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Jay Rose

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Everything posted by Jay Rose

  1. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0037627 or summary https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/05/08/2314250/how-a-half-inch-beetle-finds-fires-80-miles-away Fire-Chaser Beetles have evolved a way suss out and find a forest fire fifty miles away. (They love to eat the recently-burned trees.) In many cases, they can sense infrared radiation from the fire even if it's at a level below local thermal noise! They're doing to heat what our brains do when we spot visual or acoustic patterns below random noise...
  2. https://nyti.ms/2VjVWjA Researchers have sent a very tiny simulated atom back in time a fraction of a second, using a small public quantum computer. In other words, while you can't know both its velocity and the location at the same time, they've managed to compute how a wave function "got here" and reverse both to where it started. While complexity increases geometrically, a much larger future computer could conceivably scale this up. Yes, it was only a few qubits, on a tiny slice of IBM's smallest quantum computer. But consider how far binary computers have come in the past fifty years... [Please forgive the whimsical topic line. This is much more important than that.]
  3. So there I was, self-taught* high school hardware hacker, running my jury-rigged transmitter in the middle of the AM band when a local station shut off for the night. I'd walk around nearby blocks, listening to my taped self on a transistor radio. Nobody complained. Here's a guy who just wanted to light a bulb when someone is upstairs, and he immobilizes a whole neighborhood! Times were sure different then. - *Thanks, RCA Receiving Tube Manual.
  4. IANAA [not an accountant], but as I understand it, you can give an “04” EIN to your clients — I’ve done that for years — but also have to file a Schedule C with it. You can’t just stick the 04 number on your 1040... and Uncle gets upset if your clients file a 1099 with your 04 (a lot of them do) but nobody files a matching Return. On the the other hand, Sched C makes it easier to deduct legit business expenses. And report your SE contribution on non-withheld earnings. Bottom line: talk to a CPA. Which you should do anyway, if you’re a self-employed professional. It’ll save money in the long run, and possibly other major inconveniences.
  5. Not quite. The poor sound quality is due to physics. A dedicated and experienced professional understands the physics. They can control/compensate better than someone whose mic and eyeball is locked onto a camera, is concentrating on picture framing, and is trying to conduct interviews at the same time. As Jim points out in his excellent post, you can direct/interview while running the mic. Takes some experience and skill to do it well, but at least if your only technical requirement is mic position, you're free to take in the whole area visually and to maintain eye contact with the subject. I've directed a bunch of decent pieces* with a hand-held short gun (rather than a boom), and someone else shooting. They can move around and get good visuals, and I can be in a conversational position to conduct a more intimate interview (with less room effect and noise), just staying out of the shot. * - well, the sound and interviews were decent, and the DP was very good. The overall films certainly weren't at the Wiseman level. The alternative way to compensate for physics is a lav.
  6. BK, you and others may certainly post or link to it. But please use this URL: http://jayrose.com/funny/PAPManual_April2014.pdf It's in the humor directory of my website (where there's other stuff as well). Ihave no idea where the "hubspot.net" url came from.
  7. If it was Notre Dame, Pepé was probably crying.
  8. FWIW the AKG ck1 is also just a capsule. It needs a 451 or 460 powering module. While it's a small mic that can even run on 9v, it's a properly high-voltage externally polarized cap (clever little inverter/transformer/booster in the preamp). That line also includes omni, short gun, and long gun versions for the same 451. Their "BlueLine" is very similar but uses an electret capsule. Cheaper and a bit more self-noise, which might not matter for most v/o recording.
