[Stephen Lovett]

Hi Greg,

Yes the thread kind of morphed in the middle, so the answer is “yes” to your question… did that help? 🙂

The genesis of the mail, and the primary need is on set communication.

Specifically on multi camera shoots, where the guys are mobile we need the OK “you hold the wide shot I’m going in for a ECU on foobar” etc so that I don’t get stuck in editing because all the cameras are panning or moving at that moment leaving me with nothing to cut to.

four to six radios that can do the surveillance style headsets would be a good fit. All radios should be able to communicate with all other radios. There should operate silently and be sensitive enough to allow crew communication without creating an obstacle for the sound team.

I asked here because I I don’t want cross talk, or whatever unknown to me downside of my proposed solution to cause headaches for the sound pros. I’ve learned through hard experience that sound is at least 50% of the equation.

The thread morphed because Ty recommended Comtek, which evidently does both.

Orthogonally I need to add some lavs that suck less than my Sennheiser’s and thus the deviation into the mic comments.

I’m completely happy for these two issues to be unrelated. That said fewer on boxes and cables on set is better IMHO.

I still haven’t follow up with Comtek, I was at NAB last week, and I’m still digging out.

Thanks,

Steve

[Stephen Lovett]

Thanks again Ty,

I’ll check in with comtek. I’m heading out to NAB on Monday, and was surprised that they are listed as one of the vendors.

On the countryman, (for dialog) I am planning on going with the countryman E6i omni.

Have you had a chance to evaluate the newer compact model?

All the best,

Steve

[Stephen Lovett]

Ty,

Thank you kindly for your guidance.

Having looked at the comtek equipment, it appears that I’d have to run an AC powered base station for any and all applications.

This isn’t a practical solution for me as ~50% of my shoots are in the field with no reliable access to A.C. power.

Any other suggestions?

And as a logical extension of this conversation, as I’m going to take your advice and add a couple of countryman’s to my set up, is there some synergy possible here.

I’m ok with separate solutions to these problems.
1) set communcation
2) wireless connectivity to mics

But less equipment is better than more equipment IMHO.

I don’t use my wireless stuff much now (Senhieser G2 series) as I’m not thrilled with the sound of the lav and the SKP100 doesn’t have phantom power, so my boom is wired.

Given that the countryman is available in dozens of flavors… if it were you, and you needed to be A.C. free regularly, what would you choose.

(If it helps almost all my source material is gathered on a boomed, wired 416)

All the best,

Steve

[Stephen Lovett]

Marvin,

I’m at the front end of a Final Cut Pro server deployment. We needed additional storage, so I’m replacing our current server that hosts our Small Business Server 2003 with a 16TB array that will host both SBS 2008, and be the archival storage for the xserve that hosts FC Server.

(the network model in Windows server is quite different between 2k3 and 2k8, and I’m still working through that)

I’ll let you know more when we’ve had it up and running a bit.

Steve

[Stephen Lovett]

Hello Bruno,

No, that’s news to me.

I have an early ’08 MacBook Pro, 10.5.6, and 4 GB of ram. I’m using the Tempo Sata Pro express card 34.

The only issue I’ve had is that you have to be careful not to move the computer or drive as moving the cable can cause the connection to the drive to break.

Other than that, it’s worked fine for me, even with a homebrew striped raid setup powered off the FW bus.

Steve

[Stephen Lovett]

It all depends on what you need to accomplish.

Powerbooks haven’t been make in a LOOONG time, so I assume you mean Macbook.

For simple stuff firewire 800 is OK. I wouldn’t use FW 400. Most vendors are offering a “quad” solution: USB FW400, FW800, e-sata. I think that’s the way to go.

While FW800 will do for simple editing, if you want to transfer your footage to other systems USB is ubiquitous, and FW is being eliminated from Apple’s consumer level laptops, so e-sata is IMHO a necessity at this point.

I’ve had good luck with the sonnet express card 34 based e-sata cards.

If you want to do mulitclip, have a lot of audio streams or work in a 10 bit color space for correction, you are going to need e-sata and a two disk raid as a minimum.

These systems vary a great deal in performance. I’d stick with a vendor that specializes in video storage. Cladigit, Gtech, Sonnet etc.

I’ve had a gRaid mini from Gtech, and it’s a great little box.

These can be spendy however.

LaCIe has been a mixed bag of tricks for me. I’ve had a couple of slow noisy drives from them, however I’ve a got a quad interface tower (it doesn’t have a model number on it sorry) that’s been great.

I prefer to work in ProResHQ off the HDSDI port via an IOHD, and subsequently have built a cool little portable striped array with two fast notebook drives that is e-sata based but is powered off the firewire 800 port. It’s quite good for a small footprint in field solution.

I can elaborate if anybody is interested.

Steve