Noah Timan

Absolutely not. I voiced a similar complaint over at RAMPS recently. I wish the manufacturers in question could experience a load-in to the camera truck at the end of a shoot day to see why this is so vital to our needs. Our need must seem trivial from the perspective of working in an office (where there is already a computer set up) but trying to burn a disc on a computer on a truck that's being bounced and jostled about by ten to fifteen people moving a lot of heavy equipment, carts, etc around, during which time the PAs are anxiously waiting to collect your tracks so they can get the dailies run together and your crew is frustrated because your attention is diverted from helping them with the wrap process, is a very different scenario. If there's a computer failure or a write-once media verification failure, the problem only becomes more compounded as you need then to start all over, at which point the teamsters (in expensive overtime) are ready to go and just waiting on you. The need in this scenario to take something out of the machine and hand it to someone at camera wrap becomes critical to avoid all of these obstacles. It's the wrong time to be messing around with laptops or cart computers. To be fair, they have promised that they are working on it. But like yourself, I could not help feel disappointment when I see new machines being issued when the old ones (OR new ones) still cannot deliver on their original promises. In your case, since it's a backup situation and not a primary media situation, could you not simply dump everything to an external drive during downtime (if there is any) on the following shoot day? Or does production want a copy of the backup as well at the end of every workday?

I didn't really get this either at first when hearing so much mention of it in discussions, but Billy Sarokin reminded me on RAMPS that there are times when the two cameras are covering completely different action/dialogue simultaneously and the mix for each camera's shot is not the same. In this case, sometimes you need a seperate mix for each shot, and both of those should go to dailies. Hence the "two track dailies mix". Another reason to work hard to make a dedicated mix is that post is not necessarily prepared nor budgeted with enough time to remix all of the production tracks from scratch with your iso feeds.  In an ideal world, the post team could take advantage of all of the tools and the ability to automate and go back and tweak and fix a mix, and sit around massaging the dialogue mix to perfection before even going to the dubbing stage. In the real world, these folks are often under the same kind of ridiculous time pressure that we are under on set (or worse). They are dealing with producers who have either completely underbudgeted the sound edit, are running out of money by that late stage of the filmmaking process, have an inflexible deadline to deliver a finished product and meet a pre-agreed upon release date, or any combination of the above. Though the potential they possess for control (dealing with mixing elements of a recording, as opposed to a live occurrence, where one can stop, go back, fix things, etc) is superior to ours, there is often no resource of time to realize this potential. So, aside of your very wise comments about a mix that doesn't work on set potentially not working in post either, we also can help out our brothers and sisters in post by getting it right the first time. It may also help the overall movie and create more time for creative sound design, rather than dialogue repair. And if that's not possible, or we screw it up and miss a cue or whatever, THEN that technology is in place for them to repair our mistakes or inabilities on set by delivering the isos.

It's my experience (from conversations with dialog editors and supes) that it's not really necessary to persuade them -- they're already on your team. Most sound editors are not going to take the time out of their busy schedule to load, pick through, reassemble, and remix numerous split tracks when your mix sounds great in the first place. It's when the mix is problematic (or, if the schedule allows for the luxury, simply could be improved upon) that these tracks become necessary, or if no mix exists at all. Just as we would rather use one mic than nine, so they would rather deal with one track than nine. The only other good and common instance of utilizing splits I can think of (when the mix is fine) is to reduce background noise -- often when in an extremely noisy location (next to the highway, on 5th Avenue, etc) and working with lav tracks, A/Bing the split lav tracks results in better S/N than using a live mix where both mics were basically left open, thereby doubling the BG noise.

I think it has always had the ability to read and process CD-Rs as well. We had a long discussion about this on RAMPS about a year ago and Howy from Zaxcom explained the technical advantages of DVD-RAM over write-once optical media exceptionally well. http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.movies.production.sound/browse_frm/thread/1f8d24c63b61e123/a46c4be5d5c5a1ca?q=dvd-ram+howy+dvd-r+blocks&rnum=1#a46c4be5d5c5a1ca (Scroll down to message 120 in the thread)

One of those things (besides the weather) us New Yorkers will always be jealous of you Angelenos for. In New York, the movie coppers will only lock up traffic if the street is in the frame. They are not allowed to hold traffic for sound only.