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I want to clean up the outside of an AKG 414 silver. It has a few light scuff marks and a light tarnish. I'd like to try a very gentle test with brasso first to see what happens. Any other recommendations for cleaning AKG silver finishes? thx John

OK, thanks for the insights, guys. I will look into those avenues of inquiry. Commpost

Can anyone recommend a library resource for REAL 1920's or before jazz recordings that might be licensed for a movie I am working on? (Not contemporary recordings -- i want low fidelity 78rpm sound.) thx Commpost

Cheap Chinese imports are destroying lives, businesses, and jobs in Europe and the US. If I'm gonna kill some jobs, I'd rather do it at Harbor Freight than at Lowe's. It does smell a bit rubbery at times....the smell of burning American jobs.... commpost

I detest ebay now because it takes so long to get paid on sales i make. Sure, the seller pays within a day or two, but paypal holds up the funds for weeks! It's awful. Unless you're making 25 sales a month, payment process has become constipated on that site. Sure takes all the fun out of selling. commpost

Hi ~ I've been having trouble getting a certain high-profile project I had worked on listed on my IMDB page. I have repeatedly tried to get my credit recognized on my IMDB listing, but IMDB keeps telling me that the credit list is "full", even though my name is listed in the end roll credits as, I believe, a matte camera operator. I made almost 50K working on this particular production, though it was a while ago....1991. I have tried different combinations of occupations, such as "special effects" "fx camera" and what have you; IMDB seems to reject them and never gets it listed. Is there an email or a way to contact IMDB directly to get this credit fixed? Anybody else had problems of this nature? thanks commpost

I recently had my old AKG 452 (which I bought new 35 years ago) serviced by a reputable dealer, but after sitting in the case for a month or two, the performance seems worse than ever. The output is low, and there is significant white noise in the output. Is the problem in the preamp or in the CK1 capsule? Can it be repaired? thx Commpost

This is a great thread. I really appreciate the equipment recommendations! Cart picture monitoring is something I want for mine. The camera dept have their video village; I have come to call my cart the "sound town". You are so right -- a sound cart can attract a crowd of it's own if properly equipped. What has bugged me almost more than anything is when the video cart gets moved around, and I have to chase it. I suppose on some shoots you wanna be near the video cart, on others you don't. It's a political decision. For the moment, I am done chasing the video village all over the place. Even when I'm near it, I usually can't see the picture because it's got blinders and people crowd around it anyway. ~ Commpost

But it would be nutzoid to mix the two mics together, no? This would introduce phase problems, and would probably sound weird and unnatural. But having a choice of levels or perspectives is the only sensible purpose of this. ~ Commpost

I was having dinner with a european producer last night and he was talking about a 2-mic proximity ADR technique? I have never heard of such a thing. Been looping dialogue for years, and sometimes of course the actor may distance himself from the mic for a proximity effect, but 2 spaced mics on a sound stage for a single actor? Can anyone give me some details on this, or was this guy talking through his hat? thx Commpost

I use the countryman B6's constantly with viper clips and lectro R400a's -- superb equipment! Commpost

A classic slate reminds on-the-set visitors that we are making a movie and adds to the glamour of the profession. ;o) Just kidding. On the two-Red shoot I'm working now, first thing i do is sync the cameras to my 788t by jamming the lockboxes. I change their rechargeable NIMH batteries every morning. The crew also slates the shot with conventional clappers as a redundancy measure. Spending the money on a timecode slate would be silly, since the dailies always sync up. ~Commpost

In the manual, it does not say how to format the primary INHDD. Am I wrong? commpost

OK, so the orange lights after recording are nothing to worry about, as it is normal for disk activity to continue for up to 30 secs after recording activity has taken place. That seems to be what is happening. Still I am having some minor glitchy problems w the 788t, generally associated with connecting to my notebook PC for xfer to thumb drive. 1) Sometimes the 788t will not shut off. I press the power button and it says "closing files" and just hangs there for minutes. The only way to turn off (i.e. reboot) at that point is to unplug AC power and also pull the attached battery. 2) Last night as shooting was going on, the 788t would not play back any files. This was rather disturbing. If I hit playback it would prompt me to check the HDD for a list of takes. Still, the takes I had recorded were there and I was able to dump the files to thumb drive. Both drive lights were green during the no-playback incident. 3) IN recent days, when i attach the external notebook computer to 788t via USB cable, the 788t will not recognize it and not come online. I have to keep plugging in the cable repeatedly, reboot either the 788t or the notebook, or both, in order to get the 788t to come online so I can copy files to thumb drive for the data wrangler. 4) I am making a point of ejecting the 788t before removing the cable, but that is also a problematic procedure, and doesn't always work perfectly. Again, I have just completed my 3rd week of shooting so maybe it is time to reformat the drive -- or pull the CF card, as some have suggested. I had pulled another CF card over a week ago and it seemed to clear up some problems at that time. The brand of CF card is the Transcend 32gb, which i bought from Coffey. thanks John

Mostly it was the CF but sometimes it was both the INHDD and the CF. I was not aware there was an "orange" light value, however i wll keep an eye on this.

