Philip Perkins

Way good! Very clean--love the fader-surface drawer! Cart-nerd question: do the big rear wheels have individual axles or is it a single axle that runs thru both? It looks from the mini wheels on the handle that you transpo this thing on its back? With a ramp or? How has the Rack 'n Bag thing worked out for bag work off the cart? thx

I've worked on Broadway-style shows and events with that many wirelesses: we had a wireless tech whose job was to monitor and coordinate all the freqs all the time--it's possible but very expensive. There are lots of ways to waterproof TX, right? Bags, boxes or WM style TX, with upside-down lav rigs using B6, among others? All doable, but they must have a pretty big audio dept to make this much gear work. It might be good to find out who is supplying the gear for this: when the show ends or is cancelled there might be a lot of used WM TX for sale!

Yes the manuals for the 664 and the 552 give the pinout for hooking them with a 442 up via link i/o.

Yes I mean confronting whoever is responsible for promising to pay you, in person. It's really unpleasant, but it at least demonstrates to them that you are serious. You can bet that corporations they owe money to will be sending their debt to collection agencies if they don't get paid, and those agencies can be very confrontational. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

I'm not familiar with French financial law but from what the OP wrote it sounds similar to that of the USA. Which unfortunately means that as a small creditor you are, as you say, the last of the last in the payment line and will likely not see any money. Does the French tax system allow for writing off bad debts? Is it possible and are you willing to confront these people in person? I've had several nonpayments over the years, the former tactic never panned out for me but the latter one got me at least a little money a few times...

You can do this with any device that can make separate prefade outs per input and also make a mix out on the main faders. Link i/o works well with older SD gear but could work with any mixer if you get the mix level you are sending to the 664 dialed in. My current rig fits in a PortBrace AO bag with other stuff (NOT wearing this, it sits on a cart) and has similar-feeling and operating knobs to the 664. You do have to remind yourself that you solo all channels on the 664, not on the external device!

I run a 664 rig for music work mostly, and for inputs 7-11 have an SD 552. The prefade direct outs of the 552 feed the 664 7-11 inputs at trim level, and the post fade stereo mix out of the 552 goes onto the mix bus of the 664 via Link i/o. This way I end up with prefade isos on 11 channels of the 664 while still being able to make a live mix that doesn't affect the isos.

I own at least 6 paid-copies of Reaper. One of the great things about Reaper is that you can start for free--full up version, with only a slowly increasing boot up delay with a nag-screen for more or less ever as far as I can tell without paying for it. Yes, if the OP finds it useful enough to get a lot of real work done with it then they should pay the $60 for a nonpro license. But one of the founding principles of Reaper was easy access to it by anyone regardless of whether or not they had any money at the moment. This attitude has made me want to support them by buying new copies for new computers as they come in rather than "moving" my existing licenses. (So all machines around here have "legal" Reapers.)

Audition will work great.

You can teach yourself to do this work using a freeware app like Reaper, for which there are MANY online tutorials on all sorts of subjects. There are many free plugins you can find (VST etc) that can help you as well. Consider downloading these apps and trying to work over your recordings until you are happy with them. Search under audio noise reduction etc.

Most rain recordings are the sound of rain hitting something--rain passing through the air makes almost no sound. So what do you want it to be hitting? A roof? A window? Leaves? Concrete? Water? How much detail do you want--ie how close to the surface the rain is hitting do you want to be? Are you after a general ambiance or individual droplets? Finding a place with quiet BG is a good idea unless traffic and other human sounds are part of what you want. When doing nature recordings of rain I eventually found myself looking for sounds that were unique in some way OR were utterly generic. Both are useful in post, with, somewhat surprisingly, the generic rain sounds getting used more often than the unique ones.

Sorry, Bouke. Add "Make Transcriber Files" to the list!

Faber Acoustical sound level meter, Octave RTA, AudioFile Calc, fGenerator, TC Calc, Catchin'Sync, H+M Lite.

You can hear 14k?

That's the way it was done then. Did many myself the same way, with combos of IV-STCs and Harveyized IV-SLs. The latter was a superior device to the former in every way. Harvey Warnke RIP.

I did try out the Sax and SD boom-mounted pots/pre etc back in the day. They weren't for me....

I guess it would all be in how and where you mounted the phone, and how much active mixing you need to do. I'd find it hard to be constantly refocusing my eyes from the talent out under the boom to a phone pretty close up. I think I might miss the tactile feel of the knobs, which I can be adjusting without looking at them, 2 or maybe even 3 at once...

It's happened to me several times, especially with talent who sort of think they know everything about filmmaking.

The source of the problem could be security, communications or installed lighting etc equipment in or near the room itself, having nothing to do with the camera and lighting gear. Or it could be all of them, interacting with each other. What a wonderful RF world we live in.

Well trained actors don't mess with their mics. They look for the person who wired them and tell them if it needs fixing, changing, muting etc.. We soundies need to be very responsive and available for this for the protocol to work, otherwise the talent WILL start to screw around with their mics themselves. (My fave is them unscrewing the lav mic connector at the TX thinking they can unplug the mic that way.)

It happened to me too, one time by accident, one time because the actress was pissed off at the director.

Funny....but it's still the mixer's responsibility to kill mics for talent when they go off set, or even enter a private convo ON the set, like with the director. On commercials and movies dead mics to comms unless we're rolling has been SOP forever...

For recent movies I built up bespoke hybrid playback/record rigs that reflected the exact needs of those productions. One was based on a MOTU 828ES, the other on a Focusrite 18i20. In one case I had a small Yamaha mixer as a speaker controller, in the other I did that via the level controls on the ADAC. The two ADACs got the jobs done but I disliked their limitations enough that both were sold not long after those productions wrapped. For the next project of scale I think I'd look at the RME Fireface UFXII. A good deal more expensive than the 2 I mentioned, but way more flexible and without a lot of gotcha limitations on routings.

Maybe also consider talking with specialists at the vendors who sell pro recorders, and see what they recommend re: what you want to record vs your budget.

True, thanks.