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Abe Dolinger

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Everything posted by Abe Dolinger

  1. Hi David, I think your reading of the situation is probably correct, and that negotiations failed on the side of the producers - they sound unreasonable. I don't understand your statement - "If the producers had, in fact, been willing to pay union wages, there would have been no need to offer multiples of normal rates to recruit a crew" - doesn't one imply the other? They may have started off as crooks, but if they felt the pressure and called local IATSE members to work, weren't they on the way to becoming legitimate customers? That's the part of this story that bugs me. It's not something I think is really worth arguing over. It's somewhat naive of me to hope that each situation can have the best possible outcome. At the end of the day I think it's a net positive. Even though this film went south, it will encourage other producers (and crews) to do the right thing. I do think that a culture of always assuming one side is right is dangerous, though, and leads to polarization and ultimately things falling apart. That's sort of the caveat I'm hoping to voice here.
  2. The comment thread on that article is fascinating. I have to say I see both sides of the issue. If you needed an answer quickly I'd tell you that I'd vote for unions every time, and that workers need more protections than they get. Though I haven't been there myself, the other side is that film/TV is by nature somewhat of a lottery. You can't expect a return on all - or even many - of your investments. It's worst in independent film; the ratio of profit to loss in indie film is enough to scare away all but the most optimistic (or self-aggrandizing) of players. Therefore, as an investor, the obvious path is to minimize your hard costs. Should that extend beyond moral or legal bounds? Of course not. But that's the direction of the pressure these people feel. I myself would never make such a risky investment, so the question of how well to pay the crew wouldn't come up. And people who treat crews badly are among humanity's dirt. All the same, without these foolhardy, often egotistical, ill-fated director/producers I wouldn't have learned my craft. It was, in essence, a paid apprenticeship. The stakes were low, in retrospect - I was able to maintain connections by having a professional attitude without true professional ability. I made mistakes I'm not proud of on those films. And on the larger stage, it didn't matter, because the crew knew that the filmmakers were crazy, and that a good film was never in the cards. But on a personal level, I think that there were days I didn't deserve the pittance I was making, because those were the days I really learned - from my mistakes. Then there's the way the local union handled this incident. Somewhat buried in the article is that the filmmakers, bereft of their crew, were willing to hire union crew in order to continue production. The union encouraged their members to accept positions and then not to appear for work. This is not acceptable to me. If the producers were willing to hire union crew, that is where the feud should have ended. The real triumph would have been that the film was completed, with the original crew, under union rules. Maybe that was impossible, but when I read that the producers were willing to pay "up to five times" the rate for union crew and been snubbed, I feel that both sides have fucked up. The point is to get things done in a way that benefits both parties. This producer loses his entire investment, and the union is deprived of paying work. Who wins there? I will close by saying that I will always be grateful for the effect the film unions have had on non-union work. In my 10 years as a sound mixer I've never wanted to join the union (due to the nature of my work and personality), but I've always benefited from the union standards on meals, overtime, turnaround, and pay scale. I owe you union members a good part of my bread and butter and I'm very thankful. May you live long and prosper.
  3. From what you've said, it sounds like something is up with the antenna, like something in that chain has an intermittent short. The unit doesn't flicker or lose power, right? Does it always happen after you've been using the tx for a while? My guess (key word) is that something is expanding a little when heated, or something gets slightly knocked, and that shorts out the antenna. I'd swap it out if you can, it sounds like too much for the average user to troubleshoot on their own.
  4. Yep, there are definitely advantages to the 216 system. Just saying the Lectros have an edge where RFI is concerned.
  5. After trying a couple of things to keep Zaxnet out of my 216s and failing, I switched to Lectro IFBs and have been very happy. I don't use a ton of them so the expense wasn't mind-blowing. The decrease in general RF issues, compared to Comteks, is huge (at least for me, in NYC). There was a thread where some people had more success than I did keeping stray Zaxnet etc. out. I think you're ahead of where I was in regards to using base stations vs. the M216, but maybe there's a tip in there that would help.
  6. Yes, you're correct, and sorry if I phrased it to the contrary. My point is that the idea of dividing time into seconds is a (recent-ish) human thing, not that time itself is a human idea. Also, for those curious: the original atomic reaction was clocked using "ephemeris time", in this case measuring the movement of the moon, against the decay of a cesium isotope. And even then, there was some variation in the results, so we use an average as our standard. Time's tough to measure.
