Features

A Tribute to Stefan Kudelski and the Nagra Recorder

by Scott D. Smith, CAS

Long considered the “gold standard” for location sound, the Nagra recorders established a level of technical superiority and reliability that to this day is unmatched by almost any other audio recorder (with the possible exception of the Stellavox recorders, designed by former Nagra engineer Georges Quellet).

With the death of Stefan Kudelski in January of this year, this would seem an appropriate time to look at the history of the Nagra recorders and the man responsible for their huge success.

The Early Years

It should probably come as no surprise that Stefan Kudelski would be destined for great works. Born in Warsaw, Poland on February 27 of 1929 to Tadeusz and Ewa Kudelski, it would become clear to those around him early on that he possessed a level of intelligence and ambition exhibited by few other young men his age. His father had studied architecture at Lvov Polytechnics, but later went into chemical engineering. His mother was an anthropologist. Despite this, his childhood years were far from idyllic. With the imminent Nazi attack on Poland in September of 1939, at the tender age of 10, Kudelski and his family fled Warsaw, first to Romania, then to Hungary, and finally to France. He resumed his high school education at the Collège Florimont in Geneva, and later studied electrical engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Like most successful endeavors, Kudelski did not originally come to the idea to create a portable tape recorder directly. His initial interest was sparked by the terribly inefficient work he saw being done at a machine shop in Geneva, where each piece was turned by hand. Realizing that much of this repeatable work could be done by automation, he set about designing what would have been one of the first CNC machine tools. However, he lacked a method to record and store the data necessary to control the motors, and began to look at magnetic recording as an possible medium for data storage.

After dismantling an old recorder to study its design, Kudelski then set about designing a new recorder from scratch. This recorder would be destined to become the Nagra I. However, as the son of a poor refugee family, he was unable to interest anyone in his CNC machine tool project, so he turned his focus to designing a recorder suitable for broadcast use.

Working from his apartment in Prilly, he managed to scrap together enough money to design a prototype machine. It was an instant success, and he sold his first machine for the sum of 1,000 CHF. (While this only amounted to about $228 USD in 1952, it was still a significant amount of money for the young Kudelski). This initial sale was followed by orders from both Radio Lausanne and Radio Geneva.

In May of 1952, on the heels of interest from some well-respected European reporters, he receives an order for six Nagra 1’s from Radio Luxembourg, which convinced Kudelski that he is on the right path. It was at this time that Kudelski left the Ecole Polytechnique and pursued development of the Nagra full time. (Years later, he would receive an “honoris causa” degree from the Ecole Polytechnique, in recognition of his work in developing the Nagra recorder.)

By the end of 1953, Kudelski had established manufacturing operations at a house in Prilly (west of Lausanne), and employed a staff of 11. Toward the end of 1954, improvements were made to the machine (now called the Nagra II), with printed circuit boards being implemented for the audio electronics. The orders continue to roll in, virtually all from word-of-mouth, and by the end of 1956, the staff numbers 17. Despite this success, Kudelski recognizes that there are still improvements that need to be made, especially in the area of the drive mechanism. He continues development of the machine, but opts for a ground-up redesign, as opposed the incremental changes between the Nagra I and II. The result is the Nagra III, introduced in 1958.

The Nagra III Makes Its Debut

The design of the Nagra III marked a significant departure from the Nagra II. Gone was the spring-wound drive mechanism, replaced by an extremely sophisticated servo-drive DC motor. Also absent was the tube-based amplifier circuitry. In its place was a series of modules, each encased in metal, which contain the individual components of the machine. It also sported a peak reading meter (the “Modulometer”), which set it apart from most of the other recording equipment of the period, which still relied on VU meters. It was designed for rugged operation conditions, and could be powered from 12 standard “D” cell batteries.

Acceptance of the Nagra III was almost instantaneous. 240 machines were built in 1958, and in 1959, the Italian radio network RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane) ordered 100 machines to cover the Olympic Games in Rome, paying cash in advance. With this rapid expansion, larger premises are acquired in Paudex (near Lausanne). Since the Nagra III relied heavily on custom machined parts, a significant investment in machine tooling, along with skilled machinists to run them, was required to keep pace with orders that were now coming in from networks around the world, including the BBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and others. By 1960, there were more than 50 employees working in Switzerland, and a network of worldwide sales agents was established to support the sale and service of the machines.

Nagra Enters the Film Business

The application of portable sound recording to the film industry was not lost on Kudelski or his agents. In 1959, French director Marcel Camus used a Nagra II to record part of the sound on the feature production of Black Orpheus, shot on location in Brazil. Sensing that this could be a burgeoning market, Kudelski quickly set about designing a version of the Nagra III that could utilize a pilot system for synchronous filming (referred to as the PILOTTON system).

This early version of this system was based on technology initially developed in 1952 by Telefunken and German Television, which consisted of a single center channel pilot track about .5 mm wide. However, it did not have HF bias applied to it, which caused the distortion to be rather high, and bled into the audio track. Realizing that a better solution was needed, Kudelski invented the Neopilot system to replace the PILOTTON system. This design consisted of two narrow tracks, recorded out of phase with each other, which resulted in the signal being cancelled out when reproduced by a full-track head. The addition of HF bias helped reduce distortion, which resulted in minimal interference to the program audio.

A companion synchronizer (the SLP) was developed at about the same time, which provided a method to resolve synchronous recordings on the Nagra III. The design of the DC servo motor system provided for an elegant approach to this task, making the AC motor drive systems of the day look archaic in comparison.

The first of the Nagra III’s equipped with the new Neopilot system were delivered in 1962, resulting in a huge increase in sales. Lead times for the Nagra III now grew to 6–8 months, requiring yet more space for production. Also, there were restrictions placed on business by the Swiss government in regards to how many workers could be hired, which hampered the growth of the company.

In 1964, additional office and production space is rented in Renens, with further premises acquired in 1965 in Malley. By the end of 1965, the decision was made to purchase a factory in Neuchâtel. Finally, a huge tract of land is purchased in Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne, which allowed for the construction of a dedicated factory.

Nagra IV Debuts

By 1967, the sale of the 10,000th Nagra III is celebrated, and in 1969, the company moves into their new facilities in Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne. 1969 also brought the introduction of the Nagra IV recorder, which marked yet another significant improvement in analog recording technology. While the basic transport design mimicked that of the Nagra III, the new machine now used much more reliable silicon transistors and sported two mike inputs. The pilot system was also improved, with the flux level on tape being standardized, regardless of the voltage present at the pilot input. The signal was also filtered which significantly reduced the amount of noise that could bleed through into the audio track. Approximately 2,510 of the new machines were built in 1969.

Not content to leave well enough alone, one year later, Kudelski introduces the Nagra 4.2L recorder. While the 4.2L offered a few improvements over the IV, they were not as significant as the changes seen between the model III and IV. If some industry observers were of the opinion that Kudelski had begun to slow down further development of analog recorders, they were significantly underestimating his ambitions…

If One Channel Is Good, Why Not Two?

Seeing further opportunities in the sale of machines to the broadcast and film markets, in 1971 Kudelski introduces a stereo version of the Nagra 4.2, called the IV-S. Built on the same platform as the 4.2, the machines offered many of the same features, but with two channels of recording in the same footprint as the mono recorder. It also marks the introduction of a new pilot system, called NagraSync FM, which records a FM modulated pilot signal at 13.5 kHz between the two audio tracks. This allows for synchronous recordings, without having to reduce the width of audio tracks, and neatly solves the problem faced by trying to use the older Neopilot system for twochannel recording. It also allows for a limited bandwidth commentary track to be recorded on the same channel, which aids in slating for production situations where a standard “clapper” slate can’t be used, without interfering with the program being recorded. While  stereo recorders were certainly nothing new at this point, all the commercially available machines were bulky AC–operated recorders, giving Kudelski yet another significant entry into the audio recorder market.

1971 also saw the introduction of the unique SNN recorder, a miniature recording using 1/8” wide tape, but in a reel-to-reel configuration as opposed to a cassette. Like its predecessors, it also had the ability to do synchronous recording. Although Kudelski had begun development work on the SNN about a decade earlier, he waited until 1971 to bring it to market. This year would also mark the introduction of equipment destined for applications outside of the traditional film and broadcast arena.

Diversification

Whether driven by the need to invent or recognizing that the market for portable audio recorders would eventually become saturated, it was about this time that Kudelski begins to design and manufacture equipment destined for applications outside of the traditional film broadcast market. While he had designed a recorder for military applications as early as 1967 (called “Crevette”), 1971 would mark a significant departure in the direction of the company.

Fresh off the heels of the Nagra SNN and IV-S recorders, in 1972 Kudelski introduced the Nagra IV-SJ, a two channel instrumentation recorder aimed at scientific and industrial markets. Recognizing the application of the SNN recorder for law enforcement use, Kudelski also introduced the SNS, which was a half-track version of the SNN recorder. Recognizing the need for a more economical ¼” mono recorder for broadcast, in 1974 Kudelski introduced the Nagra IS, originally designed to be a single-speed mono recorder aimed at reporters. With a footprint and weight that was almost half that of the 4-Series recorders, this machine gained rapid acceptance by broadcasters who were looking for a high-quality, economical recorder. Like other Nagra products, variations of the basic recorder were soon to appear, which could provide Neopilot sync for film use, as well as two-speed operation. Two year later, the Nagra E was introduced, which was a further simplification of the IS recorder.

Despite the simplification of these products, both maintained the unique trademark characteristics of Kudelski’s design approach, and would never be mistaken for some mass-market cassette recorder.

Just the FAX Ma’am

While Kudelski was known worldwide for his unique audio design talents, somewhat less well known was his keen interest as both a sailor and aviation buff. In fact, Kudelski established “Air Nagra” in the 1960s, which operated a few Cessna twin-engine planes, used primarily to transport businessmen in the local area. Ever aware of the opportunity to bring a new product to market, in 1977 Kudelski would introduce the “NAGRAFAX,” a unique portable weather facsimile machine aimed at the maritime market. While the military had a similar system in use, the NAGRAFAX was aimed at the commercial and private yacht market, and also saw use in airports, ski resorts and coast guard stations. This product would mark Kudelski’s first departure from recording equipment.

1977 saw the introduction of yet another instrumentation recorder, the Nagra TI, which offered four channels of recording (as opposed to the two channels of the Nagra IV-SJ). It also boasted a unique dualcapstan transport, which minimized disturbances in the tape path, a critical design component when the recorders were employed in military operations. This transport would become the basis for the Nagra TA recorder introduced in 1981. Essentially, a two-channel analog version of the TI recorder, the Nagra TA had the unique ability to chase timecode in forward and reverse, and was specifically aimed at the telecine post market.

While the T Audio recorder boasted the most sophisticated transport design of any of the Nagra analog audio recorders, its complex logic circuits caused many users to shy away from it, except for telecine applications, where it had no rival. Despite this, it is still highly prized among audiophiles for its stellar tape-handling features.

Nagra and Ampex—Strange Bedfellows

The year 1983 would see an unlikely alliance take place, with Nagra and Ampex embarking on a joint venture to introduce a portable 1” Type-C video recorder aimed at the broadcast market. While Sony already had a small 1” video recorder on the market, in predicable fashion, the design efforts of Kudelski raised the bar significantly. Employing a lightweight transport and surface mount devices, the new recorder (dubbed the VPR-5) brought a level of sophistication to the broadcast video recorder market that has never been seen since. While the VPR-5 enjoyed a brief period of popularity (with 100 machines ordered for use at the 1986 Mexico World Cup), the everchanging “format wars” brought a premature end to its use.

Nagra and the Cold War

In yet another somewhat unlikely alliance, soon after the introduction of the VPR-5, Nagra joined with the Honeywell Corporation with the intent to produce a highly specialized recorder designed expressly for military use. However, this venture, which utilized all of Nagra’s R&D operations, never brought a product to market. The project was quickly abandoned after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The only remnant of the effort is a prototype recorder called the “RTU.” This would be the last project that Stefan Kudelski would be engaged with directly in an engineering capacity.

Despite this misstep, much was learned during the development of the RTU, and in 1992 Nagra introduced the Nagra D, a unique (and proprietary) four-channel digital recorder aimed at the film and music recording market. While the Nagra D gained some adherents, by this time Nagra had unfortunately begun to lose its dominance in film sound to DAT technology, which had begun to make inroads in the market while they were still distracted by the Honeywell venture. (In fact, Nagra never did produce a DAT recorder, moving directly from the Nagra D open-reel digital recorder to the introduction of the ARES-C tapeless digital recorder in 1995.)

Despite losing some market share in traditional film sound recording to new players, Kudelski continues to design and innovate. In 1997, they introduced a line of high-end audiophile components, starting with the PL-P vacuum tube preamplifier, and later incorporating the VPA mono-block tube power amplifier, as well as the MPA 250-watt MOSFET power amplifier.

Even further afield from the original focus of the company was establishment of a division devoted to pay-TV set-top boxes for CANAL+ in 1989. This would turn into a very successful growth operation for the company, and continues to be the main business of the firm.

Nagra Today

In 2002, Nagra introduced the Nagra V hard drive recorder, which was intended as the replacement for the Nagra 4 series analog recorders. However, despite the excellent design, by this time Nagra had some of its footing in the film recording market, overshadowed by the development of DAT recording in the 1980s, and the introduction of the Deva hard drive recorder in 1997. Nonetheless, Nagra still enjoys a significant share of the broadcast journalism market with products such as the ARES series solid-state recorders. Currently operated as a separate entity located in Romanel under the moniker of Audio Technology Switzerland, the firm continues to pursue the film recording market, with the introduction of the Nagra VI hard drive/CF card recorder in 2008. Stefan Kudelski’s son, André Kudelski, continues as CEO and Chairman of the firm.

Despite the changes in technology that have taken place in the intervening years since the introduction of the first Nagra recorder, every sound mixer “of a certain age” I’ve spoken with can still recall the first time they used a Nagra recorder. Likewise, the stylistic contributions made to the film business by Kudelski’s introduction of the Nagra are immeasurable. Films such as D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back would have simply been impossible to do without the aid of lightweight cameras and recorders. The entire French New Wave movement, led by directors such as Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard would arguably not even have existed without the aid of the Nagra recorder and Éclair camera. Thank you Mr. Kudelski for your marvelous invention.