  9. Since Jim Feeley asked: 1) My all-time favorite is an RCA 77 in good condition. I did a side-by-side with a U67 once, and the difference was amazing. U67 sounded like a good mic. 77 sounded like the actor was talking from the CR's UREIs. (I then had a chance to do a 7.1 IMAX track where the v/o is interrupted by a wisecracking stagehand - multiple mannikins with cued spotlights - walking around between the screen and the top of the dome. Used a U87 for the vo; 77 for the stagehand. He actually sounded live, compared to the announcer sound we're all used to from a good large-diaphragm condenser.) Of course the 77 requires a good room and high-gain preamp. Worth the effort. 2) For most of the 70s and 80s I standardized on AKG CK1 in my multiple radio spot rooms. The rooms had very good acoustics, radio doesn't need the deep lows of a large diaphragm, ad agencies hate long setup times, and the mics could be about 5" from the actors' mouths without blocking their sightlines, so two or three could look at each other while performing. (IMHO, radio production used to be a lot more sophisticated than most of what's on the air now.) (And we were winning a lot of Clios, Andys, and other awards.) 3) When I needed some large diaphragm condensers, I had my dealer give me a bunch to try out. I spent an evening with another engineer/voice, taking turns in the booth and then listening. We had sort-of settled on an AudioTechnica as being the best sounding, and then Dan came out of the booth to talk with me in the CR... and I realized it didn't sound like him live. What we were hearing was the mic's 'flattering' (aka distortion), which would lock us into a sound and could become fatiguing after a few long sessions. We went with the AKG 414 instead. 4) I've never used a long gun in a booth (except when necessary as a second mic when matching some ADR). 5) But I have used short guns a lot in some situations like ad-hoc booths. If you put it in the right place for VO, inverse square will lower most of the room effects. Just don't try to use it at boom distances unless you're outdoors or in a very good space. I also love using a short gun with kids. I sit them in a chair, so they're 'spiked' to the right position, and then mic them with a short gun from about 9" away. I put a Stieff stuffed animal on the mic, being careful not to block the directional holes, and tell the kid to 'talk to the tiger'. Not only does it give them focus; it also guides them to the right projection level, and stops them from "performing" for the mic.
  10. A friend of mine is part of The Museum of Broadcast Technology, a large building in Rhode Island with two floors of audio and video equipment. He'll be at NAB with at least a couple of large pedestal cameras and who knows what else. It's in the main lobby of North Hall, right at the Taxi pickup area. Worth looking at. And if you do please say hi to Paul Beck, one of my best buds from college (he went into video; I stayed with audio). You might also see Tom Sprague or Peter Fasciano; they're also good people and Boston-based engineers. When I first walked into the museum, before it was open and the equipment was just sitting there, I told a friend "This is my whole career -- almost everything I'd ever worked with from the late 60s through mid 80s -- in one place!" The museum's website hasn't been updated lately, but they've posted a video sample tour of just one of the pieces in their collection. The sample is about one particular VTR... but they also have audio stuff. And here's a couple of snapshots from their pre-opening. They're rebuilding almost everything, and a lot of the gear now looks and acts brand-new.
  11. I tried a math question on a cat, asking "what's 21 divided by (3 minus 3)?" His eyes lit with an error message, and he froze. I had to reboot the puss.
  12. In honor of today's 4/1 holiday, NYTimes scanned its archives for weird stuff. This story appeared in its pages November 20, 1910 (link to collection: https://nyti.ms/2FNwvO8) --- A Dog That Talks. He’s a Setter and Demands Cakes in Good German, It Is Asserted. BERLIN, Nov. 19 [1910] — The scientific sensation of the hour in Germany is the talking dog Don, a dark-brown setter belonging to a royal gamekeeper named Ebers at Thiershutte, near Hamburg. Don promises to become as celebrated an attraction as the horse Clever Hans, which startled the zoological savants of Europe eight years ago with his alleged mathematical feats. Karl Hagenbeck, the world-famed animal dealer, has offered Don's master $2,500 for the privilege of exhibiting the dog in the Hagenbeck outdoor menagerie at Hamburg. The dog's vocabulary, it is said, already embraces six words. His alleged elocutionary power came to light early this week as the result of reports from the United States that Prof. Alexander Graham Bell had succeeded in teaching a terrier to speak. It was declared that Germany not only possessed a dog with similar gifts but a dog which had been talking for five years, in fact, ever since he was six months old. The story was first considered a joke, but Thiershütte all the week has been the Mecca of interested inquirers, who have come away convinced that Don is a genuine canine wonder. His callers included a number of newspaper men, who went to Thiershütte to interview the dog. The gamekeeper, Ebers, affirms that the dog began talking in 1905 without training of any kind. According to his owner, the animal sauntered up one day to the table where the family were eating, and, when his master asked, "You want something, don't you?" he stupefied the family by replying in a deep masculine tone, "Haben, haben." ("Want, want.") The tone was not a bark or growl, it is declared, but distinct speech, and increased in plainness from day to day as his master took more interest in the dog's newly discovered talent. Shortly afterward, the story goes, the dog learned to say "Hunger" when asked what he had. Then he was taught to say "Küchen," (cakes,) and finally "Ja" and "Nein." And it is added that he is now able to string several of these words together in sensible rotation and will say "Hunger, I want cakes," when an appropriate question is addressed to him. The New York Times correspondent has caused inquiries regarding Don to be made through trustworthy authorities at Hamburg. He is assured that the dog is an unqualified scientific marvel. Don's owner is overwhelmed with applications from circus and music-hall managers, who are outbidding one another for the privilege of exhibiting the dog.
