Tip Mcpartland
Forum Replies Created
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Today I got an e-mail from Tai Audio announcing that Lectro has jumped on the dual channel bandwagon. The dual receiver costs $3,000. But with Lectro shipping this in January I think that dual channel systems have entered the mainstream.
Remember, if your camera has four channel audio, you can use two of these and record four voices (or whatever) with no mixing or combining of tracks.
Tip
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Today I got an e-mail from Tai Audio announcing that Lectro has jumped on the dual channel bandwagon. The dual receiver costs $3,000. But with Lectro shipping this in January I think that dual channel systems have entered the mainstream.
Remember, if your camera has four channel audio, you can use two of these and record four voices (or whatever) with no mixing or combining of tracks.
Tip
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Don’t forget that Sony, Audio Technica and even Azden have dual channel receivers.
The Sonys are pricey, the Azden are in their second version, the first didn’t work, don’t know about gen two.
The sweet spot is the Audio Technica AT-1800 dual channel series but replace the supplied cheapo mics with Tram, Countryman or whatever.
My set-up is two Audio Technica dual channel receivers, each receiving from two bodypack tansmitters and Countryman mics.
This can feed all four channels of my Sony XDCAM HD F-350 so with just two receivers in a saddlebag over the battery I record four separate, discrete channels with no need for a mixer.
For the F-350, you do need to make or get a Y-cable that adapts the single 5-pin XLR “stereo mic” input on the camera to two 3-pin XLRs.
Tip McPartland
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I used to have the 4×5 but it wouldn’t work with my wide lens. The 5×5 I have now is generally a more substantial piece. I don’t think either is exactly tough, but they are beautifully made and I wouldn’t agree that they look cheap, that is Cavision’s territory!
Tip
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Be careful of a 4×5 with a lens as wide as yours. No problem until you’re at or close to full wide and you rotate your polarizing filter 90 degress and suddenly your 5″ wide frame is only 4″ wide. Or at other angles corners will vignette. 5×5 or larger will probably work better.
By the way, there is a third high quality choice which is Petroff — well worth checking out their gear.
Tip McPartland
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Rocket,
I’ve had the same issue in Premiere Pro 2.0 with MainConcept plug-in. The worse case was transcoding the MPEG to an AVI and dropping that into a Cineform project.
Interestingly enough, in my case, if I turn off the video track the audio plays fine. I heard something about video memory buffer issues causing this, and since turning off the video track made a difference, this sounded reasonable. So I fooled around with the video memory buffer, but sadly to little effect.
Tip McPartland
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Not in our industry!
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Redflag,
Thanks for your post, like I said, haven’t tried sending it to Japan for warranty work, could be you’re right, hope I have no need to find out. The bit about the guy advancing with the giant screwdriver is quite an image! Anyway…
The grey market purchase saved me about $3500 (camera and lens) over the best price I could find in the US at that time. Without that price, I could not have bought the camera and lens at all. I’ve now used it to shoot much of a reality pilot that could get our company a network deal (also used two HDX-900 and two HVX-200), and have started shooting an Indy feature.
None of that would have happened had I been more fearful of Japanese warranty procedures than I was (yes, I was somewhat nervous), so if I was lied to by the vender, so far I’ve come out well ahead.
Meanwhile, I have an excellent LA shop (by many accounts the best) lined up for any post-warranty servicing I might someday need.
Tip
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This was supposed to append to the thread below about domestic Sony service quality. When I saw that I’d started a new thread, I hoped it wouldn’t confuse anyone. Oooops.
Now that I’ve clarified that, anyone still not see the relationship between this post and the thread it refers to? If so, I’ll explain further.
Tip
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The rule of thumb is that interframe compression such as MPEG2 can be about 2.5 to 3 times as efficient as intraframe compression such as HDCAM, DVCPro HD, etc.
Using this rule of thumb the 50 Mb/sec XDCAM HD will be equivalent to somewhere between 125 Mb/sec and 150 Mb/sec intraframe such as HDCAM, so it probably achieves rough parity, but is not likely to be significantly better.
This does not speak to the initially more difficult work flow, but those rough early days are passing as Avid, FCP, Vegas and Premiere with MainConcept plug-in now offer good support.
I own the 35 Mb/sec XDCAM HD and love it. Many of you already know that it’s approved for Discovery HD Theater and I just noticed in a promo that they’re using it for the new History Channel HD series “Ice Road Truckers.”
Even at 1/2″, 4:2:0 and 35 Mb/sec this is a very professional and very serious piece of hardware. At 2/3″, 50 Mb/sec and 4:2:2 it will be awesome.
Tip McPartland