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1978 era loc sound equipment


cjh

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Hi all, my next film includes a low budget film crew in the cast and props require an authentic looking period sound kit. Set up will be a simple rec / headphone boompole / mic kit. Interested in the following info if anyone can help:

 

Model of Nagra (or other rec?) in common use then

Boom Mic (presume 416)

Mic suspension

XLR connectors

boompole (I have an old aluminum panamic doc boom that I bought 2nd hand in the early 90's..?)

Headphones (poss have a pair of old DT48's but a more comfortable option maybe preferred!)

 

Photos of any of it would be much appreciated also.

 

Thank you!

Chris.

 

 

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A low budg crew in '78 (that would have been me) probably didn't have  a Sela or any mixer at all.  We had a Kat15 external preamp for the 3rd input on a Nagra 4.2 or IV-L and mixed 3 channels down to mono live on the set.  Needing more than 3 channels at once was pretty rare in low-budg world then, in that we'd be more likely to go to 2 booms before we'd want to wire anyone anyhow.  When I HAD to wire 3 or 4 people we might use a cheap mixer of the day (Shure M67) for that one shot, and ditch it for normal (cleaner) operations as soon as we could.  In that time I also had a Nagra III, so 2 channels only with the external pre.   Some higher tech local (SF) mixers, like my friend Agamemnon Andrianos, had British-made collapseable "trolleys" as sound carts on location: the rest of us made do with an apple-box, mostly.  Our boom ops were heroes, we mostly had "rehearsals" for each scene, and we got through those days, somehow! 

 

One more thing--possibly not relevant to this situation: back then on a really low budg indie being made by people who were very new to the movie biz, nearly all of the camera and sound equipment would have been rented, probably from a local rental house if there was one nearby.  There were no entry-level sync sound cameras and recorders in those days (no BM 5k or Sony A7s, no Zoom F8 equivalents), so often the sound person might only own a mic, a boom, some headphones and a few cables and would rent the rest as needed (especially wireless gear, which not a standard-expected-package item then).  There were more rental houses then, some kind of specializing more in indie lowbudg productions, so finding gear to rent wasn't difficult.  The fact that almost every single piece of gear had to be separately rented contributed to the (by today's standards) extreme simplicity of the recording rigs then!

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