The author wishes to thank Omar Milano for generously sharing the transcript of an interview he conducted with Mr. Kudelski. I am also grateful for the opportunity to have accepted the Wings Award on behalf of Mr. Kudelski at the Polish Film Festival in America in 2008. It was an honor.

© 2013 Scott D. Smith, CAS

Editors: We will present other articles in coming issues to explore the accomplishments of Stefan Kudelski. We invite members to submit stories and anecdotes of their experiences with the man and his recorders. Please send your anecdotes to: nagra@local695.com

Recording Les Misérables – Part 2: Implementing the Plans

by Simon Hayes AMPS
Photos by Laurie Sparham/Universal Pictures

Beginning my assignment on Les Misérables, I had some enviable, even unprecedented, advantages. I had support from the producers at Working Title Pictures and the Director, Tom Hooper, to use every resource available to achieve live recording of all the vocals without any ADR. And I had a crew of seven skilled associates to help achieve this goal, all handpicked from the best technicians I know, all excellent choices for their ability to work together as a team. But it still remained to coordinate with other departments and develop a plan for how this goal might be accomplished.

Meeting Supervising Music Editor Gerard McCann was the next step and a defining moment in the planning stage. Right away we agreed to join forces and merge his four-man department with my seven-man team. Whatever demarcation had existed, we relegated to history and agreed that the teams would share all the tasks of the daily technical grind including rigging, cabling and loading gear.

Music Supervisor Becky Bentham was also part of this first meeting. She is a legend in the UK film industry. Both Gerard and I had worked with her before and had great respect for her abilities.

The three of us discussed the project in detail and worked out a plan of attack. We would have two live pianists on set at all times. Both were part of Cameron Mackintosh’s team and had years of experience with the orchestrations of Les Mis. One pianist would work with the shooting crew and the other would be available at all times for warm-ups and rehearsal. Whichever one was on set that day would work inside a soundproofed plywood box fitted with ventilated Perspex windows so that the mechanical sound of the Korg electric keyboard would be confined. The player would wear headphones with an IFB feed of the vocal mix in one ear. The pianist was also fitted with a radio mike for direct communication with the actors via their “earwig” feed.

The piano would then be routed both to Pro Tools Rig #1 and also to the sound cart for transmission to the actors’ earpieces. Says Gerard McCann: “We had our live piano performing and three Pro Tools systems, operated by Music Editors Rob Houston, John Warhurst and myself. Simon was able to route that live piano feed into earpieces worn by the actors who were then able to sing to live accompaniment. Our Pro Tools systems had three roles: one was dedicated to playback for tracks that required a fixed tempo, like chorus material. For the larger crowd songs, we would record a rehearsal of the ensemble cast on set on the day, and use that as a playback for shooting so that the crowd could follow along singing in the correct tempo, and this live singing recorded by Simon. This was to allow Tom maximum freedom to use as much of this sometimes rough, raw, but very real sounding live chorus as he chose, together with additional layers he might record later in post. A second machine was dedicated to recording the live vocal and piano mixes from Simon, and the third was used to turn around this recorded material almost instantly for playback.”

In working out the production sound methodology, I was keen to stick to a comfortable workflow; this wasn’t the time to be introducing new or untested equipment into the recording chain. I needed to be using equipment that was second nature to me so my attention might be on capturing performance rather than technical issues.

I chose to gang together two Zaxcom Devas, one the Deva 16 and the other a Deva 5. This would give us 26 tracks. I would give the picture editor two mix tracks to use on his Avid timeline: Mix-1 had the vocals and the mono piano; Mix-2 had the vocals only, without the piano. This gave the editor the facility to adjust the blend of voice and accompaniment as needed.

We linked the two recorders together so they would have identical timecode. The Deva 16 had the two mix tracks plus isolated mikes on tracks 3–16. Machine 2’s ten tracks were all assigned to ISOs.

The two linked machines gave us a total of 24 tracks. Since we might need to use radio links for the two mono booms and the stereo boom, we were limited to 20 radio mikes. I already had two fantastic Audio Developments’ mixers with eight channels each. They were modified to supply either analog or digital signal on all the outputs so we were well equipped for 16 tracks. We reasoned that we would not need all available tracks recording the solo performers, only when recording the chorus, so we could connect directly to the Devas and use the front panel faders on those occasions.

I also ran a safety copy of the mix tracks on a 24-bit Nagra V in case of a hard disk failure on the primary machines. That covered us in the event of an equipment failure on a magical “perfect take.”

Running 20 radio microphones without any inter-channel modulation or interference is not easy. Luckily, the UK was in the middle of switching the legal film industry channels from one band to another to make way for digital television, and we took full advantage of the temporary window available to us to use both channel 38 and channel 69. As Gerard worked out the need for five different Comtek feeds—that’s right, five mixes—our special good fortune became more apparent. Our plan called for Mix-1 to be piano and vocals while Mix-2 would be piano only for members of the music department who needed to concentrate on that element. (Quite a few members of the music team kept two receivers on their belts so they could swap between these two mixes as they wished.)

Mix-3 would be vocal only for use by dialog coaches working on accents. The pianists also used this mix while listening to a direct feed from the electric piano in the other ear.

Mix-4 was a special mix that Tom Hooper and Danny Cohen required for themselves and the camera crew. The music was such a large part of the tempo and timing that the camera crew needed to hear the piano and voices to motivate their action. We added a talkback mike—a Shure SM58 with a transmitter—to permit Tom to communicate with camera operators and grips even during the takes.

Mix-5 was the boom operators’ headphone feed, much the same as Mix-4 but with my voice alongside the singing and piano instead of Tom’s. I was, of course, using the onboard talkback mike on my mixer rather than a handheld SM58. This permitted me to talk to the three boom ops throughout takes about lens sizes, shadows, etc. With the 20 radio mikes, five wireless headphone feeds and Tom’s SM58 transmitter, we would be using up to 26 separate frequencies at any time. The responsibility for wrangling all these frequencies fell to 1st Assistant Sound Robin Johnson. Without his skill and experience, I doubt we would have been able to run that many channels.

All of this equipment would live on two sound carts that could be moved around on location. We were becoming technically ready. The next step was to consider the “in-the-ear” monitors for the actors.

We considered several in-ear monitors and made a decision early on to use a traditional induction loop system over the newer radio systems. To fit within the ear, all of these systems are limited to a very small driver that severely limits sound quality. None of the present designs sound very good. Since the units with a built-in radio receiver offered no audio advantage, we couldn’t justify their extra expense particularly considering the number of units we would need. We concentrated our efforts into finding the best induction loop amplifiers and in optimizing the performance of the traditional design.

We confronted two problems with the available earwigs: their small driver size severely limited bandwidth and they were not very loud. An orchestra with a broad mixture of bass and high frequencies would confuse the tiny driver and the output became muddled. We found the problem was less acute using the Korg electric keyboard as its output is simpler and tends toward the midrange. The pianists were a great help with this by adjusting their play accordingly. We also adjusted the EQ settings on the keyboard to suit the earwigs.

The loudness issue was not so easily resolved. These earpieces were originally designed to assist people with hearing difficulties, not to be used as a reference while singing “Who Am I?” or “I Dreamed a Dream” at the top of one’s voice. We contacted the manufacturer and they were very helpful and supplied us with louder units. We also had them come out and make ear casts of each principal actor to supply them with custom-fitted earpieces both left and right. This helped in several ways. The custom earwigs fit deeper in the ear canal and were less visible to camera. Also, a precise fit ensured that the earpiece was optimally positioned, and its tiny outlet hole unblocked, so it could deliver its maximum output. Having both left- and right-fitted earpieces also gave the option for using both if an actor were struggling to hear. This was really a last resort because it would interfere with the actors hearing their own vocals.

We decided early on not to feed vocals into the earwigs both because of the frequency response issues and also because we would forever be discussing individual preferences on the balance between vocals and piano. This would present an impossible situation because we could only provide one earwig mix on the induction loop. But there are always exceptions—on “I Dreamed a Dream” Anne came to me after the first take and asked to wear both earwigs with the piano as loud as possible and a tiny amount of her own vocal added. Since she was singing a solo, and we didn’t need to provide earwigs to others, we were able to accommodate her.

For a couple of monumentally challenging sequences, Tom staged two actors at locations hundreds of yards apart, harmonizing together in real time but shot with separate cameras. In those instances, we fed their vocals to their earwigs so they could keep pace with one another. This created much hilarity on set as Hugh and Russell realized they could communicate with each other and began comparing progress on the setup and which camera crew might be ready first. There were other exceptions to our no-vocals-in-the-earwigs rule but we generally tried to keep the playback practice as simple as possible.

With recorders, track assignments, piano accompaniment and earpiece distribution worked out, Gerard McCann and I had a good plan for recording the vocals. But we needed to meet with Orchestrator and Music Producer Anne Dudley and her team to confirm that our efforts would meet her needs. We met her and Music Supervisor Becky Bentham at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. They told us that their engineers would like to hear the mikes we intended to use so we set up some test sessions. The Neumann U87 is the standard condenser microphone in a music studio. Its accuracy is unexcelled and its large diaphragm produces a smooth response to rapid transient changes. The music studio also offers acoustic excellence and the ability to place the microphone in optimum position. No location recording plan we might devise would ever be able to equal that performance. But the live recording offers the advantage of immediacy and an emotional link to the acting so the operative question was whether the fidelity of our system would meet listening expectations.

I chose the Schoeps Super CMITs for our boom operators. These new microphones use DSP noise-canceling technology to reject off-axis background sound. This capability is a great advantage but demands a high level of skill from the boom operator. When the Schoeps were used in testing it became clear that, if they were in an optimum position, the kind possible while shooting a close-up, they could compete on a level playing field with the music studio mikes.

We also tested the DPA lavaliers and Lectrosonics radio mikes. In my opinion, the DPA matches the Schoeps Super CMIT more closely than any lavalier I’ve heard. During the demo at Abbey Road, the engineers, despite initial skepticism, were suitably impressed. They felt they were getting approximately 60 percent of the quality of a Neumann U87 when I believe they were expecting much less. When you consider that the studio mike is placed on a stand in the best possible position while the DPA is rigged on the actor’s chest, that is an excellent result.

Paco Delgado, the Costume Designer, was extremely helpful and collaborative in this process. To hide the lavalier mikes, he and his team supplied us with the necessary cuts of fabric from each costume and also allowed us to make the holes needed to hide cables. He encouraged us to take the lavalier rigging to a level that enabled us to record absolutely clean singing with no clothing rustle. As we started shooting, it became clear that the process of mic’ing the cast was far more time-consuming than on a “normal” film not just because of the need to match fabrics but also because there were so many radio mikes used.

It’s always my aim to deliver as natural a dynamic range as possible so I was in full agreement with the engineers’ request that we not use any compression or limiters in the recording chain. To make the full 24-bit dynamic range available, this meant not only refraining from using or tripping limiters in the equipment but also not riding gain during the take. We used the Lectrosonics transmitters at a very low-gain setting to ensure that limiters would never be engaged. Historically, the higher gain setting needed with radio mikes to stay above artifacts meant that limiters were needed to prevent overloads with louder signals. The ability of the current generation of Lectrosonics’ gear to capture clean signal at lower settings, even with whispered delivery, was impressive and a key reason we were able to take on the project. By agreement between the Music Department and the Sound Department, we used no limiters or EQ anywhere while recording Les Misérables.

With everyone in agreement on the methodology, we turned our attention to the challenges of recording live singing on a movie set. We had to consider the scale of the Paris street scenes and how to manage them. Tom asked me if I would prefer to shoot the exteriors on a soundstage or on location. I knew that Tom wanted to shoot the scenes, some as long as 14 minutes, from start to finish without a cut. I didn’t see how this would be possible outdoors in a modern, aircraft-infested environment but the only stage large enough for the planned scenes, the 007 stage at Pinewood, is not really a soundstage and has poor acoustics. Just a few weeks into preproduction, Tom contacted me to tell me about a new stage being built in Pinewood—the Richard Attenborough Stage—that would be the biggest in the UK. (After our good fortune with the transitional availability of radio frequencies, we began to think someone upstairs was smiling on our project.)

Eve Stewart, the Production Designer, asked me about ways that set design could help with Tom’s vision of a live musical. I commented that for live sound we wanted reality. If they are in shot, the cobbles should be real cobbles, the oak door frames should be real oak, so that any sounds we picked up would be as authentic as possible. She took my suggestion and filled every inch of the 30,000-square-foot stage with sets built with the characteristics of permanent structures.

Our interest in solid oak and stone applied only to areas seen in the shots; outside what the cameras saw we tried to make the set and crew sonically disappear. Our efforts extended even to fitting rubber shoes on all the horses’ hooves.

For Eponine’s number, “A Little Fall of Rain,” we faced the additional challenge of recording the entire number in the rain. We worked with the Special Effects Department to get the best possible rain that would show on camera without drowning the mikes or making too much noise. We covered every part of the set not seen by the camera, every rooftop and every piece of floor, with rubberized horsehair to deaden the raindrops. We had an entire truckload of horsehair delivered to Pinewood. We also had a horsehair cover to provide quiet protection for the camera and asked the camera technicians to wear black “Bolton” cloth (Duvateen) ponchos over their Gore-Tex to soak up the sound of the water hitting. We even had a second boom operator shadow the primary boom with a horsehair roof on the end of his boom pole to shield the primary mike. That was the attention to detail that we exercised and it was possible because of an outstanding seven-man team. With a truck full of rubber-backed carpet, this team padded every dolly track and every walk-and-talk to keep the set as quiet as possible and recovered the carpets as soon as the shot was completed so they never held up the shooting. These efforts paid off not just by reducing noise from footfalls but they helped to deaden sound reflections throughout the set and augmented the many sound blankets we hung for that purpose.

Wind to flutter hair and costumes is a necessary element to create the illusion that players are outside and not on a set. Traditionally, large fans or wind machines provide this but they are quite noisy and compel ADR whenever they’re used. We coordinated with the FX Department to place the wind machines outside the stage and pipe-in the wind through flexible air-conditioning hose. The mikes didn’t pick up the sound of the electric motors at all, just the sound of moving air that mimicked the sound of actual wind. And, since its frequency fell outside of normal voices, it could be effectively removed in post.

