[Todd Terry]

Expensive is relative.

We regularly do shoots where the budget is half is much as I paid for my first house. This is not one of them. This is for a virtually no-money shoot where the entire budget is less than the cost of two MixPre-Ds. It’s a mixer that I will use once for an hour and then probably put on a shelf never to see the light of day again.

So yes, some things can be sacrificed and in this case I readily agree I’m one of “those guys.” I’m just trying to (cleanly) feed two mics into one camera… once.

Maybe I’m in the wrong forum for such a pedestrian low-end issue, but I appreciate the responses anyway.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Ty…

And… I don’t want to be one of those guys…. those cheapskates that I’m always ragging on over on the video side of things… but YIKES. I’m sure that’s a great device… but it’s expensive. This is for a little no-budget shoot so it would be hard to justify a mixer that is three times the price of the Mackie 12-channel boards that are in each of our video editing suites.

On all the usual suspect on-line sources (B&H, Musician’s Friend, Sweetwater etc.) there are boatloads of little mixers in the sub-$200 neighborhood, and even some sub-$100 ones… but being an audio ignoramus I’m just not sure what’s best for me. Basically just need a little gadget with two pots or sliders that will let me mix two mics (and phantom power at least one of them).

I also don’t have time to scour the used market… just looking for something where I can click a button and have it delivered tomorrow. Wow we’ve become a lazy society… but hey it is what it is.

The alternative to finding a mixer is to take one of our “real” cameras along as well (or even a Zoom recorder) and feed the mics in it, and then feed the camera into the Osmo, but I’m trying to keep things simple and avoid taking a lot of not-really-for-that-purpose gear.

Any thoughts? Anyone?…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I’d say the MP4. Or maybe one of MP4 and one of Cinema Raw Lite… but if I had to pick one I’d say the MP4.

The XF-AVC is not needed.

If you or anyone here has a short clip or two to share, it could be uploaded to me at this link….

https://spaces.hightail.com/uplink/fantasticplastic

Ehhh… I just edited this post… for some reason the upload link doesn’t seem to be working. It MIGHT work for you, or maybe WeTransfer or such could work?

Thanks!

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Didn’t see it, but bunches of clips are available on the Tonight Show’s YouTube channel. It looks to be all location pieces, Jimmy in various spots around town.

Wonder how much Samsung paid them for that? Samsung must have been pretty confident about the new 10 (which incidentally is probably the phone I’m trading up to later this week) because that was all night footage, which is not what most phones excel at.

I’m betting that even though there was one person holding a little phone, that union rules meant the “camera” operator was still surrounded by a crew of a whole bunch of people.

It’s a pure gimmick of course, but interesting.

At least they had the phones horizontal.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Look at all the various pieces of gear from Edelkrone.

Their stuff is amazing, and incredibly affordable.

https://edelkrone.com

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Ok, this is not totally related (although somewhat), but I was just in a non-COW forum where someone there didn’t have a good grasp on what “full frame” actually means, and why it may or may not necessarily be a good thing. Again, this has nothing to do with noise… but rather frame size.

They were also disparaging on anything less than “full frame” cameras, such as the various flavors of APS-sized sensors.

So… I took a bit of my very valuable time (actually a little bored today) to make this diagram for them, drawing it out with my bare hand like an animal, and I’ll share it here too.

Some people can’t grasp why “full frame” is not the same as Super35mm. That is because, obviously, a still film camera runs the film horizontally whereas a cine camera runs it vertically. Yes, that Pentax K1000 you shot yearbook candids in high school shoots a bigger frame than a Panavision Gold GII.

Secondly, there’s no call to be wary of some of those other sensor formats because they are not “full frame.” They are still big. The Canon APS-H sensor is actually bigger than an S35mm frame, and the Nikon and Sony APS-C sensors are almost as big… they are perfectly adequate for almost any job, size-wise (and there are actually two sizes of APS-C, the Canon version is slightly different than the others. Obviously Micro Four-Thirds is a fair bit smaller, but even that is still bigger than a 16mm film frame.

Also, old school film guys like me don’t want to shoot “full frame” because that’s not what we are used to, and have completely different fields of view than S35mm. If I put my eye to the viewfinder of any S35mm camera in the world I know exactly what a 50mm lens will look like, what an 85mm will look like… and so on. If I’m using a “full frame” camera, the FOV is completely different. If I were a still photographer by trade and had been doing 35mm-format portraits for the last 30 years instead of cine work, it wouldn’t bother me… but that’s not the world I come from.

Just getting all that off my chest.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

“Full frame” has nothing to do with it.

I always laugh at the “full frame” fanatics, anyway. “Full frame” means the frame size is the same size as a frame of film shot with a 35mm still camera… where the film traveled horizontally, so the frames were bigger than a motion picture film frame, where the film travels vertically. I think most will agree that the S35mm frame is the standard for cine work. That’s all that means… it has nothing to do with noise.

It has to do with the sensor itself, not the size. And all are not created equally. You have to remember that the sensor alone in an Arri Alexa is probably 10 times as costly as the entire a7s2 camera, if not more.

Comparing those two cameras is apples and oranges. A decent but pretty inexpensive consumer-grade apple, compared to a pretty darn expensive and very very high-end uber-professional orange.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Well… there’s a big difference in “similar” and that “EXACT SHOT”… Which you said your client requires…haa.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

No, but some detective work probably wouldn’t be too hard.

I’d start with tracking down someone in marketing at Servcorp and find out who or what company designed their website… then hit up whomever that is for the next step… (probably the next step of several steps).

Advance warning… if that piece was bespoke for them, it might turn out to be a fairly pricey piece of animation… if they choose to make rights available.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Mark…

I found some advice on line that says yes, use 90% or higher isopropyl alcohol, and not to get too aggressive about it… dabbing and gently wiping.

The tech advice I found said that the rubber was actually de-vulcanizing… and there was no way to stop it… but that alcohol would get rid of the stickiness… for now. But the process would have to be repeated periodically.

I’ll give it a try….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com