Robert J Gray

OK so disclaimer this is a lot of info about “backup recording” not in the sense that the OP mentioned but in terms of extra recorders on the truck. Do they bill separately? Sort of, for camera and sound the “backup bodies” respectively usually serve some dual purpose. For sound they often have a cart rig and a bag rig often with interchangeable recorders. The backup recorder for a lot of people is the bag rig. So it’s billed as part of an inclusive package but its probably not sold in every show like it’s a fire extinguisher encased in glass, only to be used in emergencies. The television rental rates are heavily discounted when you look at the whole package, on account of the long rental periods and even sometimes some historical factors with the studios. For camera it seems similar on television series, because a lot of these shows use multiple cameras regularly. Sometimes the backup bodies are used frequently and seem like less of a “backup” - really more of a redundancy if one broke. In that situation they may not use 3 cameras every day (due to personnel for example) and if they were and something happened they would make do with two cameras until they get another third. Which could happen quickly. They wouldnt be single camera and shooting wouldn’t have to slow down much (not that 2 cameras are always faster than one but that’s a story for another day). Sometimes the backup bodies are really more backups and they just make appearances on some days where they want to setup a shot with an identical camera or something like that. Not quite sure of the billing or true backup status on films, just that I’ve never seen us stop shooting to wait for another camera body. I’m more intimate with TV. For TV, although they do have backups and redundancies built into packages the UPMs always seem to be trying to get as much as they can for as little as possible so sometimes the selling point of a backup might be that it can help improve the efficiency of a department until that moment God has decided it is now a backup

Standard? Depends on your work I guess. Just sharing my experience. A sizeable portion of my work is in Los Angeles on union scripted series and features, whether they’re shooting in town or just doing an LA unit or pickup shots. It seems like we always have a backup body accessible because it is too expensive to wait for one if something goes wrong. I worked with a DP who does a lot of work in the British indie film market. He made it sound pretty tough to find something with more than a tiny budget. I’d imagine on the equipment-limited shoots he described they may not have a backup body sitting around. Makes sense I guess- If your costs are really economical I guess a little downtime isn’t going to hurt you as much as on the shows I work on. Delays of an hour or more that might cause you to reschedule work can really elevate people’s stress levels because of the financial ramifications.

I see people bring this up a lot online but on a lot of TV and features I work on we do in fact have backup camera bodies... Now when I'm mixing an interview or "branded content" (low budget commercial) there seems to be a little less contingency planning, probably because the jobs are shorter in duration. On a long film or TV show, you're almost guaranteed to have a camera body fail at some point in which case you pop the next one on there. As far as rolling a backup, I've considered a Lectro SPDR or a Zaxcom ZFR300 for a backup recording of my mono mix in the bag, but haven't seen the need to invest yet for my mixing work. Now that I'm thinking of it, I should at least rig a Zoom H1n in my bag for this as it does two channels. I personally think you get the most use out of that on TV or films. When the cost of individual takes starts increasing (large crews, stunt work, lots of rigging work, you know the stuff...) I've seen a mono track backup recording save productions a lot of money firsthand in reshoots. For now whenever I'm renting equipment to a production I always keep a backup recorder close by in the kit. I am in the rental game after all, and rental houses arrange a replacement when one of their items goes down in the field.

DPA 4017 or 4018 can handle very high SPL due to its design. Not to mention they sound fan-freaking-tastic. Cheers!

Shot you an e-mail, hope I can help.