After all the technical planning, we were ready to put our methodology to the test. The film had engaged the actors for an eightweek rehearsal period directly prior to shooting. Such a lengthy rehearsal period isn’t the norm but Les Mis was a complex project. I felt it important for the whole sound crew to be involved from the beginning but there was a move to exclude us. I can certainly understand the budget implications of adding a large sound crew for an extra eight weeks. And, the performers can be self-conscious as they develop their performances. Working with playback or with a piano accompaniment will mask errors in pitch or delivery but singing a cappella leaves every performance mercilessly exposed. I could understand the reluctance but I felt it important that everyone become committed to the live recording protocols from the beginning. I worried that, after eight weeks of rehearsal with the blanket of protection afforded by an amplified piano, the cast might balk at the introduction of the earwigs on the first day of shooting. If they felt they couldn’t work without the live piano, the whole plan of live recording would founder. We needed the collaboration between Cast and Sound to begin on the first day of rehearsals.

I also felt that the long rehearsal period was important to more than just the cast. I wanted to use earwigs and radio mikes on every rehearsal so that the Pianists, Roger Davison and Jennifer Whyte, could become comfortable with the process of working within a sound booth and following the pace of the singers from their own headphones. And, I wanted the practice time for the Sound Department so that we might become familiar with the songs, the staging, the head turns, the extremes in dynamics, and work out solutions to the challenges in advance. Sometimes a single performer would need two mikes, one on each side or one close to the mouth and one lower, to handle these variables.

Even more important than the technical issues was the opportunity to become acquainted with the cast and earn their trust that we would deliver quality recordings of their live performances. I pressed these points with the producers and with Tom and eventually we were invited to participate.

By the end of the rehearsal period, the cast was completely unfazed by using the earwigs and having direct communication with the pianists through their lavaliers. They would arrive at our sound carts upon entering the rehearsal stage to ask for their mikes and earwigs before proceeding to the set and enjoyed being able to communicate directly with the pianists without raising their voices to draw the pianists’ attention.

It was going well but we were developing a new process and everyone, Tom Hooper, the Producers, the Music Department and our own Sound Department, wanted a test to confirm that it would all work through editing and mixing to a final product. The “Red and Black” number performed by the students in the café was a good selection for our test. With multiple solo lines from the cast and an ensemble of about 20 students, it provided a taste of most of the circumstances we would encounter throughout the film. From the beginning, I had requested that rehearsals take place in the proper acoustic environment so that we might make test recordings and check the results later through studio monitors. Consequently, our rehearsal space was a proper soundstage at Pinewood that was suitable for a film test. Tom decided to shoot the test with a full camera crew and three 35mm cameras.

The test shoot proved challenging, exciting and interesting. Although Tom had discussed the visual style he had worked out with DP Danny Cohen, nothing quite prepared me for his singleminded enthusiasm for shooting every take all the way through from beginning to end. For the sake of performance and energy, Tom would shoot numbers in their entirety so I needed to be ready at all times. For me this meant multi-tracking and mixing 20 mikes on every take from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. It was mentally demanding; I had to find a zone and stay focused. My own mixing improved with the constant practice but that was a small benefit as we always intended to remix from the ISO tracks in post. More importantly, the boom operators thoroughly learned the intricacies of every move by both cameras and cast members and became adept at following the singers exactly. Since the long takes forced a camera reload for nearly every take, my crew had an opportunity to act on every little problem revealed by the previous take. Carpet placement could be optimized, a cast member standing on a squeaky floorboard could be shifted slightly and chorus or extras that were whispering when they should have been miming, could be advised. (Many members of the chorus ensemble came from a theater background where ad-libs would enhance the performance. It took awhile before they became comfortable with the understanding that film editing needed consistent, i.e. silent, backgrounds.)

Silencing the ad-libs and background action was a huge undertaking that continued throughout the movie and was a constant negotiation with Tom. He liked the way the ad-libs tended to increase energy in the performances and used them to motivate the soloists to project their singing to rise above the clutter. But I maintained that working this way would force ADR when the adlibs and chatter didn’t match in the cuts. Tom understood; while he encouraged active participation in the rehearsals, he recorded the takes with mimed background action.

We finished the test shoot and I was mentally and physically wiped out. It had been the most challenging day I had ever recorded and it dawned on me that we had 70 days of this in front of us, many without the comfort and acoustic security of a soundstage. Every single day would require immense focus and energy from all of us. We got word very quickly as the test was edited and orchestrated that the vocal recordings were a complete success. Everyone was incredibly euphoric that our workflow had been proved not just possible but hugely successful. There were lots of extremely happy producers after the test.

I’m glad I experienced the test before we started shooting because it gave me a chance to prepare myself for an incredibly demanding shoot. The first part of the shoot was a reduced unit in the French Alps shooting Valjean (Hugh Jackman) traveling on foot from the port to the Bishop’s chapel. We arrived and the 1st Assistant Director told me Tom had chosen a location on the highest mountain peak and it was impossible to access it in vehicles. He asked me to go ‘handheld’ because carrying the kit up the mountain would be impossible. I told him that I wasn’t prepared to compromise sound quality in any way and we set about carrying my 180-pound sound cart up the mountain. It took four men nearly an hour to make a 20-minute trip across the boulder-strewn pass. It was a Herculean effort but we arrived at the summit with all the equipment—the proper D/A converters, the big mixing panel, the high-gain antennas—we needed to do a first-class job. It was just this kind of single-minded purpose and resistance to compromise that got us great production tracks.

Quickly, we learned from Tom and the 1st AD exactly where Hugh would be walking and singing and we set about running a battery-powered induction loop under the rocks. With Tom and Hugh’s permission, we had prerecorded the piano track in rehearsals. If Hugh was comfortable setting a pace in rehearsal, we could run playback from a Mac laptop using Audacity rather than take a piano and Pro Tools up the mountain. Valjean was to walk across the summit covered by a single handheld camera. Arthur, my Key 1st Assistant Sound, asked if he could work with a radio boom to help with the uneven surface at the summit. I asked that he remain on a cable for every shot apart from a 360-degree pan so we might minimize radio electronics in the boom signal chain and maximize sound quality. We fitted Hugh with two radio mikes, one tight and one slightly wider. Tom asked us to shoot the rehearsal so I had no idea of the volume to expect. As Tom, Arthur and the camera crew tracked with Hugh and he began to sing, it became clear we were capturing something magical. I quickly listened to the ISO tracks and decided that Arthur’s boom with the Super CMIT was the best sounding track. Due to the tight headroom Tom was maintaining, it was in a perfect position 10 inches above Hugh’s head. I concentrated my attention on Arthur’s boom track in subsequent takes. There was no background noise apart from Hugh’s wooden clogs and his walking stick tapping the granite. They were not compromising the vocal performance and I decided not to bother Hugh about them so he might get on with his acting.

I should add that before shooting, I spoke with Tom, the DP and the camera crew and told them, “Guys, I know you aren’t going to like this and I know we are in freezing temperatures up a mountain but, if this is going to work, I need you all to take off your Gore-Tex trousers and, if you are tracking with the action, just wear your jeans. Otherwise, all I am going to record is the swooshing of Gore-Tex.” This was one of those moments where all the talking about the importance of sound quality and performance was truly put to the test and it was time to see if the crew really understood what that meant. One by one they duly removed their Gore-Tex trousers.

When we arrived home from France and started setting up to shoot in Pinewood Studios, I went to watch dailies at Editorial. I viewed on an Avid machine through near field studio monitors. It was just the raw mix track which in this case was the boom only. As I saw Valjean walk wearily across the mountain range and into a close-up, I could hear his breathlessness due to the altitude and see the fog from his breath on screen. As he started to sing with such fragility from the effect of the altitude, it sounded so real. I was completely spellbound and I knew in that moment that we were creating something special. Never before had I experienced such a connection while watching a musical. As we shot, it became clear to us that we needed to be flexible and use the best method available to record each scene. Scenes like the factory women singing “At the End of the Day” were staged with multiple solos and hard light that made swinging booms to each player difficult. Those scenes were best recorded on radio mikes with the booms playing a secondary role and the stereo boom serving to add dimension to the radio mikes used on the chorus. That was also the technique used for “Lovely Ladies” but for Hugh Jackman’s “Who Am I?” and Anne Hathaway’s “I Dreamed a Dream” and Eddie Redmayne’s “Empty Tables and Empty Chairs,” the boom was the primary recording device.

On “I Dreamed a Dream,” we were shooting with three cameras and, from the first take it became clear that Anne was going to clutch her chest during the emotive parts of the performance. Of course, that was right where the lavalier was placed. To ask her not to do this action, a part of her instinctive body language during the scene, would have been to stifle the truth and honesty in the performance. After the first take, I told Tom that we couldn’t rely on the radio mike any longer and had to get the boom closer. The “A” camera was shooting a close-up, “B” camera was shooting a wider close-up with the same top-line but “C” camera was shooting a classic wide with three feet of headroom. I reasoned that it was unlikely the wide shot would be used for long and the boom could be painted out if necessary, so I asked Tom if he would permit us to bring the boom into the wide shot. The VFX supervisor was present and instantly said, “The shot is static. If you just keep the boom out while the clapper board is going on before the performance starts, we will get a clear piece of the background needed to matte the boom out.” It was this kind of instant answer and collaborative teamwork that enabled Tom to make quick decisions and keep shooting.

The boom was also invaluable on all the sewer scenes where the radios would have become waterlogged. One of my favorite songs in the movie, “Empty Tables and Empty Chairs,” sounds beautiful on the boom and that was possible because all three cameras were shooting close-ups from different angles so the headroom was the same.

Recording singing differs from recording dialog in that the acoustics on singing need to be the same throughout. It would be wrong to have the wide shots sounding “wide” and the close-ups sounding “close” because when the orchestral music is added, the balance of music and vocal would change shot by shot. This would draw attention to the shifts in camera angle. Yet while recording dialog, it is generally accepted that an acoustic change matching shots of differing sizes actually helps a scene to sound real to the audience. For singing, whatever mikes are used must be in a close and uniform position throughout the song.

It is possible to use slightly different widths of mike placement as long as there isn’t a noticeable acoustic shift. We often used two radio mikes on an actor if their performance required extreme dynamic range and I would rig one lavalier close to the mouth to get a very closely mic’d performance on the whispers, but another lavalier five or six inches further away to pick up the louder pieces while sounding a little more open. Of course, the mikes were recorded on separate tracks so the dialog editor had a choice depending on what sounded better in the final context of the scene, once orchestration had been added.

Another break in filmmaking tradition was bringing a dialog editor, the extremely skilled Tim Hands, aboard just a few weeks into shooting. He was based at Pinewood while we were shooting and I was in constant contact with him daily explaining how we covered scenes, which tracks I thought were best and pointing out any issues I thought he needs to know. It was his job to clean and edit the vocals on Pro Tools. He was extremely subtle in his work and mindful of Tom’s admonition to not remove anything that would diminish the audience connection to the actor. He concentrated on removing background noises that had nothing to do with the on-screen performance. When a scene was starting to take shape in the Avid, the Picture Editing Department would give Tim the EDL and he would give them a bounce back of the edited audio from my ISO tracks. This meant that Tim was often working on a scene many times as the picture editor and Tom made changes but it also had the valuable ‘knock on’ effect of immersing Tim in the material so that he became completely familiar with all of it. When Alastair Sirkett joined him in the post-production process, this intimate familiarity helped him get the best from the recordings and the pair of them delivered an outstanding finished product.

After the film techniques clean up, the tracks pass to John Warhurst, the Music and Sound Editor. He went through them using music industry technique to make them sound their best going into the final mix. This process exemplifies the special collaborative workflow for this movie. Supervising Music Editor Gerard McCann pointed out at the beginning of our planning that the skills and objectives of a film dialog editor and those of a music vocal editor are very different. For instance, a music editor would be working out of his usual skill set if presented with generator noise or lighting hum while a dialog editor would not be at home adding reverb to enhance vocals. An oversimplification but because the vocals on Les Mis were essentially a crossover of both mediums, we needed to make sure they benefited fully from each methodology.

Although Re-recording Mixer Andy Nelson’s main contribution comes at the very end of the process, his involvement began at the conception. He has extensive experience in musicals including work on Evita and Phantom of the Opera. Tom Hooper was familiar with his work on Alan Parker’s The Commitments, a project that featured some live recording to a prerecorded backing track, so he sought out Andy when he was first considering live recording for Les Mis. Andy confirmed the success of the live recording on The Commitments and encouraged Tom to take on the larger challenge of Les Misérables.

Tom encouraged me to contact Andy Nelson when I was first hired. Gerard McCann and I had a long conference call with him to discuss workflow and methodology, check that he agreed with our plans and receive any advice he might offer. We kept in contact thereafter and he regularly listened to and commented on material as we worked.

Andy was particularly keen on not using EQ or compressors and limiters in the recording chain. He also asked that processing done by the dialog and music editors be “virtual” so that changes could be reversed and the material returned to a raw state at the touch of a button. He wanted to have complete control at the final mix where all the elements of score, sound effects, Foley and vocals could be evaluated together and judged as a whole.

For instance, he wanted us to avoid using plug-ins to clean up camera noise because they often have a slight effect on the vocal tone and he thought that the orchestration might effectively hide the camera noise.

Jonathan Allen, a Re-recording Mixer from Abbey Road Studios, was also generous with help and advice throughout the project. He worked on the orchestrations in Post but also joined me on days with big chorus ensembles and assisted both with advice and mike placement.

The whole project was a collaborative project from the outset. It set out to bring to the audience the in-the-moment emotions and the live singing of the cast. The success of that endeavor demonstrates what can be accomplished with everyone working together.

Cameron Mackintosh offered daily support and input for the project. He commented that “Music, if used correctly, should pull the heartstrings.” I believe that the filming of Les Misérables, as envisioned by Tom Hooper and with the support of Producers Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan, Debra Hayward and Sir Cameron Mackintosh, and each and every crew and cast member, really does “pull the heart strings.” It was a fantastic piece of work.

by Scott D. Smith, CAS

This piece is a continuation of the article from the winter 2011 issue of the 695 Quarterly, which examined the early beginnings of Local 695. For those who toiled behind the scenes at the various studios during the mid-to-late 1930s, times were tumultuous. With the economy still reeling from the effects of the 1929 stock market crash, and unemployment in the double digits, Hollywood was not exempt from the crisis that gripped the rest of the nation. With much at stake for both workers and producers alike, a fierce (and bloody) battle ensued for the control of craft unions engaged in film production. In the end, the studios would be the ultimate winners, but there was no shortage of embarrassing moments for both sides.

