Re: How important is it to be all DC powered on set?

What Noah sez!

D.

BTW, Cart-size lithium batteries are down in price to about $1300 each<g>!
I am seriously considering two. Can't seem to get the question answered
about floating them across the charger which would be a "must."




On 6/29/08 5:59 PM, in article
4628f4c3-93b5-4d31-842b-a9eb87103790@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Noah
Timan" <dontwritemehereok@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jun 29, 8:34 pm, vrc2...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Question for mainly film guys.  How important is is that your recoding
rig is powered completely by DC power?  How often are you on location
and there is absolutely no access to AC power?  If you are on DC, what
system to you use?  I was looking to purchase a Yamaha digital mixer
as a front end to a Sound Devices 788t AES/EBU then mirror that to
ADAT out into Protools.
Thanks

It's not very often that there's no power available -- even if you're
very remote there's usually at least a put-put generator provided. It
does, however, happen once in a while where you need to be self-
sufficient, but in my experience it's often less than 5% of the shoot
if at all. Usually when one is in a location that remote, stakebeds
carrying heavy sound cart rigs can't get there either, so you're
working out of a bag anyway.

But DC is important for other reasons -- mostly because sometimes AC
power cables get kicked out or need to be switched from one leg of the
source to another, because it sometimes takes the electric department
a while to get power to set, and because the electrics generally like
to pull all power the second that camera wrap is called.

The usual way is to float a DC power supply running off AC across a
big block battery (for a boat or car). That way if there's an
interruption in AC supply, your gear seamlessly keeps running until
the AC supply is repatched or replaced. Lots of folks use either a
homemade variation on this or use one of the commercially made
solutions (PSC's is the most popular). This does, of course, require
DC input on all of your gear.

Lots of folks have had a DC modification performed on their Yamaha
01Vs. Forrest Forbes used to be the man for this, but I hear he's not
doing it any more now that he's running the service department for
Coffey Sound. Perhaps folks know of an alternative person who's doing
them...I'd appreciate hearing about that too, so please post if you
know someone.

I wouldn't go ADAT for weight and format reasons, amongst others --
how critical is it that you get your files into ProTools right on
set? If you must do that and have some sort of a digital front end,
I'd either record directly to ProTools and skip the ADAT stage, or
(better yet) use Boom Recorder, an inexpensive platform that will
allow you to record directly onto a Mac laptop. It's a lot more
straightforward and intuitive as a recording platform than PT is, and
you could load the recorded files into PT afterwards.

Regards,

Noah Timan

.

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