rcoronado

Hey guys, I'm being contracted out to record some amusement park rides on Nov 3rd, and its a pretty big opportunity for me. We're going to have the run of the park before it opens for business, the park engineers will be there the day before to setup and safety test, and the day of to run the rides and facilitate. The park big wigs will be there watching it all happen. Screamers will be employed on the rides for the day as well. Recordists will include myself and an A2. Rides covered will include wood and metal rollercoasters, drop rides, and anything else we deem worthy. There will be a location scout on Thursday the 29th where we eval and lock down the specific rides that will be wired and recorded. End goal is to develop a complete sfx library for the park to use in promotional materials. Shots used in the promos include mounted onboards of the rides with two shots of riders screaming/having fun, overheads, bys, etc. ---- My plan for the scout is to bring a PCM M10 and ride a couple of the ones we're pretty sure that we are going to cover, and check for mount points and wind drafting positions. Initially, I think that my mount points and strategies will be similar to what I did when I recorded a set of Porsches on a track earlier this year. This broadly means that I'll put an MS rig in the front car in a wind-drafted position to capture the screamers, and then mount a pair of MKH50s on the "rear bumper" area aimed at the track for friction. I'll also add some contact mics for the floor because I can. On the ground I plan on having two rigs: one is a pair of schoeps with omni caps mounted in a single blimp as I did here The second rig would be a pair of MKH60s a few feet apart aimed about 110 degrees out to capture any long straightaways, and maybe a Line audio CM3 in the middle to cover that gap. This rig was excellent in my porsche recordings, but I had the MS rig in the middle of it in that setup which helped with the coverage. --- I'm also going to attempt to run wireless headphones down from the coaster while its in flight using a lectro rig, but I don't know if it will throw well enough, or what the RF situation on the rides themselves will be, so I won't make any promises to anyone about that. Thoughts?

that boom buddy looks cool. that may be the answer for me.

Hey guys, I get called out to do 2 person sit down spokes/interview stuff enough that I'm looking for a more robust solution to mount 2 booms overhead in a locked off 1 or 2 camera setup. Ideally I'd do this all from a single mount (like a C stand with an arm) but still have enough flexibility in the rig that I can position the mics appropriately without much hassle. These things are often in people's houses or in a corporate office somewhere, so portability and ease of setup is a factor as well. Any special tricks or pieces of kit that I should be aware of when designing a solution for this? Thanks!

I've tried and tried but never had any luck with zynaptic or isotopes de-reverbs.

this is pretty interesting. I've never been much of a believer in supplements, but I'm always interested in the research that goes into that lost golden city that is hearing damage repair.

for just trimming heads and tails, quicktime 7 pro does the job as well.

grph. I'll fix that link on our site. thanks for taking a listen!

Hey guys, So we've been sitting on an interview with Rich Van Dyke on our little podcast for a while way too long, and its finally been properly packaged and released to the wild. Its about an hour of great on-set stories, so go check it out when you get a moment. http://tonebenderspodcast.com/038-rich-van-dyke/

Hey guys, So we've been sitting on an interview with Rich Van Dyke on our little podcast for a while way too long, and its finally been properly packaged and released to the wild. Its about an hour of great on-set stories, so go check it out when you get a moment. http://tonebenderspodcast.com/038-rich-van-dyke/

this seems like it needs both its own thread and a youtube video illustrating the technique.

not exactly my call there sir. I work with the situations I'm given. so the video is up and of course they took what I had given them and made it worse in post. I'm embarrassed to post the link here. Usually I end up getting to do post on these types of projects, but in this instance it never came back to me and just went out into the wild all unruly. tracks turned up in the avid and distorted, recordings of the player's lav unused, levels all over the place, etc. ah well...