While much ink has been spilled pertaining to charges of influence peddling during this period, I have tried to steer clear of any conjecture. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and should not be construed as representative of the IATSE.

1935

Still reeling from the effects of the strike actions of 1933, Local 695 (and the IATSE West Coast locals in general) continued in their quest to negotiate a contract with producers. It was tough going. IBEW Local 40 continued to be a thorn in the side of 695, and they had lost a significant number of members to IBEW as a result. With membership dwindling and the possible extinction of the West Coast locals looming large, the International played the only card they had left—bring in the boys from Chicago.

The Chicago Connection

George E. Browne began his show business career in Chicago, having been elected in 1932 as the head of Stagehands Local 2. His assistant and right-hand man was one William “Willie” Bioff, who had an illustrious career as a small-time criminal, running prostitution and minor protection rackets in Chicago’s Levee district.

In the early 1930s, after hitting up a local theater chain for $20,000 in exchange for labor peace, Bioff and Browne went to a local club to celebrate their coup. It was during this drunken outing they had the misfortune of running into a gentleman by the name of Nick Circella, a member of Frank Nitti’s gang, who, along with Al Capone, controlled much of the Chicago mob during the Prohibition years. With the end of Prohibition in 1933 causing a severe dent in their cash flow, the Syndicate needed to come up with some creative ways to keep their empire afloat. The film business suited their needs perfectly. Bioff and Browne were subsequently invited to join the organization. The only acceptable answer was “yes.” Using his position as head of Local 2, Browne was able to exert control over local theater owners by threatening action by the projectionists.

Industry cartoon from the 1930s. From The Story of the Hollywood Film Strike in Cartoons. Cartoons by Gene Price, book by Jack Kistner. From the collection of Dr. Andrea Siegel.

During this period, most of the major theater chains were still owned by the studios. In 1934, Browne, with the backing of the Chicago mob, ran in an uncontested election to head the International. Bioff, as his right-hand man, would accompany him to New York.

Having managed to seize control of the International, Bioff and Browne then went to the heads of Hollywood studios, threatening to disrupt the operations of studio-owned theaters unless they bowed to their demands.

Studio heads, having just lived through an expensive halt in production, were anxious to avoid any more labor problems. A previous, albeit brief, projectionists strike in Chicago had already cost the studios a significant amount of money and they didn’t relish the thought of further disruptions in either production or exhibition.

Studios Go Closed Shop Jan. 2

Thus read the headlines in the December 16, 1935, issue of Variety. After months of wrangling with the National Labor Relations Board and IBEW Local 40 over jurisdiction of soundmen, Local 695 and the International managed to regain representation of studio workers for most crafts.

This was a major coup on the part of the International, and brought at least 4,000 members back into the folds of the IATSE. While the tactics associated with this action would come back to haunt them, it did, at least for the time being, put the question of representation to rest. The move apparently caught many by surprise, including the cameramen, who just 10 days previously were still trying to sign members of camera Local 659 into the ASC guild.

However, the closed shop conditions did not remain in place very long. By April of 1939, the leaders of the International announced the return of an open shop policy on studio lots. This move was designed to head off a looming battle over charges that the IATSE was acting in collusion with producers to control labor rates and conditions.

1936—The Deal

In 1936, with the events the previous year still looming large in his mind, Joseph Schenck, head of 20th Century Fox, as well as the producers’ liaison for the Hollywood majors, was called to a meeting in New York with Willie Bioff and George Browne. At that meeting, Bioff declared that “I’m the boss—I elected Mr. Browne—and I want from the movie industry $2 million.” Schenck, astounded by the demand, began to protest, but Bioff warned him: “Stop this nonsense. It will cost you a lot more if you don’t do it.”

Two days later, at a second meeting, Bioff took him aside and confided: “Maybe $2 million is a little too much… I decided I’ll take a million.” In the end, Schenck agreed to pony up $50,000 a year from each of the majors and $25,000 from the smaller studios. Mr. Schenck later took a small bundle containing $50,000 in large bills to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, dropped it on a bed, and looked out the window. Sidney R. Kent, president of Twentieth Century-Fox Film, came in and did likewise.

A year later, Schenck received another call from Bioff, and repeated the routine. This would continue until May of 1941, at which point Bioff and Browne were indicted and found guilty of extortion in federal court. They were subsequently given sentences of eight and ten years respectively, along with a fine of $20,000. Richard Walsh took over as President of the International. Joseph Schenck, for his part in the scandal, received a sentence of a year and a day, but received a Presidential pardon after serving four months. When faced with charges for his participation in the scandal, Nitti put two .32 caliber bullets in his head while standing in a suburban rail yard. Bioff, not long after his release, was blown up, along with his car, in the driveway of his home in Phoenix. Thus came to an end one of the most scandal-ridden periods in the history of the IATSE.

Local 695 Survives

While the actions of Bioff and Browne brought disgrace to the IATSE, the members of the individual locals continued in their fight for fair wages and working conditions. This effort on the part of the members would result in a new, more democratic IATSE Constitution. In addition, to their credit, some members spoke out against the rigged election of Browne as head of the International. For their trouble, they were frequently subject to beating by Bioff’s henchmen and “blacklisted” from working.

Tommy Malloy (no angel himself), who headed Projectionists Local 110 in Chicago, was one of those who had protested the influence of the mob during the wildcat projectionists strike of 1935. In response, his Packard, with him at the wheel, was riddled with machine-gun fire on Lake Shore Drive. The message was clear to both studio owners and union employees alike: go along with the program, or face the consequences.

With the issue of jurisdiction settled, at least for the time being, Local 695 went back to the task of organizing its membership, and signing up new members who worked in areas related to sound recording and reproduction. This included not only production sound and re-recording crews, but maintenance technicians and theater sound personnel, as well as those working at laboratory facilities.

One such group was the engineers and technicians who worked for ERPI (Electrical Research Products, Inc.), which was the engineering arm of Western Electric. Most of these men were part of the Western Electric engineering group which handled installation of sound equipment in studio facilities, and the installation and maintenance of theater sound equipment provided by Western Electric. Local 695 had previously signed many of the men who worked for RCA Photophone, and the signing of the ERPI engineers in June of 1936 further bolstered their ranks.

While these hard-won gains helped to establish Local 695 as the primary bargaining agent for production and re-recording soundmen, they would continue the fight for the representation of all soundmen working at theaters and laboratory facilities well into December of 1936.

1937

While Local 695 continued in its efforts to organize those working in sound-related crafts, the fight to maintain representation of soundmen was far from over. On April 30th of 1937, the Federation of Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC) staged a surprise walkout. The FMPC was essentially a coalition of unions under the leadership of Jeff Kibre and covered about 6,000 members in various crafts, including art directors, costume designers, lab engineers, technical directors, set designers, scenic artists, hair and makeup artists, painters, plasterers, cooks and plumbers.

Kibre was a second-generation studio worker. His mother, a divorcée who had moved from Philadelphia in 1908, worked in the art department of some of the studios. After studying English at UCLA, and failing in his bid to become a screenwriter, Kibre joined Local 37 and took a job as a prop maker. He was reportedly a likable man and had a talent for making those around him feel as though he understood their problems. He was also an avowed Marxist and Communist, but apparently did not follow the party line, preferring to make his own determinations as to the correct course of action. As such, the Communist Party leadership refused to support his actions, which left him on periphery when it came to organizing.

While the April 30th walkout against the studios eventually failed, Kibre was not totally out of the picture. With the help of attorney Carey McWilliams, Kibre reorganized under the banner of the IATSE Progressives, and began a campaign to investigate the mob ties of the International.

While Kibre’s efforts to clear the IATSE of mob influence may have been laudatory, his ties (however loose) to the Communist Party ultimately worked against him. To his credit, however, Kibre’s actions led to the resignation of Willie Bioff, and well as the end of the 2% assessment fee levied on all members of the IATSE by George Browne after he had been installed as head of the International.

In the end, Kibre’s attempt to organize various crafts failed amidst the continued allegations of Communist influence, which were picked up on and exploited by the media during the late ’30s and early ’40s. He also received numerous death threats during this period, to the extent that he required a personal bodyguard around the clock. Despite his failure at fully organizing studio workers, he did manage to negotiate a deal to leave town if the IATSE leadership agreed not to persecute the membership of the democratically oriented United Studio Technicians Guild. Upon his departure, Kibre went to work for the CIO fishermen’s union.

Unfortunately, the media attention surrounding Kibre’s Communist Party affiliation provided a further distraction for the studios to exploit, serving to deflect attention from their own role in influencing labor negotiations, as well as their mob ties. This unfortunate scenario played right into the hands of the producers, who were only too happy to instigate any unrest within the labor movement.

It was probably due in part to this unwarranted attention (along with Jeff Kibre’s continued actions against the IATSE) that the membership of Local 695 took the unprecedented position to vote against the autonomous local leadership during a meeting held on December 22, 1937. Apparently, members felt that they had a better chance of maintaining their current wage structure (paltry as it was), if they let the International handle bargaining with the producers.

It wasn’t until a contentious three-hour meeting, held nine months later on September 16th of 1938, that more than 400 members of Local 695 would finally nominate a new set of officers to the Local, thereby returning control to the officers and members (although the actual election was deferred until the 28th of the month). Likewise, three other key IA locals (Camera Local 659, Laboratory Technicians Local 683, and Studio Mechanics Local 37), also voted to return control of their unions to local leadership. Once again, Harold Smith was voted business representative for Local 695.

The question of certification of Local 695 as the exclusive bargaining agent for soundmen, which was initially filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on October 12th of 1937, would continue to drag on into 1939, with no clear resolution.

Keeping Score—A Look at Wages

Given the current economic times we are living in, it is instructive to make a quick comparison of wages during the late 1930s. Below is an illustration of what a sound crew might expect to make on studio-based productions after new wage scales were put into effect in April of 1937, with equivalent comparisons to 2010.

Clearly, nobody was getting rich at these wages, especially when one takes into account that only very few of those members working in 1937 would be fortunate enough to work 42 weeks a year.

In comparison, it was reported in the September 17th issue of Variety that director Frank Capra received a salary of $100,000 each for three pictures, two bonuses of $50,000 each, plus 25% of the profits. While Capra was certainly an exception, director Rouben Mamoulian was reported to make $50,000 per picture, which is still nothing to sneer at.

Likewise, it is interesting to note that in September of 1938, Technicolor reported gross earnings for the first eight months of $862,612 (approximately $13.2M in 2010 dollars), which was nearly double the earnings for the same period in 1937. Somebody was making money—despite a national economy that was still faltering. (The national unemployment rate in 1937 stood at 14.3%, rising to 19.0% in 1938.)

It is therefore understandable when stories such as these hit the press, some crew members who toiled long hours in production might begin to feel that they were being taken advantage of. A similar parallel exists today when comparing the salaries of corporate CEOs to those of the workers who produce value for their companies.

1939 and Beyond

After having just approved the return to autonomous control of Local 695 by its newly elected board in September of 1938, the members would reverse this decision six months later. Fearful of losing the gains that had been made over the past years in wages and working conditions, the membership felt that the only leverage they had with studio management was the threat of a walkout by the projectionists.

Therefore, the members of 695 (along with Business Agent and International West Coast rep Harold Smith) felt letting the International handle the bargaining for a new Studio Basic Agreement would offer greater leverage than what they might be able to muster on their own. However, in a nod to local membership, it was agreed that any contract negotiated by the International would be ratified by the membership of the individual locals.

While the tactic of having the International control the negotiations may have been a good move in the short run (it took a threatened walkout of projectionists on April 16th of 1939 to even get producers to agree to come to the table), ultimately it placed a lot of power in the hands of the International, which at this time was still headed up by George Browne.

However, despite the events that would take place in federal court two years later, it is probably fair to say that Local 695, as well as most of the West Coast IATSE locals, would have not been able to survive the union-busting tactics of producers without having the projectionists support them. While some of the tactics employed by IA leaders during this period may be questionable, one must also remember that the studios employed their own set of “goon squads” which were equally unsavory in their tactics.

Ultimately, the greed of studio bosses was the factor that forced the rank-and-file membership of craft unions (regardless of their affiliation) to vote for measures that they might otherwise think twice about. Surely, most members of 695 would not have willingly handed over control of their local to the International unless they felt that was the only option left open to them.

While both the International and individual locals have to share some of the blame for the events that took place during this time period, if studio bosses had come to the bargaining table instead of trying to circumvent the rights of workers, things may have turned out differently.

© 2011 Scott D. Smith, CAS

by Jim Tanenbaum, CAS

NOTE: At the bottom of this online article, you will find the Appendix that is referenced here and in the print edition of the 695 Quarterly.

If you haven’t read David Waelder’s excellent articles in the last two issues of this magazine, please do so at once. In my 44 years of mixing, I’ve watched radio mikes evolve from almost unusable to amazingly reliable, but they still require a knowledgeable sound person to perform properly. David’s information is exactly what is needed, and I would like to add a few more points. Also, the other end of the system (transmitter and mike) needs some explaining too.

RECEIVERS

The directional characteristics of log-periodic (sometimes erroneously called “Yagi”) antennas are different in the vertical and horizontal planes. (Log-periodic antennas are wideband; Yagis are fixed frequency – see Sections 3.1 and 3.2 in the online Appendix.) They are more directional in the plane of the elements, thus, when the antenna is mounted with the elements vertical (as it usually is), the gain falls off more rapidly at about 30 degrees to 45 degrees above and below the horizontal. This is desirable because the actors are not often located high above the ground. The horizontal pattern is much broader, sometimes down only 5-6 dB at ± 90 degrees. As a result, it is not necessary to “track” the actors with the antenna if they move slightly, as I have seen some people do. (Note that TV antennas are oriented horizontally, because of the need to precisely aim them at the TV station’s transmitting antenna, and to reduce reflected signals from other directions – “ghosting”, although that is no longer so much of a problem with digital TV.)

