Noah Timan

Thanks Matthias! This would almost be perfect except (I should have specified) I'm looking for one that can support 4 mics (or in this case, antennas). Looking ideally for something with a 2-3 ft span.

Hi Phil, This is an old post, but I'm curious how this stand ended up working out for you? Also curious about the length of the crossbar. If anyone else can recommend a crossbar with studs that has a width of two feet or longer, I'd be appreciative. My old antenna mast (a K&M multi-section stereo bar and an old Larry Provost pole) is going and I need to replace it. Thanks!

Thanks, guys, for the info. Wonder how this will play out. Billy, I heard a rumor a while back that the TV-6 transmitter on the Citi building was owned by a Russian media station that went out of business in 2009. Don't know if this is true or not, but I did notice that we at least got maybe 100 feet of range on TV-6 whereas we got zero feet a few years ago at Silvercup. It certainly wasn't completely clear, though, so take all this with a grain of salt.

Thanks, Richard, for your input and help! I didn't realize the "FOH" cart is part of the follow cart in Mark's setup. I just finished a difficult pilot here in NYC where we shot in over 50 locations in 18 days. My main cart, while aesthetically pleasing and stocked with many goodies, is very heavy and awkward. We got around the potential landmines by using different rigs where the "mothership" just wasn't practical -- I have a stripped-down "bare bones" cart, carrying only essentials, which we used for difficult-access locations (many stairs, off-roading, etc), and on very simple setups sometimes we just used a bag rig -- but I wonder if there's a more efficient method. Complicating matters further was that this particular director doesn't like to have a lot of gak close to set. With just my own cart and me it was usually okay, but shooting in NY in the springtime means a lot of rain, and when we needed to use a tent this became an issue on a couple of occasions. One might be tempted to blame this on the oddities of this particular director, but he's not the only one I've seen with this need. I was thinking an FOH cart would solve a few problems -- it would negate the need for multiple setups, it would make my main rig smaller, shorter, and easier to handle, and when a lot of gak near set is an issue, it'd be easier to get away with -- a small, unmanned unassuming FOH cart that only needed to be tarped instead of tented could more easily left close to the set than a bigger rig with a tent and a human. Even a full follow cart (eg Magliner) I feel might be too much, but the small size of an SKB-case style FOH cart (as you picture in your post) might be easier. It also would free me up from having to muscle in close to set amongst village, camera staging, etc, and let me park closer to loadin-loadouts and away from the riffraff without having to worry about reception issues. Running antennas is always an option, but I am always wary of the lossy nature of this, especially over the long distances NY locations sometimes require (300+ feet sometimes). Plus, dealing with that much heavy-duty RF cable can be a bear. Cat-5 is a lot lighter and easier to work with. The main drawback seems to be the need to push three carts around. If anyone is doing it this way, your input is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hi all, I know the Aviom setup pioneered by Mark Ulano (utilizing the Aviom system and employing a small cart to set with receivers and transmitters that interfaces via Aviom with a more distant mixing cart) has been discussed here before, and some of you are using it. Question for the users: how prohibitive has it been to have to carry a third cart around? I like the idea of this system, but my usual way of working is that the boom operator moves quickly to the next set unencumbered to watch rehearsals while the utility and I move the carts. If the operator also has to haul a cart, it seems like we might miss a few rehearsals, and having to fire-drill three carts amongst two people also sounds like a PITA (especially over what they like to call "rolling cart company moves" in NYC). Any input to the realities of this setup are appreciated, thanks!

Hi all, Question to my fellow NYC mixers out there: I was shooting in Queensbridge Park in LIC the week before last and something was sitting very heavily on the 216 MHz block. We tried about ten frequencies on the Comtek and none of them were good. We eventually found a workable frequency on TV ch. 6 but even the range on that was severely limited to normal behavior. Anyone have any idea what's sitting on 216 over there? Thanks!

