Philip Perkins

I'm in a long process of selling off old gear this year, and this is where I'm at now. For stuff that could be considered at all "current", like working pro soundies use it, JW is the best method. The personal interaction and the likelihood that the person you are dealing with is honest are just much higher here, and the listing is really very film-sound targeted without a lot of irrelevant stuff in the way . For anything that might be music-recording related the GearSpace Classifieds can work fine, but your gear easily gets lost among all the non-film sound stuff, and the board is heavily targeted by people using listing-bots so that gear that no one responds about keeps popping up at the top of the listings, sometimes for years. This pushes your new listing down very fast. Selling through Reverb works fine too, but they take a decent size bite of your sale $. Again, better for music gear. I sold a lot of gear thru Trew's consignment service back when their fee was lower and lower still if you "banked" it with them to use to buy new gear from them. In my current work I don't need much that Trew sells, so this doesn't work very well for me any more. I don't live in a production-centric area like LA, so local Craig'sList is rarely helpful. That leaves EBay. It works pretty well these days, but forces you to have whatever you are selling fully ready to ship before you list (re: packaging and shipping details). The reach of Ebay, and how fast you can move things that are not going to ever sell on JW, has got to be 10 times that of the other platforms. There is a lot to not like about Ebay, how it works and how scam-ridden it is, but for a lot of older gear it is actually the only way you'll ever sell it for any price.

This is (still) Jeff's party. He gets to say what he wants to.

A slight breeze or even a decently stiff wind isn't my enemy: like any pro sound person I have zeps for the mics and sandbags etc for the stands. If need be I tie off the stand and the boom to something heavier. This goes for outdoor music recording too.

That sounds like a documentary. Which is kind of what a lot of us do?

That was an 8-in 54xx-series mixer made for radio work (that could run on DC). Big sound, but as they aged they needed a lot of love. By today's standards they were pretty noisy.

For a freelancer, a late fee is a nuclear option, just short of threats of small-claims court. To most people, especially honest ones, it will seem like an attack. I found it better to be a little patient and try phone calls and emails in which you leave them an opening to apologize and pay up, even if maybe they were really intending to "age" your invoice some? It's good to make them understand that you are paying attention to your outstanding invoices and that you mean to get paid in good time, but it's also good to start out with politeness and not threats of penalties.

Are your wireless RX in a remote rack? Monitor TX?

And of course those sync issues are the sound dept.'s fault, right? In this sort of situation I gently remind the posties that my audio files were recorded vs. a very accurate and very consistent clock, so your sync issues must be caused by the (gasp!) camera?

One of the nice things about being an independent location sound recordist is that usually you get to build up your own working rig anyway you want that you can afford. So if you want to use pres like those mentioned for location dialog work, build up a system, deploy it and tell us how it goes. As has been said, most location soundies would prefer gear that is lighter, smaller, less power hungry and less expensive than a vintage pre, where you are paying a premium for the name and rep. Location soundies have so much gear to buy that studio folks don't have to deal with, especially wireless mics, monitoring and time code gear that most would prefer to not sink so much money into name-brand mic pres. The other issue is that a whole lot of on-set mic booming is done via wireless anymore: there are huge advantages in mobility by doing this, but that would let out using this sort of pre. But if you can manage it on your jobs--have at!

Nice

I was wondering if anyone using a Yamaha DM3 on a cart was powering it off 24VDC, and how that is going? I would only need to do this occasionally, so I was wondering if a 24v camera block battery might work for this (rented)? The manual says it draws 43w @ 24vdc....

DM7: what they have instead of CL and QL. Venues I work at with those are looking harder at DM7 than Rivage right now. Those working with DM3 dante or no--are you able to use USB (or Dante) to get input into channels 17-18? Like via a USB interface box? Have you tried making a Mac aggregate device with the DM3 and an interface to ProTools or Boom Recorder or etc?

Quite a few years ago many talking commercials (ie with actors and/or "real people") became essentially very expensive documentaries, at least in the way they are shot. So the verite doco techniques for sound pertain, although unlike on a doc the soundie will have full camera, G+E, props, art, etc etc depts to contend with. Also unlike a real verite doc those other depts will not feel obliged to do their work quietly.