If you have an interfering signal, you can swing the receiver’s antenna and try to null it out. Chances are, the actor will still be within the front lobe of the antenna’s pattern. If not, you can relocate the antenna to get the actor ‘in front’ of it while keeping the interference in the lowest gain direction. This works better than reorienting the antenna horizontally because the null is no deeper, and now the actor may have to be tracked. Important: the greatest null direction is not directly to the sides or rear of the antenna’s the pattern is more like a hyper-cardioid or short shotgun mike’s, at about 135 degrees rearward to the left and right. When you have some free time, set up a transmitter in a fixed position and then rotate the receiver antenna while watching the receiver’s signal strength meter. This will give you a feeling for your particular antenna’s pattern. Be sure to do this outside in an open area, so reflections won’t confuse the results. And, if you have more time, move the transmitter to another location and repeat the procedure. Check for the front acceptance angle as well as the location of the rearward nulls on both sides.

Circularly-polarized antennas are indeed good at receiving signals that have had their polarization angle changed by reflection(s), but there is a low-cost alternative. If you are using two 1/4-wave whip antennas, simply orient one 45 degrees to the left and the other 45 degrees to the right, instead of both vertically. Right-angle BNC or SMA adapters are the easiest way to do this if the antennas do not have right-angle connectors themselves. For a pair of sharkfins, modify their mounting brackets to angle their upper edges outward by the same amount. This puts the antennas at a right angle to each other, so at least one will pick up the signal strongly no matter what its polarization angle.

Regardless of what type of antenna you use, keep the cable connecting it to the receiver as short as possible because most coaxial cable has a greater loss than sending the radio signal an equal distance through the air. See Section 4.2 in the Appendix.

TRANSMITTERS

As to transmitters, there are a number of things you can do to improve the signal that arrives at the receiver antenna:

1. Most intervening objects block the direct signal path, and, since UHF waves are small (about one foot), it doesn’t take a very large object. This includes people, especially the actor wearing the mike. If the actor will be facing you throughout the scene (i.e. facing the receiver antenna on your sound cart), mount the transmitter or at least the antenna (see 3. below) on the front of the actor’s body.

2. Another improvement comes from spacing the bodypack’s antenna as far from the actor’s body as possible. In addition to mounting the transmitter under the outer layer of wardrobe if possible, slipping a length of rubber or plastic tubing over its antenna will increase the radiated power considerably. Automotive supply stores sell tubing for windshield washer fluid that is the correct size: about 1/4-inch O.D. x 1/8-inch I.D.

3. As David mentioned, raising the receiver’s antenna helps. This is also true of the transmitter’s antenna. If you have to mount the transmitter on the actor’s ankle, use an extension to get the antenna higher on the body.

A simple extension antenna can be made from a length of miniature coaxial cable: RG-174 type, with a braided shield and a stranded center conductor.

Start by stripping off several inches of the outer jacket at the end of the coax, being careful not to cut or even nick any of the shield braid wire strands. The length removed should be about an inch and a half more than the length of the whip antenna for the frequency block you are using. Don’t include the length of the connector’s metal shell. (Or you can use the antenna-length Table in the online Appendix. Pick the center frequency of your block.)

Next, carefully push the cut end of the braided shield back to expand it, and continue pushing the shield until it inverts over the remaining outer jacket. Smooth the inverted shield braid out – it should now be the correct length (or slightly longer, in which case trim it back). Cut the now-exposed insulated inner conductor to the correct length, then cover the shield braid and inner conductor with a length of shrink tubing.

After you have successfully completed these steps, cut the coax to a length of five to six feet (to reach from an ankle-mounted transmitter to the shoulder-mounted antenna), and attach the appropriate transmitter-antenna connector to the other end.

4. It also helps to raise the boom operator’s transmitter antenna if using a wireless link. Butt plugs are one solution. If a bodypack transmitter is being used, the extension antenna described above can be mounted on the boom operator’s headphones. I use this method and often get a solid 1,000-foot range. (Zaxcom makes a filtered remote antenna for specific blocks, which also helps to reduce interference with receivers used in a bag.) It is also possible to mount the transmitter as well as its whip antenna to the headphones, although this adds more weight and bulk.

5. One more caution: recently, large (12′ x 12′) metalized cloth scrims (silver or gold) have come into widespread use. Although coated with metal, they absorb radio signals rather than reflect them. Not only will they completely block the signal from an actor behind them, but actors standing in front of one (with transmitters mounted on their backs) will have almost all of the radiated signals absorbed, with resultant R.F. dropouts. This caused me no end of trouble until I figured things out. (For the technically inclined, the characteristic impedance of the metalized fabric is about 50 ohms – see Section 4.3 in the Appendix.)

MICROPHONES

Once the transmission and reception of the radio signal has been optimized, there are also techniques to improve the quality of the audio:

1. Mike mounting position: Basically there are two choices: torso or head.

Torso: Usually, the lavalier is mounted on the chest, located over the sternum (breastbone). This position is a good compromise – any lower and there is too much ambient sound; any higher and the upper voice frequencies are reduced by the “chin shadow,” and there is also an excessive drop in level if the head is turned to the side.

Head: Extra-small lavs like the Countryman B-6 can be hidden in the hair above the forehead. This keeps them “on mike” regardless of any head turns. If the actor wears glasses, concealing the tiny mike at the hinge point is another possibility. If a baseball cap is part of the actor’s wardrobe, the mike can be mounted under the visor. A plastic hard hat is even better because the transmitter can be secured inside the hat, just above the suspension. With both hats, the mike can be concealed under a sheet of felt (see 5. next page) that is glued under the visor or brim. If the bump from the mike is visible (be sure to remove any EQ sleeves from the B-6), use two layers of felt, with the inner layer cut out to accommodate the mike and cable.

2. Cable strain relief: A taut cable can pull on the lav and cause it to rub against the clothing. Even if it doesn’t, mechanical noise introduced anywhere along the stretched cable will travel to the mike where it will be heard. A full 360-degree loop in the cable, secured with strips of tape both below and above it will break this transmission path. Sennheiser makes a line of lavaliers, such as the MKE-2, that use stainless steel wire instead of copper in the cable. While this construction is extremely rugged and reliable, the stiff steel conductors can carry mechanical noise down the entire length of the cable. Even two loops sometimes does not prevent it from reaching the mike. Using these mikes on studio news anchors usually presents no problems, since they speak up and are relatively motionless. Actors in a dramatic scene, with lowered voices and extensive body motion, often cannot be recorded successfully with these lavs.

3. Mounting lavs directly on the actor’s skin: Individually-packed alcohol swabs are useful in removing skin oils before taping down the mike. There are three types of medical tape available that work well for different situations. The one I use most often is “3M Micropore,” a plastic tape perforated with many tiny holes. These serve to allow perspiration to escape rather than lift the tape by hydraulic pressure. They also make the tape easy to tear cleanly. While all three types are hypoallergenic, for actors who express a concern about their “sensitive skin,” a version of tape made from paper with a less aggressive adhesive may be used, but will require a greater area of contact to remain in place. It is porous but not as much as Micropore. For applications involving abrupt and vigorous body motions, or where the transmitter must be taped to the body, there is a cloth tape that has a much greater tensile strength and a much stronger adhesive. (Avoid body hair if at all possible with this tape.)

Most men have a depression in the center of their chest that is a good spot for the lav. For women, between the breasts (unless they’re pushed together) is ideal, possibly attaching the lav to the center of the bra. If the clothing rubs against the mike, there are two choices: double-sided tape between the cloth and the skin, or attaching one or more “bumpers” to the skin near the mike to keep the cloth away from it. A piece of makeup foam works well for this purpose. Trim the foam to a smoothly-rounded contour on the side where the fabric will contact it and use “TopStick” double-sided adhesive toupee tape on the flat side to attach the bumper to the skin.

4. Chest hair: Some men have a thick mat of chest hair with the consistency of steel wool that rubs on the back of the lav. (Robert Urich was extremely cooperative and shaved a patch of his pelt down to the bare skin every day for me, but you are unlikely to encounter such generosity.) The best solution is to have the actor wear a cotton T-shirt or tank top, but if that is not possible, tape a 6″ square of felt (see 5. below) to the body hair behind the mike, using the paper tape mentioned (see 3. previous page.) You will need lots of tape and use the alcohol swabs liberally. If the actor won”t go along with this, taping two or more layers of felt to the wardrobe so that they cover the back of the mike will help to a certain degree.

5. Windscreens: Foam windscreen material is not very effective when used in thin layers next to the mike. The mesh “ball” windscreen provided with some lavaliers (e.g. Sanken COS-11) is better, but is too large to hide under most wardrobe. I have found that a layer of wool felt provides considerable protection without attenuating high frequencies excessively. Important: you must use 100% wool felt; wool-polyester blends or 100% polyester felt is very noisy. (See Illustration on page 22.)

For most installations, cut the felt into strips about 3/8″x 1″ for B-6s and 5/8″ x 1-1/2″ for Sankens and Trams/Sonotrims.

Next, cover exactly one-half of the strip with a piece of TopStick double-sided tape, notched to clear the business end of the lav. Place the mike on top of the tape, with its end just shy of the middle of the felt strip and the cable running down the center of the strip.

Finally, fold the strip over the mike and press the edges together along its length. This will space the fold in the felt slightly away from the end of the mike to improve the windscreen’s performance.

Buy as many different colors of felt as you can – this will help in concealing the mike, especially when a leather jacket (or other sound muffling material) is involved. If you can match the color of the jacket’s lining, it is often possible to position the mike very near the opening. The various shades of felt are also useful for windscreening and/or concealing planted mikes.

Tram, Sonotrim, and other flat lavs that mount with “vampire clips,” have a grill on one side that can be mounted facing the clip so the solid back of the mike faces forward and helps block the wind. The gap between the grill and the clip can be filled with a thin sheet of foam windscreen material, or felt for even more protection.

6. Clothing noises: If you have any input in preproduction as to wardrobe materials, natural fibers such as cotton, linen, wool, and even silk, are preferable to synthetics like polyester. These plastic fibers are much more rigid and will carry sound through the fabric much more readily. Unfortunately, wardrobe people like synthetics because they are wrinkle-resistant and easier to clean. If you encounter this problem on the set, isolating the lav with a piece of makeup foam will help. Latex works best but has recently been replaced by a synthetic to avoid allergic reactions. There are also commercially-produced cylindrical mike sleeves available in black or white foam.

TopStick works well to tack rubbing layers of clothing together. A supply of various sizes of safety pins is also useful. Neckties have multiple layers that can rub together and be picked up by a lav mounted underneath. To complicate matters, the backs of most ties are sewn shut, so you cannot get inside to tape the layers together. You can use a safety pin to immobilize all but the front layer, and sometimes the tie’s pattern will allow you to snag the front layer as well. There is a “silk” safety pin available from dressmakers’ supply stores that is very small and has a flat-black coating, which is ideal for this purpose. (White, pink, and other painted colors are also available for use with sheer wardrobe.)

For completely intractable clothing noise, it is sometimes possible to stick a B-6 out through a button hole and support it on its cable, half an inch away from the fabric. This technique works especially well if you have B-6s in all the available colors. You can also use colored markers on a white mike to match various colors. “Dry-erase” markers are the easiest to remove, but be careful that the color does not rub off before the shot is over.

Two often-neglected sources of noise are flapping zipper tags and the circular springs inside the female part of snaps that rattle when the snap is unfastened. These can be amazingly loud when the lav is nearby. A small piece of double-sided tape will secure the zipper tag to the body of the zipper, and another piece can be wadded up and stuck inside the snap opening. Warning: be sure to remove all the tape from wardrobe items when the shot is over.

7. “Soundproof” wardrobe: Zipped-up leather jackets (when under the collar is not an option) and down-filled parkas are two of the most difficult items to deal with. It is sometimes possible to locate the lav behind the zipper, so the sound can reach it through the gaps in the zipper teeth. If the teeth rub against each other audibly, asmall amount of Krazy Glue applied to the teeth immediately in front of the mike will stop that. Another possibility, if the wardrobe person will permit it, is to cut a short section of the stitching that fastens the zipper to the jacket and bring a B-6 out through the gap, leaving the end of the mike flush with the edge of the leather bordering the zipper. Down-filled parkas (or other insulation) are almost impossible to mike successfully, especially nylon ones. The audible noise made by the sleeves rubbing against the torso is so loud that even using a boom mike it is often impossible to get an acceptable track. The muffling effect of the insulation adds to the problem because any part of it that gets between the mike and the actor’s mouth will absorb most of the high-and-upper-midrange frequencies. The only saving grace is that most scenes involving such heavily-insulated clothes usually have the actor also wearing some kind of headgear, with the possibility of hiding the mike there.

MYSTERY NOISES

1. If metal objects in the vicinity of the transmitter antenna happen to rub against each other, they can produce static in the audio signal. This occurs because they act like antennas and pick up some of the RF energy from the transmitter. This produces microscopic sparks between them where they touch, and this in turn produces a static radio signal over a wide range of frequencies, including the audio band. This signal can enter the transmitter’s audio circuits where it will be combined with the audio from the mike. Lavs and transmitters with plastic cases are particularly susceptible to this problem. Either separate the offending objects or insulate them where the meet with a piece of tape. (You could also solder or clamp them firmly together.) Some car seats have internal metal springs that rub together. Moving the transmitter from the actor’s back to the front of the body usually solves the problem. A bag transmitter can cause this problem too, unless its antenna is located far away from the other items in the bag, such as on your headphones.

2. Modern automobiles and trucks are equipped with special resistive spark plug wire to suppress ignition interference. But many hot rodders replace it with solid copper ignition wire to improve performance, and this causes the vehicle to radiate a considerable amount of radio interference. Unfortunately, I have encountered this on some camera cars. Motorcycles with magneto ignition systems also produce this type of interference, unless they’re upscale models with a built-in radio. Auto stores sell plug-in suppressor resistors that you can temporarily install between the spark plugs and the cables that attach to them. (Unfortunately, some recent vehicles have the spark plugs hidden under plastic shrouds, or worse, buried under miles of smog control or other plumbing.)

3. A single AC– or battery-power supply can transfer interference between multiple units connected to it unless the individual outputs are isolated with EMI filters. Most commercial power distribution systems incorporate filters but not all. The audio input cable to a transmitter used for a camera hop can carry RF energy down its length to whatever is feeding it. (So can Comtek transmitters.) A cylindrical ferrite RF choke snapped over the cable will block most of this, and should be located as close to the transmitter end as possible. Keep it in place with a nylon cable tie, and cover it with shrink tubing.