I just saw this thread now for the first time, so I'm a little late to the game, but I'll share my own experience: On features, episodics, pilots, and other shows where I'm the first unit mixer, it's customary for the camera/sound or sound/video truck to come and get my stuff, and pay me and my utility a prep day and a wrap day. Sometimes they try to play the "swing truck" game, but it's often possible to talk them out of that. On commercials I am expected to bring my own gear. In previous years commercial production offices were always good for a "cinematic immunity" parking tag for the vehicle, but that was it. Now that Bloomberg's office has gotten extremely strict about city parking for film shoots, I don't even know if this is still on offer (haven't done a commercial for a while). As Philip notes, the commercials DO have trucks doing runs for camera and G&E, but doing pickup runs for sound is not customary and not particularly welcome. Most of the guys and gals who strictly do commercials for a living (video brothers and sisters as well) have their own Sprinter vans or other vehicles such as you have just bought. On episodics where I'm filling in for the first unit mixer or coming on as the second unit or tandem unit mixer, it's a bit of a grey area. The most common scenario here is that they WILL send a truck to pick up the gear, but they are seldom budgeted for any prep or wrap days and usually loath to pay for those. Occasionally I've succeeded, but I've also blown this one before and lost a client as a result. I didn't have anything going on one winter a few years back, and a friend who was mixing an episodic had production hire me to do second unit. It seemed on that show that there was going to be a fair amount of second unit work here and there, and they'd lost their usual second unit guy to a feature. I called the office repeatedly to ask them how to handle prep/wrap days but the UPM never returned my calls. Finally, after the first bit was over and I still couldn't get anyone on the phone to address the question, I shrugged and put in for one prep/wrap day on my timecard, especially since the wrap day (per transpo) had to occur five hours after a 4 AM wrap. The third on first unit called to book me again and then, a few days later, mysteriously called to cancel. I asked the first unit mixer what had happened and he told me the conversation went like this: Line Producer: "I saw you put Noah on for the 2U. You can't hire Noah again. He billed for a prep day. Hire X instead." First Unit Mixer: "We can't hire X again. X is incompetent. Last time we hired X, they had to loop every single line of dialogue X recorded." Line Producer: "I don't care! He didn't charge for any prep days! Hire X!" I don't know if they carried on with X or with someone else for the rest of that season, and I doubt everyone is quite like that line producer, but hopefully that can be a cautionary tale. Anyway, hope that helps. I used to have fantasies of having my own dedicated vehicle. I had a colleague many years ago who used to store and drive all his gear in a custom outfitted milk truck. It always seemed like a great situation -- permanent staging, no truck loading and unloading, no haggling with the camera department over truck space, no waiting on the camera department to load and unload at the end of the day. Ultimately, I thought about it and the cons were enough to not go for it: having to haggle with teamsters and production about getting an extra driver, having the truck parked miles away from set every time, having to pay for parking during downtime, having to find a secure enough location for parking not to worry about theft, potentially having to drive a milk truck full of sound gear home after a fifteen hour day with a nine hour turnaround, maintaining the vehicle, etc etc. These days I pretty much roll with the status quo, having realized that there just isn't a good, easy, cost-effective way in this city (at least that I can conceive of).

I'm with Jeff. DVD-RAM was a failed format for the consumer market that either isn't being made any more or won't be soon, depending upon whom you ask. It's got lots of vulnerabilities, including the kinds of "it'll play on this machine but not that one" issues discussed in this thread. More efficient solutions have been around for years, and they've been ignored. Basically, it's DAT all over again. Will we ever learn?

Yeah, but a lot of states' incentives don't end up paying off that way. The problem is that a lot of films are scripted (purposefully or not) without specifying location, or whose location details aren't specific enough to fool anybody. For example, I remember working on a film called "Beautiful Ohio" here in Brooklyn a few years back, and some friends worked this fall on a film set entirely in Minnesota but shot entirely on Long Island. In 2009 I got called to Toronto to do a T.V. pilot called "U.S. Attorney" (!), set entirely in New York City. These are but a few of many, many examples I'm sure we could all chime in with. (I'm thinking of Jackie Chan's "Rumble in the Bronx" with the Cascade mountains of Vancouver in the backdrop of the, er, "Bronx", myself). And this is nothing new -- L.A. and its suburbs doubled for many places around the country and globe in the decades before the incentives. I guess that begs the age-old question: if a film shoots in a state for the incentive but pretends to be another state, does it make a sound? In New York's case, it doesn't hurt so much, because in a place like New York City, there's always enough New York City-centric films that the tax incentive does end up stimulating tourism long-term (having, of course, the benefit of New York City having a large tourist draw in the first place). But do people go to Albequerque, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Stamford Connecticut, Edmonton Alberta, or Shreveport Louisiana because they were inspired to do so after seeing those places in films? That I can't speak to.