I've been doing a shoot for several weeks and the new 788t has been pretty much bulletproof. However, recently my disk error lights in the ready and waiting status have been showing green/red or even red/red, as I am recording to both INHDD and CF card. The CF card has been the most troublesome, as while it is not full, I swapped out the first one I had used.. At one point last night during the shoot both INHDD and CF status lights were showing red (disk error). This however seemed to have no detrimental impact on my takes as i simply dumped the files to a thumb drive as usual during breaks. Later on in the evening, both of the lights turned green. What is going on here? Is this normal? Are there any precautions I can take to run a scan and fix on any of my drives? If both lights are red, can I still record to them? Wish the 788t manual had an index. thx Commpost

This is an excellent thread, Tom. I have really enjoyed it. I'm done trying to make friends with the gaffers and grips on the shoot I'm working on now. They all seem to be on speed. .. highly focused, but cold and unfriendly assholes. So now I have already broken Ben Franklin's rule: "i will speak ill of no man and speak all the good i know of everybody..." commpost

Hello ~ I am having getting the 788t to shut off. When I power down, it says "powering down" "closing media" and hangs forever and won't shut off. The only thing mounted on it is the internal harddrive and a CF flash card. All my data in the unit is backed up. Please recommend a fix. Commpost

I've been shooting for two more days and haven't had any more trouble. I must say in the morning there is tons of free spectrum, but it gets busier as the day goes on. Also shooting in RIchmond HIll area as we are there is no traffic noise and aircraft noise maybe twice a day, of minimal amplitude. The crew consists equally of people from LA, Munich, and locally. And the pay is healthy. They tell me there's a "special ops" base within a couple miles and you can sometimes hear the helicopters way off in the distance, but generally, as i say, this remote location is great from the standpoint of low noise. Thanks for all the advice. Yeah, I sometimes get a good distance away from the set so using XLRs to get the receivers close to the shot can be vital. Man the oysters down here are great. Commpost

I'm mixing a movie with 2 red epics in a medium sized town in the Southeast. I am currently using 3 Senn G3 lav transmitters. My third unit was crapping out on me...the reason? The lav spectrum is almost completely filled! The 3 lavs are fighting over whatever remaining open bands of spectrum there are! In the later afternoon I did a fresh spectrum scan, and there were maybe 3 channels open on all 12 frequency spectra. The effect is, I can get the Senn's transmit and receive to say they are in sync -- I get the checkmark -- but the then RF led does not light up, so I got no signal. The crew is using motorola radios (which are not mine), which as i understand it use 12 fixed bands. But I think the real culprit might be a nearby military base. I had planned to set up camera hops and maybe comtek headphone feeds, but that may now not be a good idea. My lavs need any open band they can find. Later in the week I'm going to try some older Lectro digital transmitters when I get the proper adapters for my B6's. Any other ideas? thx Commpost

I am on the input page now. Yeah, in order to get asterisks next to G and H i rotate the data wheel to the track and press it in to activate the asterisk....thanks! commpost

I've just been shooting my first movie with a 788t for the last week and a half, and things have been going extremely well. However, I have noticed that whenever I activated chs 7+8 for recording (which are in effect 9+10 since L and R tracks are the first on the list) the track ready lights were not solid and the tracks did not record. I know that the 8 tks is the limits for recording to two drives at once. I was recording at 48K and I was recording to only one media, the internal harddrive. So I should be able to record 12 tks (i.e. more than 8 tks) . Is there something I missed? thx commpost

The 72 transmitters i have seen appear small. I assume that one 72 transmitter would generally be matched to a 72 receiver, no multiple receivers for one transmitter. Unless the crystals were somehow at the same frequency. The transmitter input must be mic level, correct? So I'd have to turn the output gain way down. Then on the receive end, I simply want to plug stereo headphones into the jack. If it picks up a mono signal, that's fine.

What is the lowest-priced transmitter i could get away with? commpost