4. Be sure that the mounting hardware for all transmitter mike input connectors is tightened securely. A loose collet nut on the mike plug can also cause problems. Broken shield wires anywhere along the cable are another point of entry for interference. Periodically check your lavs by listening as you wiggle the cables down their entire length, from mike to plug, while they are connected to the transmitter.

5. Interference from other transmitters (taxicabs, local paging systems, walkie-talkies, etc.) can cause several types of problems. Audible noise, either whistles or the actual program material, affects analog radio mikes. Muting (audio dropouts) occurs in digital systems, both hybrid (Lectrosonics) and full digital (Zaxcom). Both analog and digital systems can suffer R.F. dropouts if the interfering signal is powerful enough to swamp your receiver’s front end, and analog radio mikes can also have distortion introduced in their audio if they don’t lose your transmitter’s signal entirely. I have found it very useful to carry a small handheld analog scanner receiver to help identify the source of the interference when using
digital radios.

In closing, let me tell you a secret: radio mikes work partially by magic, and I have found that a few drops of goat blood applied to the receiver antennas at midnight under a full moon improves their performance by at least 20%. The color, sex, and age of the goat don’t seem to matter, but the animal must be alive when you obtain the blood.

Text and photos © 2011 Jim Tanenbaum, all rights reserved.

APPENDIX
BASIC RADIO ANTENNA TECHNOLOGY

1.0 Radio waves are a form of electro-magnetic energy, like light or gamma radiation.  They consist of rapidly varying transverse electric and magnetic fields, oriented at right angles to each other.  In a vacuum, they travel at the speed of light, about 300,000 Km/sec or 186,000 miles/second, denoted by the letter “c”.  In air or other substances, they travel slightly slower.  The length of a radio wave is given by λ= c/f, where “λ” (the Greek letter lambda) is the wavelength, and “f” is the frequency.  Frequency is measured in Hertz (cycles/sec) and multiples of 1,000: Kilohertz (KHz), Megahertz (MHz), Gigahertz (GHz), etc.

For example, a 300 MHz signal has a wavelength of 300,000 Km/sec / 300 MHz, or 300,000,000/300,000,000.  The dimensions are m/sec / cycles/sec, or m/cycle, so λ = 1 meter, or about 40 inches.

1.1 In addition to frequency/wavelength, radio waves have another parameter known as “polarization”.  This refers to the orientation of the axis of the electric field to some reference such as the surface of the earth.  A vertical whip transmitter antenna produces radio waves with a vertical polarization, and this signal will be most effectively received by another vertically-oriented antenna.  However, the polarization of a signal can be changed by reflection.  Refection off a horizontal surface can rotate the polarization axis up to 90 degrees from the vertical.  Reflection off a vertical surface can also rotate the polarization axis, depending on the angles involved.

It is also possible to generate a circularly-polarized radio wave, whose polarization axis rotates (either CW or CCW) as the wave travels.  Because the required antenna is large, it cannot be used with concealed bodypack transmitters, but it is sometimes used with receivers – see Section 3.3 below.

1.2 The “Inverse-Square Law”, describes energy that falls off as the inverse square of the distance or E = 1/d2.  (E.g. 1/4 the power at twice the distance; 1/9 the power at three times the distance, 1/16 the power at four times the distance, and so on.)  Theoretically, this law applies to a radio signal transmitted by any antenna, whether omni- or highly-directional, but in the real world, the ground and other nearby objects (including people) can absorb some of the signal and reduce its level even faster.  At best, the Inverse-Square Law can be used for an estimate of the minimumloss.

The signals transmitted by both omni- and directional antennas obey the 1/d2 rule, but the signal level will be higher at any given point from the directional transmitter antenna.

1.3 The power level of the transmitter also has an effect on range, but not as great as some mixers believe.  To double the range (using the I-S Law) requires four times the power, or going from 50 mW to 200 mW, with the resultant reduction in battery life.  (Doubling the power is only a 3 dB increase, because of the nature of decibel arithmetic.)  Moving the receiving antenna closer is preferable, if you can move the receiver along with it to avoid a long run of antenna cable – see Section 4.2 below.

2.0 Radio transmitters and receivers couple to radio waves by means of antennas.  There are two types of antennas: electric and magnetic.

2.1 The simplest electric antennas are constructed of a straight length of wire (called a whip) connected at one end to the transmitter or receiver and free on the other end.  The length is ¼ of the wavelength of the desired frequency, usually written asλ/4.  If you look at a single cycle of a sinewave, you will see that it starts at zero, reaches its maximum positive value at λ/4, returns to zero at 2λ/4, reaches its maximum negative value at 3λ/4, and finally ends back at zero at λ.  Thus a λ/4 whip antenna will produce the maximum voltage at its end, and have the largest current induced in it.  A shorter or longer antenna will produce less voltage and current at the same frequency because it intercepts the wave at a point before or after the maximum.  A vertical a λ/4 antenna is omni-directional in the horizontal plane, with a null at the top and reduced output below the horizontal.  If space is limited, the full length of wire can be coiled up in a helical configuration to shorten the overall length (the typical “rubber ducky”).  It will appear to be the same length (and frequency) to the radio signal, but the output will be somewhat less that an equivalent straight antenna because its smaller size doesn’t capture as much of the signal’s energy.

The performance of a simple λ/4 whip can be improved by the addition of a secondλ/4 whip underneath, pointing downward.  This configuration is known as a “dipole” (and now is a half-wave antenna, or λ/2), and has an omni-directional pattern in the horizontal plane and a figure-8 pattern in the vertical plane, with the nulls at the top and bottom.  (This dipole element is at the heart of many advanced designs, to be discussed below.)

If a λ/4 whip antenna is mounted on top of a metallic surface (called a “ground plane”) whose dimensions are at least as large as the antenna’s, it will appear to be “reflected”, and act similar to a physical dipole.  It is also possible to have several ground wires sticking out radially from the base of the whip instead of a solid sheet of metal for a ground plane.

2.2 The following table gives the length for λ/4 antenna elements.  Look in the row designated by the first digit of the desired frequency, and then in the column headed by the remaining digits.  (E.g. for the cell in the third column of the fifth row, 7.0 inches, the frequency is 400 + 20, or 420 MHz.)  For exact lower frequencies between the table’s 10 MHz intervals (e.g. 14 MHz), or frequencies outside the table’s 10 – 990 MHz range, divide 2,946 inches by the desired frequency in MHz.  (E.g. for 1,000 MHz: 2,946/1,000 = 2.9 inches.)

λ/4-ANTENNA LENGTH IN INCHES

2.3 For low-frequency applications (<50 MHz), magnetic antennas are preferred because they are much smaller than a λ/4 electric antenna, which would be 60 inches or longer at those frequencies.  Magnetic antennas are coils of wire, wound on a plastic or ferrite core.  They are directional with a 3-dimensional figure-8 pattern, whose nulls are aligned with the winding axis.  These antennas are most commonly encountered in portable A.M. radios (about 0.5 – 1.5 MHz), and will not be discussed further here.

3.0 More complicated (electric) antenna designs are said to have “gain”, but this is not the same as the gain produced by an amplifier.  Instead, it refers to comparing their performance to a simple λ/2 dipole antenna.  Two of the most common types are Yagi and Log-periodic.  These two antenna types are different in both construction and functioning.

3.1 Yagis are tuned to a specific frequency and have very little performance above or below it.  This type of antenna has a “driven element”, a λ/2 dipole with one or both arms insulated from the supporting strut (unbalanced or balanced circuit) and at right angles to it.  Behind them is a “reflector” element: two arms of slightly greater (about 5-10%) length that are both grounded to the strut.  In front of the driven element are “directors”: pairs of slightly shorter (about 5-10%) arms also grounded to the strut.  All the directors are the same (shorter) length, and the more of them there are and the longer the strut, the more directional and higher gain the antenna is.  The spacing of the reflector, driven element, and directors is constant, but can vary greatly, from λ/10 to λ/2 in different designs.  Gain ranges from 4 dB for shorter antennas to 12 dB for ones 10 λ long.

Here is a very basic (and over-simplified) explanation of how a Yagi antenna functions.  The reflectors are longer (lower frequency) than the driven elements, thus the incoming radio wave is too small to go around them, and is reflected back toward the driven element.  Technically speaking, the reflector reacts “inductively”, causing the phase of the current induced in it by the radio wave to lag behind that of the voltage.  The directors are shorter (higher frequency), so the radio waves coming in at a small angle are “snagged” as they pass around them, and are bent toward the driven elements.  Waves coming in at progressively greater angles are deflected away.  Waves arriving directly on axis are not affected.  The directors react “capacitively”, causing the phase of the induced current to lead that of the voltage.  Like the microphones mentioned in the article, there is some sensitivity to waves arriving from the rear.

The use of Yagis in production is limited to fixed-frequency applications, such a remote feed link, and for this application the elements are usually oriented horizontally.

3.2 Log-Periodic antennas are designed to operate over a range of frequencies, 2:1 or even 3:1.  There are a number of pairs of elements, of differing lengths, arranged on the supporting strut with the shortest element at the front and the longest at the rear.  Unlike the Yagi, the spacing between the elements decreases toward the front.  This type of antenna does not have particular elements with assigned functions.  Instead, all the elements are insulated from the strut and connected together, with alternating pairs connected out of phase.  It is easy to see this on a “shark fin” printed circuit model.  On one side, the upper elements of pairs 1, 3, 5… are connected together, and also connected to the lower elements of pairs 2, 4, 6…  The other side has the upper elements of pairs 2, 4, 6… connected together and also connected to the lower elements of pairs 1, 3, 5…  This effectively “shorts out” all the antenna elements, so every pair of elements can act like a reflector or director as in the Yagi configuration.

With one exception: the pair of elements whose length most closely matches the desired frequency – they will now become the driven element.  In their case, the RF signal they intercept will be so much larger than the out-of-phase signals from all the other pairs that it overwhelms them.  Now all the longer elements behind the driven element act like reflectors, and the shorter ones in front act like directors.  As in the Yagi, the more directors there are, the greater the gain and directivity, and this occurs at the lower frequency end of the range.  The total number of element pairs in the antenna design has a significant effect on the gain for another reason: with more pairs of elements, the length of the pair acting as driven elements will more closely match the wavelength of the desired frequency, and have a voltage closer to the maximum.

The compromise in making the Log-Periodic antenna frequency agile is that it has less gain than a Yagi of equal spar length, typically 3-6 dB for a frequency range of 2:1.  Also, the gain is not constant over the frequency range.  You should check your particular antenna’s performance (as mounted on your cart) at different frequencies to find if there are any “dead spots” (gain of only 1-2 dB, or sometimes even less).

3.3 “Circularly polarized” and “helical” designs are currently the most expensive types, and offer the ability to handle radio signal with polarizations of any angle.  However, simply angling the two conventional antennas of a diversity pair outward about 45 degrees each will accomplish much the same effect at no additional cost.

4.0 “Impedance” is a characteristic of electrical components and/or circuits that contain capacitance and/or inductance in addition to resistance.

4.1 Radio mike antenna systems are designed to have an impedance of 50 ohms (Ω, the Greek letter omega), and use 50 Ω coaxial cables, most commonly type RG-58A/U.

Video systems are designed as 75 Ω systems and use 75 Ω type RG-59 A/U cable.  If video cables are used to extend radio mike antennas, there will be a reflection of some of the signal away from the mismatch point with the resultant small loss of power.  (Standard RG-59 cable can be recognized because it is slightly larger in diameter than RG-58.)  There may also be a mechanical interference between 50 Ω and 75 Ω male and female connectors that can damage one or both of them if they are interconnected.

4.2 In addition to impedance, coax has a characteristic signal loss of so many dB per foot, and this may sometimes exceed the loss caused by transmission of the radio signal through the air.  For any given cable type, the loss increases with frequency.  For standard RG-58 50 Ω cable types, this loss at 400 MHz ranges from 8 to 12 dB per 100 feet.  At 700 MHz, the loss increases to 12 to 15 dB.   If you must have a long coax run, use RG-8 low-loss 50 Ω cable.  It is much larger in diameter, but has only about 2.5 dB loss per 100 feet at 400 MHz and 3.5 dB at 700MHz.

Instead of extending the antenna cables, moving the receiver with its directly-connected antennas closer to the transmitter and sending the audio back on XLR cable will avoid all the cable losses.  The only drawback is that you do not have immediate access to the receiver’s meters and controls.

4.3 Most objects in the real world tend to be either insulators (very high impedance) or conductors (near zero impedance).  Insulators will generally allow radio signals to pass through without too much attenuation.  Conductors will block radio waves by reflecting them away, but again without too much loss, only a change in direction and sometimes polarization angle.  The problem is with certain substances that have an impedance near 50 Ω as they will absorb a large amount of the radio signal.  The human body, some vegetation, and the metalized scrims mentioned in the article are prime examples.

by Scott D. Smith, CAS

In the previous issue of “When Sound Was Reel,” we examined the development of optical recording technologies for general 35mm film releases. In this installment, we cover the next generation of technology designed for discrete multi-channel theatrical exhibition.

Digital Comes to the Cinema

Although the development of Dolby Stereo, as conceived for encoding four channels of audio onto a two-channel release print, was a huge step forward in terms of sound quality for standard 35mm film releases, it could still not rival the quality of a good four-track or six-track magnetic release (at least when the film and heads were still in good condition). Besides the advantages of a superior signal to- noise ratio and wider bandwidth, discrete magnetic recording systems were also free of the compromises inherent to the 4-2-4 matrix, which meant for Dolby Stereo there would always be some crosstalk issues between channels.

While this issue was minimized by careful channel placement during re-recording, it was still a far cry from the luxury offered by independent mag tracks on either 35mm or 70mm film. This was not lost on the engineers at leading suppliers to the film industry, who realized that further development would be needed if they were going to maintain a lead in the marketplace.

