axel

Advice from Austria: Stroh Rum 80% will enhance your tea in Wintertime, but terrribly stiffen your lav cables throughout all seasons. I'd never buy a used DPA from over here ;-)

For some actors I use them upside down, so they poke out to the downside of the button.The above pic by Henri Rapp shows very good the principle of a B6 mount (although it might be a 6060), imagine it 180 deg reverse, to avoid the nose blow. Thanks for the pic!

+1 for all experienced posters above. There is no one-4-all recipe, neither a few tried options which together will cover almost any situation. It is many variables that determine your mounting options, just to name a few here: talent's body shape costume fabrics and colors special hiding possiblities (button holes, necktie, scarf, hat/cap...) a trained eye and ear for fabrics and costume layers: how muffeld will a certain mounting option sound if one ore even two specific layers of fabric will cover the mike; which fabric layers will move and rub on each other in the shot and how will that sound; will a thin layer suffice to cover the wind noise or does it require Tx mounting options and antenna placement requirements talent movement and body positions required by the scene experience with movement patterns of your particular actor body orientation voice level former experience with talent's voice wind (important) mouth or nose blow from particular talent a very good knowledge of your lav mikes and mounting accessories a good assortment of sticky tapes, tools and gadgets and many more... Best is to get started by a close view on talent's wardrobe, making sure that what you see now is exactly what will be there in the moment of shooting. Try to know as many of the parameters above, especially about movements and talking positions. Your personal experience resulting in a small arsenal of miking techinques covering your standard situations now comes into play and your trained eye, your experience and your good communication with the talent will get you to a decision within some seconds. Now if you are a novice to the business, don't hesitate to start working on this arsenal of your personal miking techniques, make sure you always listen to what you previously miked. Confronted with problems, look for a chance to find out WHY it does not work! Depending on the talent you might have a few tries to improve your mount. Try a different solution, as long as your talent is comfortable with your actions. Miking people is a very complex task. No one can claim 100% success, not even regarding only "acceptable" results. 80% "OK mounts" are good for an experienced guy or girls. For a beginner 20% "OK" mounts will be rather normal. Be prepared for the learning curve, it will not always be steep, but gradually improve towards the 80% or even better.

lots of uses for PDR and SPDR, some not so conventional: Equipped with a DPA 4098 gooseneck hypercardioid and velcroed to an Alexa Mini, the PDR acts as a preamp/camera mic (Cam has line level input only, but can be fed from the PDR; the gooseneck streches out to the end of the lens. Easy TC jamming for external recording as a backup, ACs could handle it for some remote second unit guide track recording. SPDR acts as a recorder for low profile binaural stereo recordings (nowadays with DPA 6060's attached to the in-ear monitors, with moderate wind an overcover on the mic works fine). I am working on custom made earmuffs for even better wind protection SPDR also grabs high quality stereo recordings from an RSM191, attached to the 191 matrix box which provides power to the mic. SPDR with a proper minijack to 2xTA5 cable records audio from any analogue consumer source with headphones output. Quick/easy/low profile, also for private use SPDR acts as a timecoded stereo backup recorder for your cart or bag system. Caution: as the PDR/SPDR inputs are all unbalanced, there might be grounding issues when the SPDR is sharing external DC powering with other gear Caution: When using the line output of PDR or SPDR as a loop through into other gear, make sure you don't use the dual track -18dB split level option. Or if you must, check the proper wiring of your cables and run a test. See a photo with SPDR and VT500 mics atttached to my UE-4 inear monitors for ambience recording

it works well with commonly available shrink tube, small diameters. Pull off the cap from the capsule first ;-). And btw, if such a mic lasts for 15 years, chapeau! I love the B6 because of their mounting options in plain sight. Sure their specs are inferior to COS11 and DPA, but often the way you can mount the mic has far more impact on sound than self noise or frequency response. Lately I find myself using the DPA 6060s a lot, but even those are more than double size compared to the B6 and their visual impact does not allow for under the shirt button or plain sight.

yes, you are right. but you can also use the 4 wire cup for any 2 wire hirose connection.

to keep you updated: We did the shoot and the client company confirmed the FS7 accepts 25 fps TC in "locked" 50 fps mode. In this mode it also records sound on camera. There is also a variable high speed mode, where sound recording and TC input cannot be used. I asked about post workflow and they go with Premiere pro. It was days 19-21 of a docu series, they had already edited several episodes using sound from external recorders with the very same setup. Only for interviews they switched to 25 fps. I had a Tiny Lockit attached to cam and also fed them a scratch track via a G3 hop. Client was happy.

they have been shooting with that setup at several other occasions with different sound people every time. The camera guy says TC has worked with 50 fps but is not sure about the settings. It is unclear how they handled the post workflow or if the footage has been synced up at all so far. It is a sports doc where they want to be able to use a 50 fps slo-mo any time. Meanwhile I found, that Tentacle claims it's sync software can handle 50 fps. So maybe I'll use a Lanc logger and send the second TC output to audio channel 2 on the FS7. Slating will not be an option I guess. Anyway, I'd like to know how others did the job with the same requirements. I guess I'm not the first one here.

I have a shoot coming up by the end of the week, same setting, PAL land. How did you manage to get it done? Cameraman says they've been using a TC syncbox and a guidetrack to cam so far, but does not remember which TC settings they were using. I doubt, an FS7 will accept TC @50 fps at all.