Well, and the irony is that most of the productions that we work on (that qualify for said incentives, or not) also end up losing money. Wait. Are you saying the Mississippi now runs through China?

Dan, I think you might have missed David's point, which isn't that Angelenos know how to make films better than anyone else. I think he's pointing to the notion that the resources that are available there -- built up over 80+ years of being the filmmaking center of the country -- are unparalleled anywhere else in their depth (including here in New York, where many departments have to spend quite a pretty penny having costumes, props, gak, and other things shipped in by the truckload from the other coast). I love New Orleans, love working in New Orleans, and think very highly of its talented filmmakers and craftspeople, some of whom I am proud to call my good friends. But I think it's foolish to suggest that the film-centric resources available in NOLA (or NY, or anywhere else in the US) equal those in LA, in terms of shops, tools, facilities, depth of available crew people, history in the business, etc etc. Maybe they will catch up if filmmaking stays in one (or several) places for decades, but for right now that's not really the case. At the end of the day, it's a business, and movies and TV shows will get made regardless of the quality of the resources a given city or state might have. I'm sure (whether we realized it or not) we've all seen wonderful movies made in tax-incentive states away from LA, and there's no doubt we've all seen god-awful movies that were made in Hollywood. But from a craftsperson's perspective, I can certainly sympathize with the theoretical glint in David's eye about the potential loss of the resources that have sprung up from the industry being centralized in one place for so long.

As others have noted here, I believe there's not really a one-size-fits-all answer -- weather, environmental location noise, insert car layouts, setup and knockdown time allowances, politics, and the requirements of the recording can all vary wildly from job to job and even situation to situation. Both a small, portable cab rig and throwing the whole cart on can have their pluses and minuses, and it really depends on the particulars of how complicated the recording is, on what kind of insert car rig, in what kind of environment, and on what kind of day the driving shots are going to be a part of to figure out what's going to be easiest/work out most efficiently, in my opinion.

I also appreciate anyone's reports here if they find a successful way to change this. I'm in the same boat: three of my four "known for" projects are one TV show where I did a few tandem units, and two movies where I came in to do new scenes for films that had already wrapped principal months before (with another mixer at the helm). I can appreciate IMDB's point that they have a "professional" (pay service) website, but the reality is that most people use the regular (free) website for professional purposes all the same. In addition to the importance of not stealing anyone else's thunder, it'd also be nice if we could be "known for" things we actually mixed the whole of (or at least the bulk of). Maybe they could charge us to be able to change it?

It was 2001 or 2002, so perhaps we have found our smoking gun...

I tried getting around by city bus on my first trip there, but found wait times long, travel slow, and a lot of walking from bus stops to some destinations. Of course, that was some years ago. Sounds like it's gotten better -- apologies.

If it isn't important for you to stay right on the strip, you get a lot more bang for your buck. There's cheap-but-clean options within a five mile radius, and some nicer options for more $ outside as well. Of course you need a car, but I usually get one anyway, as the rental cars in Vegas are cheap and the parking is free (as opposed to the expensive cabs and inefficient public trans). The only time I stayed on the Strip (I think), I stayed in the Venetian -- it was very nice, but not cheap.

One of our Local 52 union brothers, a grip, was killed earlier this year in a car crash after a 15-hour Monday. He was the son of one of our boom operators here in New York and had two young children.