Well as I said they got the job done, and for that I'm grateful. I don't think I meant to say that I didn't like the G3, just that they weren't my preferred piece of gear for that job on that day. Really my only complaint was the lack of volume control for the producer, which I see solved in the posts above. I'll certainly look into picking up a pair of headphones with integrated volume control for when I inevitably run into this in the future.

that's a really nice souding setup. I have the hardest time getting cameras to wear headphones. They just don't even want to know that it exists.

yep, comtek is what I normally use there. As stated above, all of my comteks were rented out that day, so I had to improvise.

Hey good people, Just thought I'd give a quick postmortem to a shoot I had this past sunday because this kind of thing is therapeutic for me. For background I'm a studio guy about 80% of the time, so when I go out into the field its not my primary area of expertise. I'd consider myself an intermediate production sound person. Had a shoot yesterday where the idea was to present some season ticket holders for a local sports franchise with a package of swag and a surprise visit from one of the team's star players. There were three locations, and in each spot I was going to end up pre-set in and around the lucky fan when the player arrived. Cameras were DSLRs, and were doing simple clap-slating for sync before walking in the door. No ref audio or timecode to cameras. Breaking frame was not going to be an issue, as they wanted the look to be a little raw. My basic rig was a 788t in a petrol bag and harness (because that's what I had available to me - I would have chosen a 633 if I weren't out on rental), two channels of lectro wireless, an MKH60 in a rycote blimp on a boom, and a sennheiser g3 to use as a feed for producer ears (since all of my comteks were out on rental as well). that g3 rig was not ideal for several reasons, but it ended up working well enough to get the job done. At our first location I got ahold of the player and wired him with the first channel of lectro and a COS-11. He was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, with his glasses dangling from his collar. He was fairly accommodating and I did my best with regards to bedside manner - explaining everything that I was about to do and being very careful. I used a vampire clip to attach the mic to the inside of his t-shirt collar, and wen to my rig to take a listen while the producer talked with him. After a short while I started hearing a cable crackle - not as though his shirt was rubbing, but as though a connection was in a fragile state and was coming into and losing contact. I had tested both wireless rigs before the shoot so I was surprised to hear this particular problem. I tried reattaching the mic to his body pack, but that didn't solve the issue. I swapped to the other channel on the body pack and still heard the problem. finally I swapped the COS-11 out to the other mic I had with me - a countryman B3, and that solved it. The B3 was actually much easier to place - I just gaffer taped it to the inside of his collar, and I had no other issues with his lav for the remainder of the shoot. Within 60 seconds of the problem being solved our first fan approached the location. I strapped on the bag, lifted the boom, and we rolled for about 10 minutes as he presented the gift bag and took selfies with a VERY excited fan. I relied on the lav to cover the player and left the boom position focused on the fan the majority of the time. With that location covered, I left the mic on the player but switched off his body pack while we got in the cars and headed out to the second location. My producer also kept his headphone rig during transit. In the second and third locations we I fed my boom over the G3 to the producer's headphones. The producer and the player were stationed outside while I was inside with the camera crew and a ticket sales rep. When the sales rep mentioned to the fan the name of the star player, the producer outside would hear this as his cue to knock on the door and surprise the fan with the player himself. In one location that G3 had to throw downstairs and outside, but that worked out fine. At the end of the third location I collected the lav and headphone rigs from the player and producer, loaded up, and headed back to the studio. In the studio I dumped the files to a backed up hard drive, labeled them a little more descriptively, and emailed the editor a link. ----- In the end everything went very well. I brought two channels of wireless as coverage and I'm glad that I did. The G3 unit worked well enough to get the job done, but I don't like the fact that the producer doesn't have easy access to volume levels and that the G3 throws noise if I switch off the transmitter. It was a hot and physical day, but in the end we get to be out there doing what we love, so there's that. Any thoughts on setup or technique are welcome. thanks for taking the time to read!

beautiful recording. Here's what I got when I google image searched "Andy Williams behind the scenes"

the wikipedia page spells out everything in the book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow its enough to have ME interested anyway. thanks for the headsup.