  13. It might be helpful to discuss the operational differences between 'wireless' and 'lav'. They're not the same thing, and in the price range you're covering, a wired lav can give you a lot better sound than a wireless. If you can spend a few grand on a wireless rig (plus the mic), it'll probably be useful in most situations. But if you've only got a couple of hundred, and you can possibly run a cord, you'll get much better results spending the money for mic rather than mic-plus-cheap-radio. And if the talent is staying put, or ideally sitting down, there's usually no reason to use a cheap wireless other than convenience. It's a bad bargain.
  14. A few um, minor nits based on their video and the article. The science seems valid for what it does, based on a single wavelength, and I don't think the video is edited. But... 1. The material has to be calculated to reflect one specific frequency. They demo it with a sinewave (sounds like ~450Hz, tho that's by ear). What happens with an actual real-world sound with multiple changing frequencies? 2. What happens with a wave at the calculated frequency, but rich in harmonics? 3. How about impulse noises, more common in production, with sharp rise times that reflect a ton of frequencies momentarily? 4. Their demo has the filter at the end of a long pipe. It seems obvious they picked the length so this wave would be at a particular phase when it reaches the filter. 5. It's at the end of a long pipe. What happens if the sound - even of a single pitch - is being reflected and coming from multiple directions? 6. If they make a [magical, for now] flexible barrier with broadband reflection, what happens when the barrier flexes and catches different parts of the multifrequency wave? If they can figure out a way to make it broadband, it could be great for a rigid camera blimp. Or even if they tune the camera to specific frequencies. Of course it would have to let the air flow, and not interfere with the lens. But maybe... honestly, the physics required are way beyond me... I can't see how it could be done.
  15. I stopped going to NAB for clients, for mental health reasons. One thing was keeping me sane. Well worth the $15 per car entry fee. Even worth it if a group of you have to rent a car.
  16. I miss the forum for a couple of days, and things explode! Danny, I wrote the book Jim so kindly refers to. It's required reading at a lot of university film courses, but I basically wrote it as a how-to rather than a textbook. It could help you. I'll disclose a financial interest: I get a bit less than $3 for each copy sold. (Amazon, and then the publisher, get the rest.) There are sample chapters and other details at GreatSound.info. I also wrote a bunch of other stuff; follow the links from GreatSound to my main site. I did this to share what so many mentors have been kind enough to teach me, along with what I've gleaned in a long and happy career doing both national and indie projects. Read it. If you have reasonable and meaningful questions, I'd be glad to answer them. And pay attention to the folks on this board. We are, by and large, professionals secure in our positions who are more than willing to help a newbie... who's done the basics and knows what to ask. And don't be put off by the sharp answers. A lot of us are tired of people saying "you've got a cushy job here... how can I have it?" It's not cushy. It's a rewarding, artistic and technical craft that we work hard to do right.
  17. Get some Owens Corning 703 panels, 2" thick if you can, at a building supply. They're lightweight and can be hung with picture hooks, semi rigid so you can lean them against a wall, and can really soak up sound. They're also fiberglass... I haven't had a problem, but if you've got thin skin (or want to protect your actors and PAs) wrap them in a bedsheet or fire-rated cloth, depending on your budget and requirements. A few of those, with a couple of inches airspace, behind sound blankets hung from C stands, will tame a room.
