub, talent started getting pretty pissed off at the situation. Anyway, things to look out for, if anyone will be shooting there.

Asking nicely is the best cure I've found. Everyone's just trying to do their job well, and when you politely point out the problem most people make the additional sound consideration a part of their job. Having extra foot foam and booties always helps, and I have yet to have anyone actually refuse, save for a foot dragging steady op who didn't want to screw with his flow. Fair enough, I guess. For the gravel situation, you're probably kinda screwed, but do whatever you can, as necessary inform the appropriate parties of the issue, and save the stress for another day. Sometimes, the rest production just necessarily bones the sound.

I had a musical life before production sound where I was far too lackadaisical about hearing protection. A visit to my audiologist for a frequency spectrum test found a good dip at around 5khz, i suspect from cymbals and snare overtones. Equipped with that knowledge, i spent some extra time trying to get a sense of what I was missing and factor that in to my mixes. In my case I'm missing some sibby stuff, so I know that if I do lose something post can handle it, but knowing exactly where you aren't hearing and trying to determine what that practically means can be a strong asset. It's far better to know and work around then end up cranking the treb pot and screwing the mix.

Like the subject says. I can always bend it back straightish, but I'm nervous about the bend back and forth over time. Aesthetically, I'd like them nice and straight, and I figure a curve in a dipole somehow affects performance, however this is purely half-informed conjecture.