Philip Perkins

It's crazy that Axient Spectrum Mgr would auto retune into non legal or dangerous bands. You really can't lock out certain zones? it seems like that would be important for multistage music fests, theme parks, political conventions etc....

I'm not really clear on what you are saying here, can you elaborate? If an FOH board is running on it's internal clock, and has a Dante card for communicating with its stage boxes and other systems, are you saying that the master clock of that rig is the clock in the console's Dante card? That the board's ADC (in the stage boxes) is under the Dante card's clock? And the clocks in Dante cards are "video audio accurate", ie what we're used to re: sync sound on movie jobs? And that a movie sound rig that has taken a Dante feed from the FOH Dante system could then successfully jam sync TC boxes etc and the sync would hold as well as if the video audio recorder (SD, Zax etc type), now creating the timecode for the video shoot aspect of this gig, were the master clock?

I work a lot in live-show sound anymore, and the installed base I've run into in the USA is heavily Shure (although not necessarily Axient unless it is a high-end venue), and those that aren't Shure are Sennheiser, at least so far, as are the Euro halls. It doesn't seem like the diffs in price are that great, and even in smaller markets there are often rentable Shure wireless (but not with "baggable" RX) when there are no Lectro/Zax etc rentals available except from individuals.

A shooter friend of mine just bought himself a brace of Diety TC1s. His cameras are FX9 and A7 types, and he's been having pretty good luck with them on long-roll multicam shoots. The specs are impressive and the price is pretty darn low. Anyone adopted these? At $200 a pop or $550 for a 3-pack is there any point in getting into these re: rentals, since I'd guess serious shooters will just buy their own?

I'd be interested to know if any sound folks here working in drama or docs are using Axient (or other Shure) these days? Where I live it is all Lectro, Zax and a few Wisy, with the solo-shooters using low-end Senn G4 or the Blutooth stuff. I like Shure, but what with diffs in mic connectors etc it's hard to change horses.

I "handled" genlock sync for many years: our earlier TC boxes like Ambient "greenies" and Denecke SBT all made trilevel sync as well as TC. That's what we put on the cameras, and, yes, we soundies were expected to do that. WHO supplies the sync boxes is always a matter for discussion--it seemed like the bigger (LA based for me) jobs got the sync boxes with the camera packages, the local (non LA) jobs expected me to to deal with it, so I did. A truly huge number of jobs were done this way, including multicam long-span recordings of concerts, events etc., successfully. The Dante issues are VERY related to all this now, in that it is increasingly unlikely that a video audio recordist will be able to get any analog feed from a large FOH sound system other than a 2-mix anymore. The only way to derive a full track-per-mic split is probably via getting on their Dante (or MADI) network. At that point the clock of the FOH system has to be questioned, since in many FOH setups the board looks at its own internal clock, only, and that board is now your ADC.

I can only speak for the jobs I do, but in nearly all cases in recent years there is no overall video TD as there was in the '90s and before, and sync seems to fall to the sound dept. Thus my rig becomes the master clock, having the most accurate clock+TC gen on the shoot, and my TC jams the TC boxes that are put on the cameras, like most sync sound double system shoots these days. Even on jobs where the "record span" is really long, like hours and hours between camera reloads with audio rolling through, Genlock isn't requested or done, and the TC boxes in use don't provide it. It seems that the cameras, looking at the external TC from the sync boxes are stable enough without external Trilevel sync being fed to them. The idea of running separate TC+Genlock lines in addition to a monitor video line (if video transmitters aren't being used, which they usually are anymore) is kind of a non-starter on my jobs anymore. I generally find that ACs are not very well-versed in multicam sync matters. Further complicating a concert shoot for sync is how the show sound system is being clocked, especially if video audio is required to take a Dante etc feed from their board, with that board becoming our ADC vs our own rig. Lotsa questions to ask at the scout!