  18. Reporter (and stock exchange paying for this PR) says this is inherently safer than a digital delay, because computers can be compromised. A straight digital delay can be built with no connection between data and control, and its control isolated from the web. So you'd need physical access to compromise it... the same way you could with a spool of fiber and a couple of splices. The fiber compromise would be easier to spot, that's all. When I got into this business, you used long spools of coax to time NTSC color TV camera signals so they'd all arrive at the switcher at the same time. Otherwise, dissolves would have weird color shifts. It was a breakthrough when electronic delay lines were added. Everything old is new again? Bigger question: why? What's the advantage to a company being listed on this exchange, rather than one of the big ones where program traders care about picoseconds? Is it just that the underlying company's valuation won't 'vibrate' quite as much in the second before it stabilizes? Does that outweigh the big traders' natural inclination to favor stocks where they can pick up a few pico's advantage?
  19. No supplier in our industry would ever ever make false claims. Hippo Skin is only for closing surgical incisions on a hippopotamus. Any other use is a violation of US Hippo health confidentiality law. Joe's Sticky Stuff, which is gosh-darned useful for all kinds of temporary sticking, is unfortunately only generated when Joe gets excited. (Tentacle Sync can be used only when shooting hentai.)
  20. I'm confused. I just copied and pasted the link into a browser that doesn't have my NYT login, and it brought up the whole article, no problem. There's a limit to how many articles non-subscribers can access per month... is that the issue? Try again in a few days. Or clear your browser's cookies... that'll probably reset the access counter. I'm reluctant to capture and post the text, because it'll lose the graphics and internal links. (And because our livelihood depends on people respecting copyright.)
  21. Definitely just the beginning, but a worthwhile launch that'll hopefully spark other developers. This initial implementation is very limited: according to my reading of their paper, the experimenters had to train the NN using the same original binaural recordings that they later collapsed to mono and processed to 'artificial' binaural. There's absolutely no reason to believe -- yet -- that it will translate to other mono recordings for which no spatial information exists... or even to other segments from the same acoustic (or the same session) for which the network hadn't been trained. It would be awesome to show that a 2.5D segment for which there was no specific training matched a binaural version of the same material. On the other hand, their demo does show it's possible to steer a signal based on seeing movement on one side of the screen and not the other. That's not quite "isolating sound sources"... but it's a start. There's a lot more training and testing necessary just to see if 2.5D will be usable outside these controlled experiments. But stay hopeful: if there's a commercial market, it could happen. -- My personal goal for NN in our business? Something I proposed about twenty years ago, when the necessary technology was where 2.5D is now. This would use speech recognition and prosody extraction from a noisy or echoey dialog recording, driving artificial speech trained from other recordings of the same actor. Truly automatic dialog replacement, no looping session required. We're getting there fairly quickly. The downside of my dream? Producers who read breathless news stories about the technique, and decide they don't need a production mixer at all.
  22. Is this a growing trend? I've noticed it recently, particularly on some of the mainstream narrative films among this year's screeners: There seems to be a casual attitude towards exterior BGs. Some scenes are filled, others in the same film are just dialog with an occasional music stab. At first I thought it was to reflect the characters' internal states... but no, they're conversing actively about relatively unimportant (or unemotional) stuff. Many of these scenes are not through-scored, so it isn't to let the music show through. (I learned last night that Cambridge has absolutely nothing moving other than the principals, while New York is stuffed with CU traffic and walla.) Anyone else picking up on this? Or are my ears getting too selective in my old age?
  23. i used to give my students a mantra on the first day of my postpro class at Berklee: "Everybody say after me, 'Never give the clients what they ask for'." They'd repeat, and then while they were laughing I'd interrupt: "That's only the first half. The rest is 'Always give the clients what they want!'" If a client knew how to tune a parametric or cut a song so it sounds like it was written that way, they'd do it themselves. But they do know that something about the timbre isn't working, and the song doesn't land in the right place. So you have to listen past what they're asking for, and figure out what they're really trying to accomplish. Then do it, and they'll walk away believing you're the only soundie who appreciates their genius.
  24. Update: Washington is shut down. The boom op has been replaced by a c-stand.
  25. New York Times posts a photo today, to illustrate an article on new threats of government shutdown... I get why the capitol, and the boom mic could certainly suggest "news"... but why a wind screen? It seems like there's nothing moving in Washington these days, no matter what your political leanings, and probably not even the air...
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