There are many directors for whom 50-50 is a way of life, due to their aversion to the call-and-response between AD, sound, camera etc and then slating. A few I worked with explained their reasons, and I understood them in terms of vibe management and the like. The good ones understood that work still had to go on, so they would engineer breaks in the action to allow this. Then there are the former art directors and reality TV types who don't care and basically want sound to never stop rolling ever, file organization be damned.... The gigs for the latter type were tough--I was often working solo, so didn't get a lot of breaks (to rest or to catch up on notes). On these I hoped that maybe the prod co was smart enough to have an assistant editor doing on-set syncing, so if we got really bolluxed on file naming we could at least glance at the files together...

"once you get to know the Origin C+ (which is not overly intuitive to use). " That is an understatement...

Could this be a prototype? I also have never seen or heard of this rig. Is it possible that Aaton made it by request for a specific project? Ivan K's Coherent Communications TC generator used a similar bolt-to-the-bottom idea, but had nothing like the Origine C control available for it. I'm guessing this rig might be from the late 1980s/early '90s, vs the Coherent rig being several years earlier...? Where is this thing? (The Nagra it is attached to looks pretty unscathed, which makes me think it could be a prototype...)

The smoking gun here is that Doug T's postie was an indie, who I'm guessing low-bid the post for the series and then found himself overwhelmed, overworked and being buried in notes from the producers. Yes, he should have come clean in a private convo with the PSM so they could work out an MO that would work for all parties. But some cats don't roll that way...

Well, there is no accounting for creeps. The RRM could have honestly preferred (and had experience with) all-lav shows and considered the all-boom approach old-fashioned, and he could have been getting post-producer pressure to make the show sound more "modern" (ie lav-dead acoustic). Or he could just have been a grasping creep who wanted to own the show and do things his way. A plenary meeting with all stakeholders including Mr. Creepster might have been interesting--he might have had to defend his approach and you could have showed how much faster/easier/less actor-hands-on/better sounding your approach was, but it's real possible that the outcome would have been the same anyhow... Too bad. The late John Coffey went public with his boom vs lav struggles on his last episodic ("Summerland"), similar scene, similar outcome, even as famous as he was...

The higher the budget the less likely that your live location mix will see the light of day in a final mix. But in spite of what other depts may tell you, it IS still important. Production execs, directors, producers judge whether or not they've "got" a scene based on dailies, and generally there is no time to do much of a mix for this. On the set, the director, script and other production types need to listen to dialog, especially if they are off in a video village and out of earshot of the actors. For docs it is absolutely vital to deliver a workable mix, the understaffed post dept (ie a single editor) will be working with those tracks figuring out a story for years sometimes, and crappy camera mic audio or an unmixed stew of wireless mics will really hold them back. In the old days we got rehearsals for the live-to-mono mixes we did on the set. You are very unlikely to get a rehearsal for that stated purpose today, but your mix is very worth doing anyhow.

I would love to hear their work on something more extreme, like 16mm optical, possibly damaged and worn. The shot they fixed here I would probably not want to use their system for--it doesn't sound that bad and their fix kid of sucks the air out of the sound. However much more problematic archival tracks, the sort of thing we encounter in doco post, might really benefit from this approach.

I hope the rental houses buy these. I don't think I can justify buying them, but them might come in handy once in awhile.

wow bravo!

They say it works with a CMC6 (analog), right? Is there any reason it would not work on earlier head amps? I swap my capsules that are from less than 1 year old to 40+ years old around on a bag of CMC 4-5-6 head amps...? Yes the blue with the grey (or silver) is ugly. I don't love that I can't turn off the 70Hz low cut. Nice choice to have though.

The Rycote (McMaster Carr) tubes have been great for travel with Schoeps mics, and they live in them when at home in the mic case. You can get ones long enough to accommodate a mic with a lot of accessories, we have them for CMC6+DZC10+GVC+capsule. For my 416 I made my own tube from PVC plumbing pipe. Kind of heavy, was good for a mic down in the bottom of a case..

How is the fader latency vs the iPad?