Recently, I was asked to record audio on a set for a local studio production.
I would be filling in for another excellent sound mixer that got double booked on a
couple of different gigs.
Everything that I needed was on a sound card, and one of the first things that I did
before everything was replaced, the external batteries on these sound devices 788t.
Then I'd change the batteries for the wireless packs.
I was using a variety of different types of wireless microphones just because of what we
had available. We stuck with these Sennheiser an Shure microphone.
Mainly because these workout videos and the types of microphones that we connected
were the proprietary kind that came over the ear and the microphone sits right here.
If they were lapels, I think I would have stuck with the lectrosonics because as
I understand it, those are like the top tier kind of wireless microphones.
When it comes to TV and media production.
But we didn't want to use lapels because they're probably going to get sweaty and not
stick. Also, you're gonna have to worry about all of that movement from the cloth
during a workout.
Next is comtek. These are the way that I would send music to talent during production
from the seven 1880. What you're looking at is the receivers.
And this is the transmitter.
The tongue would only want to hear music playback in one ear.
So I would tape the other ear bud down to the wire and run that wire down the
back of their shirt to the pack sitting at their waist.
I really like the angle at which the connector for the earbuds go into the comtek because
it's nice to have something at an angle a little bit, but not completely 90 degrees,
because I feel like it's easy to yank that out the
mix that was providing to the headphones also went out to the green room as well as the
edit bay. And speaking of the edit bay, I would retrieve the CF card from the edit bay
that was dumped the night before and format it.
In addition to the CF card, the 788t has an internal drive.
So throughout the entirety of the production, I never formatted the internal drive
on the 788t, but daily I was doing the CF card.
That way, if something was ever missed on in just from the edit bay, I had at
least as a redundancy on the internal drive on my 788t.
The next thing I would do is re jam time code to the slate.
Over the weekend, the time code drifted a little bit and I wanted to resync timecode to
the time of day. So I'd find an easy round number that was near a time coming up and jam
the timecode. Quick tip. I feel like I'm probably the only person that didn't know this,
but if you want to convert to military time, just add 12 to whatever number that
you want to find. If you're past that 12:00 p.m.
mark, I wish I would have known that much earlier in my life.
On screen, I can show you the actual moment where I hit the button to jam the time code
because I was using my phone to film and I needed my phone to look at the clock on it.
So when the second hand hits the exact moment where I want to jam timecode, I got to do
is hit that button and then it's synced to the time of day.
Now that I jammed Timecode into the audio device, I needed to pair that with
the slate. I would plug it in and hit a switch on the side of the slate to jam the
incoming code. Now we have both the slate and sound recorder in sync.
This wasn't multicamera shoot, but none of the cameras that we were using on set can take
timecode. So it's always nice to have timecode being read on the slate before you hit
the slapper for syncing in post.
Next, I would rename tracks or files to whatever our first record of the day was
and I would check the signals of all the wireless packs and make sure the signal flow was
getting to where it needed to go. And besides actually micing up the talent themselves.
Everything is ready to go for our first record of the day.
It's a zoom recorder, it's a boom. you go like this
and it goes directly in.
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All right. Until next episode. My name is Javier Mercedes and I hope you're out there
living a life of abundance by.