Wandering Ear

Thanks. I was browsing the specs and faq’s but didn’t see this article. In my experience the upgrade is not as bulletproof as they claim. My MiniCMIT is the D series and it “sweats out” especially when outside all day in the rain.

Does anyone have any more information on the moisture update? I see the feature line “immune to moisture”, but no other information. What has changed? Can we get this mod applied to existing CMIt’s / MiniCMIt’s? Has anyone tested this? I.e. shooting outdoors in the cold rain then going indoors for a vo line? This alone would make it worth swapping my regular cmit’s out for kmit’s

Ask me again after the winter the setup is still new to me so I haven’t stressed it much on cloudy days yet. I intentionally went for more capacity than i anticipated needing, both for future needs, and because i live in the NW and wanted it to keep up despite the weather.

I doubt I will ever actually run my sound cart off of this, but I could! I recently added 400 Watts of solar to my van camp / remote work setup. I wanted it portable enough that I am not always tied to the van, so I built it around my sound cart LifePo4 batteries. Shown here with a 75Ah. AC, Solar Charger, and Inverter all live in a briefcase for travel, and the panel folds up into a manageable pack. I could run my cart on 1/4 to 1/2 that, but it would still be a pretty fragile and unwieldy setup. I think if I ever had the need I would set this up as a charging station and just swap batteries into the cart to keep it mobile. A 100 Watt panel is small enough to mount on a cart. Roughly 3' x 2'. If I lived in the desert I might consider it, but it still feels fragile.

Interesting. I’m curios to do some research on how it works under the hood and try it out. I currently don’t subscribe to the Adobe tools, so I’m less familiar with them.

Does this exist? Can you share any references or software that can do this? Would be a pretty cool software. The generative voice models i am most familiar with are text to speech, and synthesize a new waveform that represents the text input. These can be trained with specific voices, allowing the synthetic adr. The ML based noise reduction algorithms like dialog isolate extract the voice from the background noise using essentially pattern recognition. One more thing i think that could be a benefit of this technology is synthetic adr that matches the production dialog better than some of the adr we hear today

Personally I don’t think our craft is going away. While I’m sure plenty of the corporate communications work will be replaced, and there may be less work in some sectors of the industry, I can’t see a world where we stop recording actors original performances. There is a very large gap between creating a realistic sounding voice, and being able to control inflection, craft emotion, or “preform”. Current generative models can’t do this. You can train different “styles” to pull from different training data, but the generative output is still trying to recreate the input under the hood. So a crappy zoom recording won’t magically make a studio caliber ADR (garbage in, garbage out). But a good on set recording could easily allow replacing a troubled take or location without the extra expense and time of ADR. To me this is the real value of this tech, and also why i think we’ll still have a job to do. Like we see with self driving cars, getting the first 80% of functionality is very doable. Getting the next 10% is insanely hard, and getting the last 10% may not even be possible. That’s just my take on it.

Interesting experiment. Thanks for posting the results. What RF power were you set at?

Congratulations Jeff! An incredible community you have built here. My only request is to keep going! Or at the very least make sure the community continues with the wise leadership you have provided if you ever tire of running it. Thank you

You’ll never miss the induced noise when you boom cable crosses an AC line, at least in the US.

You may be getting a bit misled by the generative ai hype these days. Izotope introduced Machine Learning algorithms (aka A.I.) in RX 6 (2017?) in the form of dialogue isolate and derustle. Maybe other modules too, I can’t remember. They are constantly getting better, and newer utilities are being introduced regularly, but they are still not magic. More like incremental improvements. That being said, you can do a ton more with difficult audio today than you could 10 years ago. One space i think we are only starting to see adoption in, and a lot of room for growth, is the ability to replace dialog without adr. Generative algorithms are able to recreate voices with less and less training data. 15 min of speech often can be enough to synthesize a voice with high accuracy. That means we may start seeing post be able to replace troubled production audio without having to bring an actor in for adr, and the software can match the tone of the performance. The SAG strikes and deal touched on this capability, so i will stay focused on the technical, and skip the ethical debate for now. this ability also pre dates the last 1.5 years, but has become part of the public discussion, and many more tools are publicly available. I have done some consulting with companies in this space and its pretty cool. Like everything else it will become another tool in the toolbelt allowing post to choose when to clean up difficult audio, when to auto replace pieces, and when to re-preform (adr).

I have been exclusively using a kortwich bag with only a waist belt for years and i can’t imagine putting on a harness again. This belt has 4x 2” clips on it. The nice thing about the clips is i can keep the belt at the right adjustment and just clip / unclip. I leave 1 side attached to the bag and swing it around me so it’s only 2 clips. Using carabiners i was always annoyed having to loosen and tighten the straps before/after attaching. I also felt like they let the bag move around too much and it wasn’t as stable.

For narrative I keep a Schoeps DMS rig in a Cinella Pianissimo. Cmc4 for the center, ccm8 side, ccm4 for the rear, recorded on a mixpre6. It sounds killer and is really flexible. I mostly end up using it for pfx work, cars etc. I try to identify the vehicles that play a character in the script, or have a unique sound that will be hard to design from stock libraries, and then coordinate with production to get half an hour with a driver to get as much as i can. Most of the time i don’t bother trying to get ambience, it’s almost impossible to get far enough away to get a clean bed when recording 360. That being said I’ve done a couple shows in the woods and have been able to run the mic out on a tripod and drop it in between setups and get some really good stuff. A recent project we spent 5 weeks in the forest filming and i was really happy with some of the ambience i got. It comes out on Netflix later this year, I’m really excited to hear how it came together.

I have done a lot of DMS surround recording and often really like the results. It’s especially suited for interior ambience and close micing like moving trains etc. I recently got the chance to do a steam locomotive which was really fun! For nature ambiences i usually find coincident techniques to be too close together. The whole surround image ends up small and doesn’t feel very immersive. Wider spaced techniques have more feeling imo. A double ORTF or similar in a single rig creates a nice large envelope without having a hole in the center. You can add a spot mic for the center for locations that have a distinct feature like a stream in the foreground. Also great for passby’s like motor sports. I’ve also been really happy with spaced omni’s for forest recordings. Even 5 DPA 4060 can get a great, wide, and immersive recording. And it makes wind pro easy since each mic can have its own zeplin / fur. For monitoring i listen to pairs. F stereo, R stereo, spot check. Doing a lot of ambisonics work i played with doing surround mix downs with hrtf’s to try and replicate the surround monitoring and it never worked for me. Listened to the pairs translated the best and helped me identify any issues that came up. One thing I’ve found is the left right relationship is very important, but the front back relationship is much less so. So i see no problem having different mics on the surrounds. Of course your experience could end up very different than mine, and the environment you are in could change everything.

I have a bunch of < $20 Phillips that i really like, but i can’t find them anymore. The new version has a thin metal band instead of plastic and hair gets caught in it too much. They sound great for their price. I bought a bunch of the Hamilton Buhl, but had a lot of them break so i felt they were too fragile. I’ve been slowly replacing them with Halter Tech.