[Dan Brockett]

Hi Trevor:

I am surprised that nobody mentioned this. Chances are good that you will get flicker from the fluros over the pool tables. What frame rate are you shooting at?

I shot a similar setup a few years ago in a store that had a lot of ugly overhead flurorescent banks. When I transfered the film, I noticed that I had flicker all over the place and worse, the flicker rates were different from each fixture. Some had no flicker, some had medium flicker and some were flickering really fast.

Since fluorescents are a ballasted discharge lamp, as the ballasts age, the flicker changes. Kinos, provided they are in good working order, avoid this by using a high speed ballast that scans at either 30kHz or 60kHz but many cheapo Home Depot types of fluorescent fixtures use cheap ballasts that will flicker.

No easy way to check for it short of shooting a test. I would. If you have mixed flicker rates, there is absolutely no easy way to fix it in post. Luckily my shoot was MOS b-roll and I did not have the fluros in every shot. By variable speeding the telecine, adding some strobe filter, etc. I was able to salvage that shoot and nobody was the wiser but if I would have had dialogue and had not been able to leave 24 or 30 fps or if the footage had been the main part of the show, I would have been so hosed.

Check the ASC Guidebook for a full section on film frame rates, shutter angles and flicker rates of discharge lamps. Hate to see you go through all of this trouble and then end up with unusable footage. There was a Green Day video from a few years ago that had flickering fluros in all of the (I think it might have been I Walk Alone?) shots and it looked pretty cool but that’s slow motion stylized and art directed, not dialogue.

Best,

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Hi:

We have a staff person who deals withthe backups, I will have to see if he can tell you about this tomorrow. I did help him set it up and I recall it was pretty simple, we just drag and srop the files we want to backup to tape.

One thing you will want to check, is the drive on and is there a tape in it while you are trying to set this up?

Best,

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Hi:

Was it by any chance a UVW-1800 deck? They are notorious for having a rolling picture, sometimes even when you are feeding them sync. Mine does stuff like that all of the time whether I feed it fresh sync from a BB generator or just loop the deck’s output to itself as a reference signal.

Glad to hear you got it resolved.

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Bob:

What is your hypothesis of why so many users and posters are all of sudden deciding that they can build Kona based editing systems and not use a mixer? I don’t get it, this is editing 101. How can all of these people even figure out how to use and configure a Kona card and RAID if they cannot figure out that an editing system needs an audio mixer?

And it’s not even a full moon yet…

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Hi Bob:

You bring up an interesting point, you are correct, AVID does use OEM Aja boards in the Nitris product. Would be interesting to see if AVID will try to buy Aja.

Best,

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Wow!

Corporate espionage at it’s finest? I hope that this is not the case and that it was just a couple of really dumb robbers. Other than burying it in an abandoned mineshaft, they would never be able to sell this camera and related gear/info on the open market.

Makes you wonder if some of RED’s larger Japanese competitors might have been involved though, huh?

Hope that they catch whomever was the perpatrator.

Best,

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Hi:

Thanks for the news. A sad day indeed, besides numerous other great films, Sven shot “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, two of my favorite films. He was a true artist and he will be missed.

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Bob:

You crack me up!

Keep up the entertainment.

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Hi Adam:

How can you not recommend the Adams monitors? 😉

I have heard very good things about the PMCs but have never heard them in person. The Genelecs have never given me ear fatigue but different strokes, I guess? The Genelecs, to my ear have a very transparent high end, the tweeters are smooth to me.

I always had huge issues with the very popular JBL monitors. I used to work about 5 minutes away from their assembly line in Northridge and took the factory tour several times. Great people, great place and JBLs aren’t bad speakers but their titanium tweeter always gave me ear fatigue very quickly. I don’t hear very much about JBLs anymore as professional monitors, other than for live sound so I guess they are not as popular.

I have mixed on the Mackie 624s and 824s, they were adequate, are the Tapcos more accurate?

Dan

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[Dan Brockett]

Hi all:

I will throw my hat into the ring and will offer some opinions on studio monitors, as opposed to speakers:

1. KRKs, while they sound decent are not accurate at all. Fine for editing, terrible for final mixes, they artificially boost bass and treble.

2. Ditto for any Yamahas or IMHO, any Japanese speakers or monitors. While many sound good, they are not accurate.

3. The Mackies are okay, not the best for the money IMHO but pretty good.

4. The M-Audios are the new Fostex. Remember those really nasty sounding POS tiny Fostex speakers that every AVID bay had in the 90’s? The M-Audios are the new version of those. They are ubiquitous in LA and NY, seems like almost every AVID and FCP system has them. I will say that they sound better than the Fostex but we have eight off-line rooms at the production company I work at and they all have the M-Audios. Once again, not even in the realm of accurate.

5. Phil is on the right track, I second his recommendation of the Dynaudio Acoustics, they are accurate and well made.

6. I’ll also give Ron the Tannoys, as long as you get the right ones. Their cheapo speakers sound pretty bad but their better pro stuff is good.

Okay, now that I have rendered all of my huffy opinions on the monitors/speakers listed here, please, please, please spend at least $1,000.00 per pair for your monitors. Buy active monitors (self-powered), they surpassed passive monitors years ago in quality because of the individually engineered dedicated power supplies are superior and more efficient than outboard amplifiers.

My recommendations, besides the Tannoys and the Dynaudio Acoustics will be the Genelec 8020As (I have had the older versions of these for many years, the 1029As and 1029Bs and they are an incredibly accurate monitor for the money, especially when paired with the matching Genelec subwoofer). If you can afford it, get the matching subwoofer, I think it’s the 7050.

OR

The new Adam A7s are superbly accurate and are also about $1,000.00 per pair. They utilize and entirely new high frequency driver design that is unlike anything else I have ever seen.

FWIW, I sold and managed a professional and a consumer audio business for 10 years. I have owned 85 pairs of speakers and monitors over the years and consider myself fairly attuned to the nuances and finer points of speakers and monitors. For home speakers, I prefer B&W, Kef and M&K but I do not think that any of them are accurate studio monitors even though they all sound great, they all color the sound as well, they are not accurate. Accurate monitors present the sound as it really is, if it sounds bad, the monitor will sound bad. If it sounds great, the monitor will sound great. Most speakers try to make everything sound great.

All the best,

Dan

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