Metric Halo Session on set, first time

[rocketamari]

the last film i’d mixed on, i struggled with an ancient Fostex PD-6 and the handful of cartridges i was able to find. it worked, and the film is now streaming in germany, but i’ll never suffer the misery of an obsolete medium again, much as i loved that machine otherwise. now i’m back in school in the states, in a summer filmmaking class, mixing on a Metric Halo ULN-2 i’d upgraded to 3D last summer on an old engineer’s recommendation, and i’m recording with the built in session recorder through an m1 macbook air, onto the air’s internal SSD and an external HDD. this experience compared to my last is heaven, i’m able to set up and name my mic feeds, have a pair of stereo mixes, make aux feeds for my boom op and the director, have a talkback mic and run multiple instances of my main mics for safety. i’m also able to use DSP on my plant mic without it printing to my ISO file. in the Session window, i’m able to add full metadata, the system auto-increments take and slate numbers and i can set the file naming in preferences. posting this here because, outside of a(n excellent) talk on the gotham sound youtube channel given by Peter Schneider at AES 2019, i haven’t found any information from people mixing or recording on a Metric Halo for film.

 

in this setup, i’m using the interface along with a presonus digimax FS over ADAT, a set of ancient clockit boxes and a master controller. my inputs are nearly saturated, but i do have an AJA analog line-in-AES3 converter to add four more inputs if i absolutely need to. i didn’t need to arm LTC for recording in order to have it stamp my files, but some small voice told me to record it anyway (trauma from my first experiences syncing long documentary interviews and multicam theatre recordings? no, couldn’t be that).