So with that battery pack you had 12:30+4 hrs of runtime? Or 12:30 hrs total?

Popups demand having a pretty decent sized vehicle. I got the smallest I could find and then sold it--the van I had then was just too small to work around it. I had better luck with a silly-looking hunting blind tent--just big enough to contain a Jr Magliner and me, it folded up very flat. In theory it is production's problem to get shelter for all critical gear up re: weather. In practice I did not find this to be the case more than 25% of the time. If rain suddenly started PAs and grips would scramble to cover camera, village, HMU +wardrobe if they were close, big lights, crafty, spare lights and grip gear, and then they would watch us soundies struggle and get wet from under their tents.

RIP ET.

WAY cool....

That doesn't describe how I or many others work--I need whatever the ADC is to be clockable directly, not via Dante etc.

Not only no TC but most all of them have internal clocks much inferior to what we're used to, so they need to get WC from an external source, preferably one that is also making the TC for the whole system (and camera boxes). Most low budg digital mixers (incl. this one) do not have external WC inputs, which makes them kind of useless for movie sound no matter how great the rest of it is.

Same as DAWs--there is always the "vocabulary problem" on moving from one platform to another. LMK if you find one for $1k.

If you test drive one please report back. The form factor is very sexy.

I hated the sound of the dishes indoors, they made it all worse in every way. You have to tell the filmmakers that if you can't get a mic on the coach you aren't going to be able to record what he says a lot of the time. If you can be in close with a boom mic that's good for part of the time (a small part) but being close enough to hear him well (in speech vs yelling) would be much more distracting for everyone (and mess up the shots of other cameras) than getting a wire on him. Don't forget to freq coordinate with the venue/team/broadcasters etc!

Really nice little film--well done!

Yes, SW does kind of keep after you. But I had pretty good luck with them otherwise. Ditto VK--they were a little more hands-on about complex shipping issues and they are into real vintage gear in a big way if that interests you, w/o any pitching afterwards. SW is a general shop--I think they deal with a lot of amateur musicians, sells guitars etc.. VK is more of a pro audio dealer I'd say.

I would ask: how much fidelity do you really need in such a high noise environment? More than a regular Comtek can deliver? In my experience with this kind of thing the listeners were most concerned with accuracy of line readings and performance, they assumed that the recorded audio was good just like they assumed that the recorded picture was better than what the portable monitor was showing them? Any more, getting the audio directly to a camera attached to the rig is how I'd go, probably from a dropped bag. I'd want to transmit to myself in a chase car if there is time to rig all that (not a given), but getting audio to a camera solves a lot of issues in one go, esp re: monitoring, video assist etc..

That is a crackerjack little doc--really well done. Good on these folks--they did the old-time hang-with-the-subjects verite thing and got a great story.

I recall that the whole speed control apparatus on a III was pretty different from the later Nagras. To do resolved playback with my III I had to find a specific Kudelski resolver that only worked with the III, not later recorders, and was very different from the SLO-type resolvers. So my guess is that a IV-series accessory like this won't work with a III?

This is pretty exactly what I did--the shoe-caddy thing on a stand placed near the "client corral" on larger jobs. I found that in general the peeps were pretty good about placing their Comteks back in the pouches when we made a move, for which I was grateful. For years before I started doing this I would bitch about how careless the users of the Comteks were--this rig seemed to solve about 90% of the "left-behind" issues.

You could try an AAF export from Resolve. I've had mixed luck with these but worth a try. A great tool for helping with exports is AATranslator. https://www.aatranslator.com.au/

Very common in TV news conferences etc back in the day, and used as a boom mic on Fisher and Mole "perambulator" booms for TV shot on stages for many years.

This. It used to be that a "25" was a "25" no matter what film camera it was on, so you could develop a feel what what the "cone" of various lenses were. Not so true today. This and no rehearsals means that if you want to try and boom a dramatic scene you need someone with eyes on the picture guiding you.