Wandering Ear

I know this is older, but I kind of love this can. Now I want to taste it.

You're absolutely right. I wrote my thought without remembering that all the ta5's on my Zaxcom recorders are the same way. It's true there isn't really a standard there and the way I learned to think about signal flow as it relates to connectors is kind of arbitrary anyway.

I bought a pair of the mini circuit splitters from lectro and combined them into a small 2 way splitter that worked wonderfully for me for years. I sometimes use it to split in front of my micplexer if I need to add a 5th receiver. If I only needed 2 receivers this would be my go to.

I think the Sonosax accessory looks great. I find the choice to use male mini xlrs a bit odd. It's just counter to how I've always thought about audio signal flow. It's always made sense to do power that way to prevent accidental shorts, but not sure why they decided to flip it for audio. General availability of the connectors maybe??? Either way I'm really looking forward to working with this camera. I know at least one owner op who has ordered this cam and since it can do 120fps at 4k they are planning on getting rid of their RED cameras which makes me happy

Hahaha. I would love to find a roll of the fabric. I'm sure it's readily available, but it has to be the right density. I have found this air filter material let's almost no water through even after prolonged exposure. When I've used the rainman in the past I found the water soaked through quite quickly and didn't provide enough water protection for me. I also find my self shooting in all day rain, not just from water trucks, so I keep a full crate in my van with multiple filter that I can change out as needed. I also keep a dry bag to cover the boom in between takes.

I just bought one of the SGS BT100 chargers. It's way smaller than I expected and I like the design. In the short time I've had it I'd say it's great, and fits nicely by the SGS 6 bay NP50 charger I use daily. But wow! The LED's they chose are crazy bright. I covered mine with a piece of photo black and can still see them. I keep meaning to reach out and see if they can mod it to dim the LED's. I tried to find info on charging rates of this and the Motorola, but never found any reliable info so went ahead and bought what was available.

When doing rain work I always mount my lavs with the head facing down, and if I can use some silicone tape of similar on the back edge of the mount to try and keep as much water away from the mic head as possible. For booms, the Cinella Kelly is very effective at stopping the noise from rain hitting the zeplin. You will need a layer inside to stop the actual water. The best fabric I've found for this is actually a green/gray cut to size air filter from home Depot. I'll try to dig up a photo of one of my boom rigs with this. Looks ugly, but sounds great. For rain falling, have as much open cell foam, preferably with large openings and 1-2" thick. Use the Kelly as a reference for this, but have a roll or two on the truck. For shot that don't see the top of the umbrella, you can lay a layer of this directly on it, or lay it on a flag or other rain cover that's above talent to get rid of the "unnatural" sound of rain on plastic. The same foam can be used on the ground around talent to deaden the splashing when it's out of frame. This is a good time to remember that qualifying sound is very relative, meaning you don't have to get a pristine dialog track, you just have to get the signal to noise ratio high enough that post can smooth and mask the background noise into something pleasant. This usually means tackling the water immediately around talent, but letting the rest of it fall. As others have said, try and get sfx to rent / run as much hose as possible. Those water trucks can get really loud once they start pumping! One thing that has happened to me before is seeing the mic once the actor gets wet. When the wardrobe is fresh it's all hidden, but when the shirt gets clingy and soaked, everything underneath starts showing through. Work with wardrobe in prep to try and get sweaters (thick wool sweaters!!) Or something to help. If it has to be a t-shirt, try routing the wire over the shoulder and using seams and the collar to mount the mic upside down without it becoming visible. Lastly, most tapes won't stick after things are wet, so try your best to get a good tack when it's dry.

Sometimes hearing yourself in the comms can eliminate the "plugged ear" effect, especially when only wearing 1 ear.

I'm considering purchasing either the Sound Guys Solutions 4 bay charger, or the Motorola 6 bay charger for BT100 batteries. I've been calling the usual suspects, but so far haven't been able to find anyone who can say if there is any difference in charging rates between the 2. Is anyone here using either / both of these? What I want to know most is if there is a difference in charging times? Any other thoughts or opinions are welcome too.

I wish someone would put their engineering into creating active noise cancellation for the drone. An array of mics and speakers that play out of phase noise to cancel out the sound of the propellers from below. Someday ...... They're pretty vague about their tech, but it looks like a combination of beam forming and active noise processing. You have to give them some credit though, the mic is really far away from the speaker, and they are still very intelligible. I would love to hear the raw recording next to the processed.

Ah. That makes more sense. I wonder if they have different companding modes for different transmitters. All I see in the brochure is "Analog RF". I'll be curious to hear how people like them. Having another option on the market is great.

Just took a look at the haltertech microsone video. Is the idea that the talent wears an IFB receiver that feeds a bluetooth transmitter the talent also has to wear? With a lav tx, that's 3 body packs on talent. At that point an induction earwig might work just as well with only having to wear the IFB receiver. These may sound better though. I'm still generally happy with my Phonak Invisity's, I kind of dread the day when one or two breaks and I'm forced to change systems since the invisity' aren't available or repairable.

I asked Zaxcom once about the possibility of changing the X line to Lemo. I was told internally the X uses the same board as the Flex and there wasn't enough room to put a lemo on it.

I have powered my edgerouter x from my bds before, so you should be fine. Hey Doug. The throughput I'm referring to (if i had checked my spelling) is the switch capacity, not the line rate. While each port runs at 1Gbps, the switch internally can only handle so many packets per second, and not all switches stack up. In a common unicast setup this will probably never become an issue. In larger multicast workflows a lot more data has to be handled by the switch without bottlenecks, even though each line can only handle 1Gbps. I don't mean to say the Netgear won't work or perform well. I own a netgear GS105e also, and have used it without issues in the past. I also own 3 varieties of the ubiquit, and a cisco SGxxx (can't remember which model). I can't find a pps rate for the netgear that I own right now, and the edgerouter x is lower than the edgerouter lite, so it's possible my memory is off. When I bought these several years ago I remember having to research the throughput because I ran into issues in my studio network, and increasing the internal switching capacity fixed my speed / bandwidth issues, even though all the networks were 1Gbps throughout. I settled on the ubiquiti as a good balance between switch capacity and low cost. I also find them a lot more configurable than the netgears. For example on one of my edgerouters I run a wireguard server for remote access. +1 to running VLANs.

I use 2 ubiquiti edgerouter x (primary/secondary) and love them. They are affordable, small, power efficient, and work great with Dante. They have higher throughout than their Netgear etc cousins, and are really flexible. One thing to consider with a switched network is ip assignments. Static ip's work if you don't change your setup, but if you're like me and constantly changing which devices your using on each job, them a dhcp server is a most. The ubiquiti can be programmed as a switch (not router) that also had a dhcp server. That's a nice bonus for a self contained system like your cart system would be, and can be easily turned off to plug into another network. I also use an edgerouter 10x when I need more ports.