i mean, simple start, stop pause transport controls for recorders would be useful on the wrist. I was sprinting all over the damn racetrack doing my porsche record for echo collective. If you've got multiple recorders up and distributed throughout a set, that could be super handy. maybe some sort of wireless xmitter display that shows freq, signal strength and battery power would be cool. how about a mic mounted camera that a boom op could glance up at and see a live feed from? or for that matter how about a feed from the main cams? what if you had a distributed metronome app keeping live performers on a "click" using the haptic taps? how about cueing actors using haptic taps? you could even just strap the watch around the ankle if you didn't want to see it in the shot. how about cueing EVERYTHING using taps? no more directors shouting "action!" ok, now i'm getting nutty.

the thing LOOKs like it has the potential to house a killer app, but I don't know what that app would be at the moment.

I use these flip belts when I'm running - http://www.amazon.com/Level-Terrain-FBV-FlipBelt-Violet/dp/B00JF9EEXQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429808647&sr=8-1&keywords=flipbelt it basically takes my phone and keys and glues them in place to my waist. I imagine it would work great for a transmitter as well.

aw, bummer! I was looking forward to hearing the story.

Hey Alan, Overall your plan looks pretty good to me. the interesting thing about miking fast moving vehicles is that if you're drafted correctly, you only have to worry about crosswinds strong enough to break the wind "barrier" created by the car itself. Once your car gets up above 30 or 40 mph, you're pretty much sitting in a bubble with regards to wind hitting the mic. This means that minimal wind protection is required to the mounted onboards. when I recorded my motorcycle back in the day I only used one layer of towel on the SDCs, and literally two layers of Tshirt on the PZM, secured with gaffer tape. pics and recordings here. side note - how do you like those AKG mics? the fig 8 option they have is the cheapest real fig 8 out on the market these days.

We had a vehicle recording rountable with Rob Nokes, Watson Wu and Max Lachmann a while back. Lots of great info in there: http://tonebenderspodcast.com/025-vehicle-recording-roundtable/ I also just came off a record of a set of Porsche 911 GT3s on the track. It was a pretty extreme experience. You're going to want to cover these elements: The air intake, the transmission, the exhaust In most cars the air intake is under the hood. The air intake is where you get that energetic upper mid revving sound. Lavs or boundary mics under the hood work well in those spots. Be aware that there IS air moving around under the hood, so place mics accordingly. You can often zip tie mics to existing structures in the car here. Transmission is typically under the car and often sounds like a big clank. Smallish SDCs work well there. Just be sure to attach them securely to the chassis using bungy cords and use towels to do any mechanical isolation between the mics and the chassis. Drafting is also key here. Place the mic in such a way that the part you're attaching it to blocks the wind. You'll have to compromise placement to do this, but its the only way to capture it. Exhaust is the most important and the trickiest. Exhaust notes tend to be low to midrangey, and sound best when recorded from multiple perspectives, so cover this with 2-4 mics if possible. I've found PZMs on the bumper to work well, in addition to SDCs gaffer taped securely to the bumper. MKH50 is great here. Expect to spend about an hour placing and mounting the onboard mics. You're not going to have many options for getting the exhaust note with invisible mics. This is because all of the sound is shooting out behind the moving car. That means you have to have a mic in a spot where the car blocks the wind but not the sound. Rear bumper is pretty much the only option in most cases. Booming from the follow car won't work due to wind.

The tonality of the preamps was difficult to judge in the trafficky environment. I do agree that the beachtec rig didn't do anything awful to the frequency range at first listen. that said, the beachtek into the camera was distorting on peaks pretty consistently, especially on the mics in the latter parts of the test. You were already past your available headroom there. Also, that kind of distortion sounds UGLY. The 552 had room to spare in the headroom arena, and has pretty sounding limiters on it that can keep stuff from breaking into crud. I love the MKH50. One of my favorite mics. sounds so big. Was surprised to not really hear a difference between it and the MKH60.

I wish he would have recorded a little bit of speech through it. cool vid though!