A coffee or fruit tea is compulsory if you want to sit and watch the screen savers. :-D

Hi Ethan, Seems like a lot of folks have given you pretty good info in this thread. It sounds like you’re going in a pretty good direction, too – the Rastorder carts have gotten singularly positive praise around here, and Rob has always been excellent people. I too looked into one of his carts a few years back when I was considering a secondary, more mobile and lighter cart than my main one. Like you, costs with shipping and the rest for what would be an only occasionally-used cart ended up being an unfortunate dealbreaker for me, but I’d be awfully surprised if you weren’t pleased if you didn’t end up going that route, and I’m quite sure you’d end up with a really quality product with good support behind it. I would certainly caution against going with any kind of Magliner cart if your interest is to go up and down stairs and in and out of taxis. The Magliners are awesome carts, but they’re just too heavy. For a scenario when your gear travels on a truck with a liftgate, they make perfect sense. For a fold-it-up-and-stick-it-in-the-trunk scenario, I think you’ll find it’s just not the right thing. It’s not impossible, it’s just really unwieldy. It also ends up defying the point, perhaps -- you are not really going to sell a “professional appearance” if you’re fumbling with large heavy cart pieces out of a taxi trunk when you arrive, and then struggling to assemble it all together on the sidewalk. I don’t know if they’re still made, but there was a great cart a while back, called the “KartMaster” I think. It’s a very sturdy horizontal design, but it folds up really tiny (much, much smaller than a Magliner) and is a lot easier to manage. The downside is that the shelves don’t have lips, which made me worry about things sliding off when rolling from place to place, but there are others who have lipless-shelved carts who seem to do fine in that regard, so maybe it was my own worry only. I saw someone selling a used one earlier this year but for the life of me I can’t remember whom. Another option, simple as though it may be, is a 10 or 12 space SKB or Gator case with some sliding shelves, sitting on top of a Rock’n’Roller cart. I went down this road a couple years ago to build a lighter, simpler cart that would work better for certain New York-centric situations, where bringing a big heavy cart was not very efficient. It’s served me well and is a lot easier to carry than my main cart – unlike that one, I can carry it myself if need be, and it works much better for commercials, 2nd units, and other quick jobs where there isn’t always a teamster and a liftgate. Philip P. brings up a great point that it becomes important to think about what’s really necessary for a job. It is true that there are some jobs (most notably higher-budget commercials) where how many blinking lights ends up being more important to the producers than the quality and capability of the instruments. But in many other scenarios, as has been discussed on this forum many times before, the producers really just couldn’t care what you have or how it looks, unless it's so completely amazing or so terribly awful (or doesn't work). I’ve had plenty of producers (some of whom should know better) be much more excited about the LEDs on a 7-series recorder in a bag than they would be from a Sonosax SX-ST mixer on a cart. As Philip notes, what they’re really going to appreciate is that you’re ready to go and capable to do the job at hand. If you can do that and show off a lot of shiny gear in the process, fine and even more kudos. However, if the showing off of the shiny gear slows you down, makes your process less efficient -- or worse, the hassle of dealing with it makes your demeanor worse, or elevate your demands on what you need in order to handle the higher or heavier gear load, I find you sometimes end up shooting yourself in the foot, and ruining opportunities rather than creating them. For whatever it’s worth, I also recommend the storage solution. It’s a tradeoff – I understand your attraction to having everything in your possession and ready to go at the drop of a hat. But there’s plenty of places probably closer to you than the one on the West Side Highway. I know for sure there’s a Manhattan Mini Storage in the East Village, near Anthology Film Archives (2nd and 2nd?) and probably other companies around too, maybe even closer. And in a 600 square foot apartment, I think you’ll find it’s a relief not to have a section of a room taken up by an ever-expanding package of gear. I’d venture a guess that you’d also probably score some brownie points with your girl (unless she’s a fellow soundo :-D).

Guess that's why they call it a windjammer!

Jesse's blog mentioned above notes that he got one from Peter at Gotham. www.gothamsound.com

Not me. Of course, every situation is slightly different and there is rarely a one-size-fits-all answer for which mic is best to use in X scenario. Location acoustics, types of noise to combat, and what kind of voice you'll be recording will all play a part. When the voice either starts failing to punch through the background noise, or otherwise fails to sound rich.

Various Rycote contraptions, depending upon the intensity of the wind. I also have a couple of the cage type that Jeff mentioned. The former. I seldom use it outside unless I'm in a rural environment of some sort.

Anyone want to make the first wager on how long a glass-fronted iPad will survive while it lives as a slate in the care of the camera department?

Thanks, everyone, for your responses! I'll take a look at FileMaker.