  7. Right, compared to the slate and mixer, which were probably jammed together and both had good clocks? In that case, you could say that those two agreed pretty well on the length of a second, and the Red was taking a different approach. The Red (if I recall) jams from external TC at the beginning of a take. Did you have a sync box on it? If you did, rolling should have brought the clocks closer together. If there's no sync box, the camera would content itself with its own time, which would be more obviously different from your clocks the longer you observed the two together. I have to note that you wouldn't have said the camera was "drifting" unless you had your own gear to compare it to.
  8. That's the thing - your brain is a device. Without our brains, there would be no 2 June or 4pm. The Earth would still be rotating around the Sun, and rotating on its axis, but the camera's not measuring those things. Humans have come up with the time and date system. The camera is just taking the best guess it can at consistently dividing its operations into Human Time. A device can "drift" from itself, as I understand you to mean, if there are errors in its clock, causing it to miss time or change time randomly. But the RED camera you saw was a few frames out, after an hour. That means its clock was oscillating around .0001% faster or slower than whatever gear you were comparing it to (probably a nice temperature-controlled oscillator). It wasn't drifting on its own - it just used a slightly different scheme than your gear to deduce how long a second is. How did you know the RED was drifting?
  9. Nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure!
  10. I like full scale tone also. Eliminates a lot of guesswork. The one caveat is cameras like the A7S, which AFAIK has a non-defeatable limiter at -3, so the meters alone will deceive you.
  11. Maybe this is the simplest explanation: what changes is the measurement of the second you're recording. Not the number of frames, not the length of the take. A second doesn't occur in nature - it's a human construct. The NIST uses an atomic clock - measuring the decay of isotopes - as the US standard for how long a second is. We don't have that luxury in our equipment, and so everyone arrives at very, very similar, but always slightly different results. So, some gear will say that it's recorded 25 frames in one second, but another piece will say those 25 frames lasted 1.000002 seconds. And that's just in the case of very good gear. With budget clocks, it might be 1.001 seconds, or worse. Hope I didn't add to the confusion.
  12. How many preamps/tracks do you need? What's your budget?
  13. Speculation: changing the battery in any way is a lot more expensive than just changing the label, so probably all of these batteries are made exactly the same and labeled differently.
  14. http://www.audioroot.fr/product/esmart-bg-dh-mkii/
  15. You're a class act, Crew. Which, on the internet, is really saying something.
  16. Nice! The sound person's lifelong dilemma: as it becomes more useful, it becomes heavier. Looks like a really good balance though.
  17. What's the exact cabling from the 633 to the device? It's possible that the way the adapter is wired is causing the signal to cancel out. It's even more likely if you're going from a balanced connection to an unbalanced one.
  18. I love the Rycote lavalier windjammers on COS-11s. They've done some amazing things for me in wind before. Agreed above about noisy clothing whipping around being a good idea to fight in advance.
  19. You're satisfied that this client is a real person? I've never heard of Crew Connection, and this sounds like a strong-arm marketing tactic. I've also never heard of a client that only uses a payment portal like that. I'm suspicious.
  20. Ha! You're right, it's definitely a grey area, and they do sign up to be entertainers. I worked for a few days on a doc that detailed the plight of the modern football player, and it's colored my thinking on the subject. Some of the injuries they sustain (particularly head injuries, which hopefully have nothing to do with wireless packs) take a while to become obvious, and the excellent healthcare runs out as soon as your career is over - an average of three years. I know almost nothing about football besides what I've just told you, so I feel bad for those guys. A lot of them don't do well after their careers are over. I'm not saying they shouldn't wear mics.
  21. I disagree Jose, I think it's the opposite - because these players are in so much danger already, everything possible should be done to limit the danger they're in. It's a bit like saying the military should walk around with targets on their uniforms . .
  22. I sent an email to a company called Areitec to see if they were interested but have not heard back yet. If there's one you'd like to introduce me to, I'd be happy to contact them.
  23. Hey Jose! Your request will be granted, I'm working on it now.
  24. Happy to say these are now available in the Netherlands from Noyz Boyz Audio here. Also, stay tuned for a UK announcement. Thanks to everyone for spreading the word!
  25. Their fully loaded 4K camera is priced at less than $3000, meaning if they do a decent job we'll be seeing a lot of these.
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