Bubblebees, Rycote Furry Balls or DPA Windjammers work the same. For real high wind conditions they won't suffice. If you used the 4060s for lav miking, you'd then use those furries plus one layer of clothing fabric as an additional wind breaker, which will work OK, but alter the sound to more muffling. But for ambience you need it clear and airy. Wind protection works better, if the wind breaker is moved further away from the microphone capsules. So it will be a good idea to fit the mics inside your basket then (rycote, rode...) and try to lose the furries and the dead cat around as much as possible. The best wind protection is to find a space where the wind is blocked by big objects close by, like car doors, walls and such

I 've worked with the YPAs when the old original DPA adaptors were still delivering very hot in gain on the Lectros. DPA changed their configuration some years ago, since then their adapters work smoothly. YPA has the right config, but the threading on the microdot side of my adapters was poorly made and with actors movements they easily lost connection. Maybe this has been fixed in the meantime, but when the new DPA 3056 came out I switched back to the originals and have not have any failure since then.

hey, Jule, a bit late, but the older Cantar X1 and X2 treat MS the same way as X3 and mini. Record discrete MS Iso's and have your stereo width on a sliding fader for the mix. Their used street price is about € 4.000,- or less. If you are satisfied with 6 Iso channels those are a beautiful option, best build quality, best preamps, best limiters, best energy efficiency.

There is a choice of 7 options you can dedicate the 2 shortcut buttons to. There is indeed an option where you can unite the icons of all 10 channels on the touchscreen along with a "solo" and a "mute" button. Tap on one channel icon and tap on "solo" to solo it. To go to the next solo you have to unselect "solo" for the first one, then tap on another channel and hit "solo" again. It needs the same amount of tapping/pressing like using the fader knobs to activate the channel setup screen whith its solo icon, only that the icons on the "solo" shortcut screen are smaller. maybe I also should mention that on the MixPre10 you can gang up to four inputs with one fader. Might be useful for ambisonics recording. and the TC section is 100% professional grade. There are just a "BNC in" and a "BNC out" plug instead of the usual Lemo5.

Pretty amazing machine, I got myself a unit from the dealer for testing: my first impression is that I see a cost effective machine and an impressive feature set, easy to operate; but 3 major drawbacks: - the hirose power plug: This is a ridiculous design. maybe some third party manufacturer (Hawkwoods??) will come up with a workaround in the future? To install this recorder in a bag, you have to add like minimum 2,5 cm / 1 inch of safety space on the bottom of the bag to protect the Hirose plug of your power cable from breaking. Even a right angle plug will not improve the situation! This will make the recorder poke out from the top of most small bags. The MixPrev 10 is slim, but rather high. Added the 2,5 cm of height, it reaches the dimensions of the SD688 and needs a huge bag. - solo monitoring is too complicated: A short press on a channel fader opens a channel setup screen, but does not lead to a HP solo monitoring of this channel. Instead after having triggered the channel setup screen you then have to find and tap on a „solo“ surface on the tiny touch screen and tap on it again when your desire for soloing is expired. please do that in the rain or with gloves on or when using a 4 m boom with a shotgun mike on the other end, having to monitor 6 wired folks… how will you find out which of the lavs is rustling? In normal life I am stepping through the potential candidates by soloing each of them. - Input gain adjustment: I was also expecting that on pressing a fader for solo mode, the same fader now could be used to adjust the input gain on that channel in solo mode. Now I’ve learned, that those faders are behaving like analog pots with a stop on either side (which is great for mixing) and I understand that they cannot be used to also set the input gain because of their actual absolute value (their position for input gain will differ from the position for the channel gain). The input gain can be adjusted only on the touchscreen (tiny arrows, one clumsy tap for a 1 dB increment) or with the HP volume encoder, which is a small hardware knob on the right side of the machine, squeezed in alongside the headphone plug, prevented from finger-access by the strap of most bags. So no one-hand solos on the fly doing doc/ENG work and no gain adjustments either. To be fair, I’ve been impressed by the simplicity of the system arquitecture, by the number of full size XLR Inputs and last but not least by the sound. It does not sound cheap, also the limiters seem to be pretty usable. They can be turned on or off only globally, not per track. The fader knobs are small, but really useable, easy to find the right one blind. The touchscreen (I don’t like them in general) behaves responsive and is well thought, anything else but the gain increments is rather easily operated with the finger tips. Metadata handling with the touchscreen/HP volume knob is a bit clumsy, but with a cellphone/wingman combo it is OK for documentary needs. If you have an iPad at hand it gets really comfortable and comprehensive, so no hard feelings using this machine on a cart! I found the Wingman app 100% responsive, far better than the old CL-Wifi I knew from my 788T-days. Routing: You can route any input to any of the outputs pre or post fader, which is nice. I did not find a way to cross route the inputs to tracks, so input 1 stays on track 1, and so on. I appreciate this approach for its simplicity. Power: The MixPre 10 needed around 7,5 - 8 W in a decent setup with 2 phantom powered mics active. As a comparison: in the same setup my old Sonosax SX-R4 sips only 3 W. I fed both from a 14,4 V audioroot battery, each of them with 2 Phantom mics plugged. Apart of the Hirose plug there is an AA adapter, which accepts 8 AA batts. For 8 Watts, 8 Lithium AAs should carry you over 4 hours, 8 black eneloops should do for 3 hs. You also could use L-type batteries, the bigger ones might be good also as a distance keeper for the Hirose plug.