Kodak Gets Into the Sound Business (Again)

Despite the early efforts Kodak made in developing stereo analog optical soundtracks (which later became the basis for Dolby SVA) in the late 1980s, they once again saw an opportunity to advance the state of the art when it came to sound for release prints. As 16-bit digital audio became an accepted standard for consumer audio, Kodak, in partnership with Optical Radiation Corporation, invested a significant amount of money in developing a six-channel system that could record discrete digital soundtracks onto standard 35mm prints.

Determining how much data could be jammed into the area presently occupied by the analog soundtrack was the first design hurdle. Kodak engineers worked on developing a new sound negative film stock that had sufficient resolution to encode a data block only 14Xm in (14 micrometers). While the print stock used during this era could support the miniscule size of the data block, a new fine grain negative stock (2374) was needed to handle the recording of the data. With this aspect of the system solved, they determined that a 16-bit PCM signal could be reliably encoded using data compression. In practice, the system eventually employed a Delta-Modulation scheme, whereby the original 16-bit audio was compressed onto a 12-bit word. Even with this compression scheme, though, the bit stream rate worked out to be 5.8 MB/per second, nearly four times the data rate of a standard audio CD. The resulting system was named the Kodak Cinema Digital Sound system (CDS for short).

This presented a real challenge when it came to reliably streaming data from a reader on a standard projector. Because of this, early installations incorporated modifications to the projector transports to provide more stable scanning of the optical track across the sound head.

After a period of initial development, Kodak and ORC premiered their system with the release of the film Dick Tracy in June of 1990, in both 35mm and 70mm versions, two years before the release of Batman Returns in Dolby Digital. While the system was generally well received, it had one fatal flaw: no backup track. Since the digital soundtrack occupied the full area previously inhabited by the analog soundtrack, this meant that any failure of the reader would result in no sound being heard at all. (It should be pointed out that the engineers involved in the development were in strong opposition to this approach, but management dismissed their concerns.) It was this aspect of the system (along with the nearly $20,000 theater conversion costs) that would ultimately spell its demise two years later, with only nine films having been released using the system.

Thus came to an end, Kodak’s second foray into sound recording systems for film.

Dolby Digital 1.0

In about 1988, nearly a decade after the release of Star Wars, Dolby engineers began development work on a completely new soundtrack format, one that would no longer rely solely on analog recording for release prints. At this juncture, nearly five years had passed since the introduction of the CD players into the consumer market, notably Sony’s CDP-101. Just as the quality of consumer audio systems outpaced the typical sound system found in theaters during the 1950s and 1960s, the introduction of digital audio to the marketplace would once again lead the film industry into a new series of engineering challenges.

As part of their engineering mandate (no doubt strengthened upon witnessing the demise of the Kodak/ORC system), Dolby made the two decisions pertaining to the Dolby Digital system design:

• The system had to be backwards compatible, and

• The soundtrack had to be carried on the film itself (i.e.: not on a separate medium, such as a separate interlocked player or dubber).

These mandates posed some serious constraints as to how much data could be recorded onto the film. Since the format had to be backwards compatible, this meant the existing optical soundtrack had to remain in place. Since there was no option for moving the picture image, this meant that the only significant area left was either between the perforations area and the outside of the film (an area about 3.4mm wide), or between the perforations themselves (about 2.8mm wide). Dolby engineers chose the latter as the area that held the most promise, reasoning that the area outside the sprockets was more prone to damage.

Moreover, Kodak (and others) used the area outside the sprockets for latent image key codes, making it unsuitable for soundtrack imaging. While the theory that the space between the perforations was a more protected had some merit (as experienced by Kodak with their CDS system), the unfortunate reality was that many film projectors still produced a significant amount of wear in the perforation area, making robust error correction and a backup analog soundtrack a must.

Despite these hurdles, Dolby engineers managed to produce a system that was quite reliable, given the constraints that they had to work with. In its original configuration, Dolby Digital consisted of a bit stream encoded at a constant rate of 320 kB per second, with a bit depth of 16-bits. While the bit rate was only about one-quarter that of a standard audio CD, it did for the first time, make possible a system which could record six discrete audio channels on a 35mm release print and was also backwards compatible with existing 35mm analog soundtracks.

However, despite Kodak’s exit from the market, Dolby engineers were not the only ones in the game when it came to digital soundtrack development.

DTS Throws Down the Gauntlet

While engineers were toiling away at Dolby, other entrepreneurs were looking at similar possibilities for marrying a digital soundtrack to film. A notable example was Terry Beard, who ran a small company called Nuoptix, which had specialized in producing upgraded recording electronics for analog optical recorders. These systems became the basis for many of the Dolby Stereo variable-area optical recording systems installed as Dolby Stereo achieved a greater market penetration.

Beard chose to take a slightly different approach to the conundrum of how to fit sufficient data onto the minuscule area available on standard 35mm prints. Instead of recording the audio signal directly onto the film, he chose instead to simply record timecode in the very small section between the picture frame and inside edge of the analog soundtrack. This timecode was in turn used to slave playback from a specially modified CD player that could carry up to six discrete channels of high-quality audio. Known as “double system” in industry parlance, this approach had been used in the past for specialty releases like Fantasia, all the Cinerama films, as well as and the original Vitaphone disk releases from Warner Bros. In general, this approach was not well received in the industry, due to problems associated with separate elements for picture and sound. Besides the possibility of an element becoming lost or separated, there were huge synchronization headaches.

Beard, however, was convinced of the viability of the format, and continued to press on in development of what would become known as DTS. After a chance encounter with Steven Spielberg, Beard had the opportunity to showcase the system to him in August of 1992. After some further work and demos to execs at Universal, Spielberg was convinced of the viability of the system, and by February of 1993, Digital Theater Systems was officially formed, with Spielberg himself signing on as one of the investors.

With Jurassic Park scheduled for release in June of that year, Beard and his team had only four scant months to assemble enough units to supply theaters to support the wide opening planned. Undaunted by this nearly impossible deadline, Beard and his staff managed to deliver 900 processors to theaters by the second week of the film’s run! Fortunately, most of the technology needed to actually go into production had already been vetted, so the primary hurdle was simply building enough units to supply the theaters.

While this “double system” approach was still not generally well received by distributors (disks could be lost or damaged), it did provide for high-quality reproduction of discrete soundtracks with a minimal amount of data compression. In the early 1990s, there were few options available for compressing audio data onto limited carriers. After reviewing the options, Beard chose a system developed by Audio Processing Technology (APT) out of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Data reduction is a tricky business. The APT system was unique in that it used only a predictive mathematic table to encode and reconstruct the data, as opposed to techniques employing “masking” of the signal. As the system offered an off-the-shelf solution, it made it very attractive to DTS, as it meant they didn’t have to develop their own data-reduction system.

A further feature of DTS was that it could seamlessly adjust for any missing frames in the film, automatically compensating for the lost timecode by providing a large buffer between the disk and the system output, which could make up for dropped frames.

In its original configuration, the DTS system had been designed in two versions; a full six-channel discrete system, as well as an economy two-channel version, which could utilize the same encoded Lt/Rt signal as analog Dolby Stereo. This was, in fact, the version that was delivered to most theaters during the initial Jurassic Park run. However, there were some problems involved with properly setting up the processors in this configuration, and in the end, it was decided that only six-channel systems would be installed.

The deployment of tracks was the same 5.1 approach as used by Dolby Digital, so the only expense incurred by theaters was the installation of the timecode reader on each projector, along with the DTS disk player.

OK, That’s Three. Let’s Add Another Format!

While most industry observers would likely contend that jamming three audio formats onto a single piece of film was probably sufficient, that is not the way the film business works. Not wanting to be left behind, execs at Sony/Columbia decided that they too needed to develop a multi-channel digital sound format for theater exhibition. However, by this point, space was running out on the print, so the only option landscape left was the area between the sprockets and the outside film edge, as well as a very small space between the picture frame and inside of the analog soundtrack (which was already occupied by the DTS timecode).

Undaunted by these constraints, Sony engineers contracted with Semetex Corp., a manufacturer of high-precision photodiode array devices, to design a system which could resolve miniscule amounts of data from the area between the sprockets and outside edge of the film. This system would become known as Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, or SDDS. However, unlike Dolby Digital and DTS, the system boasted eight independent channels of audio! In practice, however, few films ever took full advantage of the full eight-channel capability, due to the costs associated with both mixing and equipping theaters with additional speaker systems.

In its original implementation, the Sony system used a 7.1 speaker system. However, unlike 5.1, the Sony system utilized five fullrange screen channels, along with stereo surrounds, a layout similar to the original Todd-AO six-track 70mm format (with five screen channels but only mono surrounds). This was quite different from what eventually evolved into Dolby Digital 7.1.

Similar to both Dolby Digital and DTS, the system also required some data compression. To achieve the needed data rate, Sony utilized the ATRAC data compression scheme, which allowed for a compression ratio of about 5:1. Sony also provided for redundancy of the primary eight channels by including four backup channels, in case damage to the film caused data dropouts on the main channels. In practice, this proved to be a necessary feature of the system, as prints were frequently damaged by careless handling on platter systems.

Although Sony had originally planned to deploy the SDDS in December of 1991 for the release of Hook, the work needed to refine the system delayed its release an additional year and a half. It premiered instead with the release of Last Action Hero. Since Sony at that time owned its own theater chain (later sold to Loews), it could leverage its exhibition position to gain market penetration that would have otherwise been difficult to garner in the face of competition from Dolby and DTS. Further, via their ownership of Columbia/TriStar, they could create demand for the system by releasing all of their films with SDDS.

Alas, despite their advantage in the exhibition market, the only other theater chain that signed onto the SDDS system was the AMC chain, who struck a deal with Sony in 1994 to include the system in the new auditoriums they were constructing during their expansion phase. While the much touted eight-channel could theoretically offer an improved theater sound experience, the reality was that fewer than 100 films ultimately used the full capabilities of the format. Further, theaters were reluctant to invest in the needed hardware and speaker system upgrades necessary to realize the full potential of the system.

Although the system did gain favor with many of the studios for release of bigger budget films, most independent films during this period were being released primarily in Dolby Digital (and possibly DTS), which meant that the capabilities of the SDDS theaters went underutilized.

With market penetration stalled, and facing strong competition form Dolby and DTS, Sony ultimately made the decision to abandon manufacturing of the system in 2004. However, support for existing systems will continue until 2014, and new titles are still being released utilizing the SDDS format.

Review

With the variety of competing formats, it is interesting to take note of the bit stream rates and channel configurations employed by each of the competing systems:Kodak CDS System (for both 35mm and 70mm film):

Data Rate: 5.8 mb/sec
Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
Bit Depth: 16 Bits
Data Compression: Delta Modulation

Channel Configuration:
Five Channel (5.1 with LFE) (Left/Center/Right/Left Surround/Right Surround)

Dolby Digital (for 35mm film):

Data Rate: 320 kb/sec
Sample Rate: 48 kHz
Bit Depth: 16 Bits
Data Compression: AC-3

Channel Configuration:
Mono (Center Channel)
Two-channel stereo (Left + Right)
Three-channel stereo (Left/Center/Right)
Three-channel with mono surround (Left/Right/Surround)
Four-channel with mono surround (Left/Center/Right/Surround)
Four-channel quadraphonic (Left/Right/Left Surround/Right Surround)
Five-channel surround (Left/Center/Right/Left Surround/Right Surround)

Additionally, each of these formats can utilize an extra-low-frequency channel (designated the “.1 channel”), which is usually assigned to a separate subwoofer.

Dolby also provides for 6.1 and 7.1 formats in the Dolby Digital Surround EX format, which implement mono rear surrounds and stereo rear surrounds respectively.

DTS

Data Rate: 1.536 mb/sec
Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
Bit Depth: 16 Bits
Data Compression: APT-X100

Channel Configuration:
Five Channel (5.1 with LFE) (Left/Center/Right/Left Surround/Right Surround)

SDDS

Data Rate: 2.2 mb/sec
Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
Bit Depth: 20 Bits
Data Compression: ATRAC2

Channel Configuration:
Five Channel (5.1 with LFE) (Left/Center/Right/Left Surround/Right Surround)
Seven Channel (7.1 with LFE) Left/Left Center/Center/Right Center/Right/Left Surround/Right Surround)

Virtually all of the systems boasted a bandwidth of 20-20kHz (for the primary channels), along with a noise floor that was virtually silent in even the best theaters. Further, they did away with the compromises inherent in the 4-2-4 matrix used for Dolby Stereo analog. While debate still rages among aficionados as to which of the systems sounds the best, there can be no doubt that all them provided a major step forward for sound reproduction in a theatrical environment.

© 2012 Scott D. Smith, CAS

by Jim Tanenbaum, CAS

For many years, my sound cart has been a “cable-free zone.” Besides the talent’s radio mikes, both my boom operators are wireless, as are any plant mikes. My cart runs on batteries (105 amp-hours worth), including the built-in worklights. I have two UHF video transmitters that I connect to the video assist system so I don’t need coax cables from it to my monitors, and I send the audio out by Comtek. Director, script, producers, etc., all get Comteks, and my boom ops have their Comteks on a separate frequency. (I have a third channel available if each of them needs to hear only their own mike.) As a result, buzzes from H.I.D. (High Intensity Discharge) lights, such as H.M.I. or Xenon, 60-Hz hum from power cables, RF (Radio Frequency) pickup from radio/TV stations, audio/timecode crosstalk, and static from moving bad cables are all a thing of the past.

Or are they? Unfortunately, my cart is not, in fact, “cable free,” because all my equipment is interconnected with … (wait for it) … CABLES. And some of you still use cabled mikes, connect to video assist with cables, run some or all of your gear on AC, send/receive timecode (TC) by cable, etc. Here’s what I’ve learned in 45 years about dealing with these problems: like radio mikes, cables also work partially by magic. What appear to be similar problems often do not respond to the same solution, and equipment that is trouble-free one day may not be the next, even though everything is still in the same place.

The cables interconnecting various pieces of equipment on your cart are the easiest to deal with because they are under your complete control, do not change position (usually), and do not have to be connected and disconnected as much. Cables from your cart to somewhere else are subject to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” in the outside world.

Most of this article is written at a fairly basic level, not requiring a great deal of electronics knowledge. There are a few advanced discussions here and there that can be safely skipped, or consulted with a more “techie” mixer. If the text becomes incomprehensible—just keep reading and it will soon clear up. (The other end of the cable is that I have overly simplified a few things, so I ask the technically-literate to please bear with me.) Local 695’s website has an excellent online “Ground Loop” seminar by Bill Whitlock that is incredibly detailed and technical. It is almost exclusively dedicated to AC power noise problems in fixed installations, but very useful nevertheless and well worth several hours to watch. I have made sure to cover his relevant main points in this article as well.

