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Experienced Dead/Drop out with Wireless Lav Kit


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Hello,

 

I was on filming on location as the location sound recordist at the Globe and Mail building in Toronto. It is an office space and it was a walk and talk situation with a single person on camera.  I was working with a wireless Senheisser G3/G2 kit and had the speaker mic'd up. I was at a distance as to not be caught on camera and I was able to hear the speaker clear with no interference. As the speaker reached to a certain point of the room the audio just dropped out and I could not hear them speaking. Their voice would come back after leaving this particular area. I thought maybe the batteries needed to be changed and the same thing happened in the same spot. So I switched out the G3 transmitter and receiver with the G3 transmitter and receiver. The exact same thing happened. I had also scanned for a different channel to be on and still the same issue. I was wondering if anyone has come across a similar issue and what could possibly be done to avoid such a thing. Thank you for any kind of response.

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The only time I experience a similar occurrence is when I shoot in certain areas in a local university hospital. Lots of machines that go "Bing" as Michael Palin would say.

 

Oh, and I have had wild interference from pacemakers.

 

Kent

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First, things you can control easily:  Can you adjust the transmitter pack to be higher on the body or without the actor's body between the pack and the receiver?  Can you remote your receiver closer (or farther) from the problem spot?

Second, this may (or may not be) a situation where a better quality receiver or an antenna system could help (not that antennas are always practical for bag work).  Sennheiser G2/G3s are more prone to interference than some of the higher end options.

Third, carry a hardwire option, especially in unusual locations.  As PMC says, sometimes you run into a source of interference on set that can't be dealt with.

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Another possibility to consider is ultrasonic interference.

 

The compander circuitry in the EW transmitters is known to be affected by ultrasonic sources like occupancy sensors for lighting.  Mostly I expect it would sound trashy but perhaps the right signal could totally swamp the audio or mess up a pilot tone.

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I've had exactly that experience when I still used G2s!  I was filming next to a university supercomputer, and I think the security system was outputting an extremely powerful ultrasonic signal.  Made them completely useless.

But, that particular weakness doesn't cause dropout.  It overloads the compander and causes severe distortion.  So ... yes, it's a possible weakness of the G2s, but it doesn't match the symptom that ADS is describing.

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I did not experience any kind of distortion, the audio simply just cut out completely/dropped out. Our solution ended up being to stay away from that area but I wanted to try and find out what could have been the reason. I did some searching with google maps and I know there was a police station near by. But we filmed at this location for the full day and on different floors. It was only this particular area where the issue came up. Thank you for sending your examples and potential ways of avoiding this. 

 

I have been thinking about looking into some kind of antenna system, or upgrading our G2/G3 to something better since coming across this issue.

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I had a similar in cooking show with induction kitchen.

When it was turned On, the signal went to black hole of Interstellar.

 

Cable and booming was the only solution. Since then, I have stopped using Sennheiser G3 as main option.

Burned once, learned once.

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