A final note: cables have a much higher retail markup than recorders or radio mikes. Rental cables, in spite of Herculean efforts by the rental companies, are not 100% reliable. Therefore, if you know which end of a soldering iron to grab; make your own. If not, get your local techno-nerd teenager to teach you or take the Local 695 cable construction class.

Some Basic Information to Start With

1. Mike-level signals are in the 5 to 50 mV (millivolt = 1/1000 volt) range. Line-level signals are in the 0.5 to 5 V (volt) range. AC power is in the 100 to 200 V range. If you are involved with H.I.D. lighting units, the cable connecting the lamp to the ballast (called a “head feeder”) carries thousands of volts (KV). The higher the voltage, the easier it is for the current to “leak” into some other circuit, like your mike cables.

2. Civilian AC power frequencies are in the 50 to 60 Hz range. (Hz or hertz, formerly called “cycles-per-second,” or “CPS,” a much more descriptive term.) Audio frequencies are conventionally said to be in the 20 Hz to 20 KHz (KiloHertz = 1,000 Hz) range, although few people today, especially anyone over 16, can hear anywhere near the top or bottom of that. RF (Radio Frequency, but not limited to “radio” signals) starts around 500 KHz with the AM radio band, and goes upward from there. MHz = 1,000 KHz and GHz = 1,000 MHz. The RF spectrum is further subdivided into HF (High Freq) = 30-100 MHz, VHF (Very High Freq) = 100-300 MHz, and UHF (Ultra High Freq) = 300-1,000 MHz. There is also ULF, VLF, LF, and MF, but they probably won’t concern you. Frequencies in the GHz range are often called “microwave” or “MW.”

3. All electrical conductors (except for superconductors, which you won’t be dealing with) have some amount of resistance, measured in ohms (Ω). When an electrical current flows through a resistor it loses some of its voltage, although the amount of current (measured in amperes) remains the same. The amount of this “voltage drop” is given by Ohm’s law: E = IR. (E is voltage; I is current; R is resistor; and IR means I times R.) For example, a table lamp with a 100-watt light bulb draws about 0.9 A (ampere or amp) at 110 V. If the 2-wire power cord has a resistance of 1 Ω in each wire, there will be a 0.9 V drop in each wire (0.9 A times 1 Ω), for a total of 1.8 V, so the light bulb will get only 108.2 V across the terminals of its socket. IMPORTANT: This drop is distributed such that the “hot” terminal of the socket will be at 109.1 V with respect to “ground” (the meaning of which we will discuss later), and the other (“neutral”) terminal will be 0.9 V above ground. This “IR drop” phenomenon is the cause of most of our woes with “ground loop” problems, as we shall eventually see.

4. Whenever two wires run in proximity, energy can transfer between them by two mechanisms. This is true whether they are internal circuitry in equipment or inner conductors in a cable. Shielding may reduce or increase the effect, and the shield can even serve as a conductor itself. Current flowing through a wire produces a magnetic field around it, and if the flow varies, the varying magnetic field can inductively couple to the other wire(s) and induce a current flow. In addition, if a wire has a voltage on it, even if there is no current flow, a voltage can be capacitively coupled to the other wire(s). Sometimes the energy source is the pair of wires of a circuit, with the signal current flowing up one wire and back down the other, or a static condition with the voltage on one wire positive and the other negative. In these cases, the corresponding magnetic or electric fields around each wire are opposite polarity and cancel out, theoretically. In reality, the physical arrangement of the two wires is never exactly identical so the cancellation is never complete. There will still be some residual field left to interact with the remaining conductor(s).

5. Cables have a characteristic impedance, also measured in ohms but using the symbol “Z” to represent impedance, instead of “R” (used for resistance). Impedance is a more complex form of resistance, having capacitive and inductive components in addition to resistive. The main thing you need to know is that for analog audio cable, its impedance is relatively unimportant. For digital audio and timecode, it may be necessary to consider impedance, especially for long cable runs (see baluns later in the article). For video and RF antenna cables, impedance definitely needs to be taken into account.

6. Input and output circuits also have a characteristic impedance, and some of the same considerations mentioned above apply. Most professional dynamic mikes are Lo-Z, about 150 Ω, but some ribbon mikes are 50 Ω. Semi-Pro Hi-Z mikes are about 1,000 Ω (1 KΩ). Professional line-level circuits are 600 Ω. High-impedance circuits are many thousands of ohms (47 KΩ is common). In general, you can connect the output of a low-impedance device to a high-impedance input without distorting the signal, though the Hi-Z input circuit may not have enough gain. (And certain types of 600 Ω line-level outputs may not deliver the full level of low frequencies to a Hi-Z load. You can usually fix this by connecting a 600 Ω resistor across the input terminals.)

7. To summarize the above, you can connect a 50-Ω ribbon mike with a 110-Ω mike cable to the 5 KΩ “bridging” input of an audio amplifier with no problems. If you are sending AES/EBU digital audio to a device with a 75-Ω BNC input, but use a 110-Ω mike cable and a simple mechanical XLR to BNC adapter at the end of the run, you may or may not have a “jitter” problem, depending on various things including the length of the cable. But if you use a 50-foot length of 75-Ω video coaxial cable to connect your 50-Ω wireless mike receiver to a 50-Ω sharkfin antenna, you will definitely notice a loss of range compared to the proper 50-Ω coax.

8. “Crosstalk” is the transfer of a desired signal to another circuit where it is not wanted. Factors that increase crosstalk are: higher voltage, higher frequency, closer proximity, less effective shielding, and ground loops. Note that digital signals (audio and timecode) are a type of “square wave” that have high-frequency components (over 20 KHz) and can more easily crosstalk into other circuits compared to analog audio signals. Crosstalk can occur between external cables, between components of multi-cable snakes, or between the wiring inside equipment. (e.g., if you’re recording TC on one audio channel of a video camera, attenuate the TC signal to at least 30 dB below full scale with an external in-line pad to prevent TC crosstalk inside the camera to the audio channel.) Even though some of these signals are above the audible range, they can still cause audible problems, as discussed in the next section for RFI (Radio Frequency Interference, but used for any type of noise signals in the MHz range.)

9. “Noise” refers to any unwanted addition to a signal (whether it is immediately audible or not). Beside audio and TC signal crosstalk, interference from AC power is another major offender.

AC power noise consists of hum, a low-frequency (usually the AC power frequency) tone, composed of a single, pure sine wave signal, or buzz, which adds harmonics to the basic hum. Because hum is a pure tone (60 Hz, or 50 Hz in some other countries), it can be more or less easily filtered out in post. A buzz, with its harmonics, can sometimes still be removed with a sequence of filters at 60, 120, 180, 240, 300 Hz… (or 50, 100, 150, 200 Hz…), but if there are nonlinear elements in the source, there will be non-harmonic components that cannot be readily eliminated. WARNING: Many military vehicles and installations use 400 Hz AC power or even higher frequencies. Working in this environment is extremely challenging because any AC pickup is almost impossible to filter out.

When AC power circuits have a bad connection point (loose or corroded; whether visibly/audibly arcing or not), it can create “static,” which is heard as a sputtering or ripping sound.

Static (actually a form of radio signal) is created whenever electrical current flows through a mechanically imperfect (e.g., a rubbing or lightly touching) joint, as compared to a solidly clamped or soldered one. Note that static can also be created if one of your own cables has an intermittent connection at a plug, or a broken conductor or shield wire(s).

Finally, “inaudible” RF audio and video signals can produce audible noises, especially from high-powered commercial radio and television stations, even at a considerable distance. (Or a nearby video assist or remote control transmitter.) While their frequency is far above the audio range (MHz vs. KHz), if they infiltrate audio equipment, nonlinear components in the audio circuits can “detect” these signals and produce audible interference based on their AM modulation. RF signals can also interact with wireless mikes by heterodyning, creating sum and difference frequencies that fall in the audible range. And if their level is great enough, RF signals can overload lower frequency circuits, causing distortion or complete muting.

A Balancing Act—It’s Easier to Balance on Two Wires Than One

Audio circuits can be either balanced or unbalanced. Balanced circuits have their signal carried by two conductors, neither of which is connected to “ground” (to be defined later, but we’re getting closer). The two wires can be surrounded by a metallic shield, or not. Unbalanced circuits have only one conductor, surrounded by a metallic shield that is used to complete the circuit as well as to keep out interference. Almost always, balanced circuits are less susceptible to noise than unbalanced.

There are two forms of noise: common-mode (C-M) and transverse-mode (T-M). (Transverse-mode is sometimes called differential-mode, or normal-mode, from the geometric term “normal,” which means “perpendicular to,” but I will use “transverse” in this tutorial as it is less confusing.) Transverse-mode noise involves the interfering signal appearing between the single conductor of an unbalanced circuit and ground (or some other point), or between the two conductors of a balanced circuit. Common-mode noise involves the interfering signal having identical voltages (referenced to ground or some other point) on both the single conductor and the shield of an unbalanced circuit, or on both conductors of a balanced circuit. Like phantom mike powering voltage, C-M noise will not affect a balanced signal, but unless blocked, it can travel along with the signal until it reaches a susceptible circuit component and causes trouble there.

Noise can get into audio circuits by various methods: directly, by means of an electrical connection (or leakage through insufficient insulation); or indirectly, by means of an electric field (capacitive coupling) or a magnetic field (inductive coupling), or both. Any metallic substance can shield against electric fields, but only certain magnetically-conductive materials can block magnetic fields. A radio wave consists of crossed electric and magnetic fields, and it is sufficient to block just the electric field to shield against it. (Or just the magnetic field, but that’s much harder to do.) An isolated electric field is most often encountered as “static electricity,” such as when you pull off a sweater on a cold dry day and your hair stands on end. Magnetic interference was a common problem in the days of tape recording, when the recorder’s heads would pick up hums from nearby AC motors or transformers. Today, the problem usually occurs when dynamic microphones, or certain condenser microphones that use audio transformers, get too close to an overhead fluorescent light fixture with a magnetic ballast.

On the Ground at Last

The term “ground” has many meanings (the U.K. uses “earth” for some of them):

1. The physical substance on the surface of our planet. Most AC electrical power systems have their neutral conductor “grounded” at the service entrance, usually by bonding to the underground metal water-main piping and/or an eightfoot metal stake driven into the earth next to the structure.

2. The metal case and/or chassis of a piece of equipment. Often called chassis ground.

3. The zero-potential circuitry of a piece of equipment. Often called circuit ground. This may or may not be connected to the unit’s case/chassis.

4. The metallic shielding of cables or other components.

5. A separate wire included in a cable or conduit for grounding purposes. This is done in some AC power cables as well as some audio cables. In the United States, power ground wires are colored green; other countries may use other colors. The ground wire may also be bare (un-insulated) or replaced by the metal conduit through which the wires are run.

6. A specific terminal on a device to which “ground wires” are connected. In theory, a ground has no voltage on it, and can accept unlimited amounts of unwanted signals and dispose of them completely. Unfortunately, things in the real world are not so easy. In AC power outlets, there is a third opening (in the United States, it is round to distinguish it from the power slots) for the safety ground circuit. Any leakage current from connected devices flows through it to the bonding point at the service entrance, where it returns to the neutral wire. But this current flow creates an IR drop of hundreds of millivolts or higher, and this voltage will be different at each outlet. Where the electrical conduit serves this purpose, it often has high resistances at the mechanical joints, which may increase further with age, so the IR drop can be several volts. In addition, normal AC current flowing through the power and neutral wires can inductively couple to the ground wire and raise its voltage even more.

Ground Loops (Not the kind an airplane does when it crashes on takeoff)

Since any current flowing through a conductor (whether AC power, a desired audio signal or unwanted noise) will experience an IR voltage drop, if the audio and noise share a common circuit path at any point, their voltage drops may be added together, with unpleasant results for the audio. Let’s take a simple example. A small nightclub has a singer performing in front of a stand mike. The Hi-Z mike is connected to the house sound system with an unbalanced mike cable. The PA amplifier is connected to an AC outlet with a three-wire power cord, which grounds the amp’s chassis to the electrical service entrance ground. The shield of the mike cable is also connected to the amp’s chassis. The singer sings and all is well. Then she grabs the mike with one hand to remove it from the plastic clip, while she steadies the metal mike stand with her other hand. A loud hum blasts out into the audience. What happened?

WARNING: Using 3-to-2 pin adapters without connecting their ground lug/wire to “lift the ground” of all the 3-wire cord units may sometimes actually stop the hum/buzz, or reduce it to usable levels. DO NOT DO THIS! NO SHOW IS WORTH YOUR LIFE OR THAT OF A FELLOW CREWPERSON! Floating safety grounds are a disaster waiting to happen—even if only a “mild” shock results, it can cause someone to fall or jerk back into a serious or fatal accident.

The mike was in a plastic clip that had insulated it from the metal stand. When the singer touched both it and the stand, her body now provided an electrical connection from the mike to the stand, which was resting on the concrete floor (concrete is not a very good insulator). While it is true that the AC-powered amplifier’s case and chassis were grounded, the ground connection was implemented through a long length of wire running down conduits in the building, and the AC leakage current flowing through it produced an IR drop of almost one volt, raising the amp’s chassis above ground by that much. This “hot chassis” voltage in turn caused current to flow through the alternate path to ground created by the mike cable shield, the metal mike housing, the singer’s body, the mike stand, the concrete floor, and the damp soil beneath it. Remember that the mike’s unbalanced cable has a center conductor surrounded by a metallic shield. The few millivolts of audio from the mike travel down both of them to the amp. But now a far larger voltage is driving 10 or 100 times more 60 Hz current down the cable shield, and its IR drop adds to the mike’s audio signal—indeed it completely overpowers it.

In fact, the singer was lucky that a loud noise was all that resulted from her actions. If the amplifier wasn’t properly grounded (e.g., the plug’s third prong broken off, a mis-wired outlet, or a 3-to-2 pin adapter used without attaching the grounding wire), she could have received a severe electrical shock instead of just a nervous one from the sudden loud noise.

If you plug several pieces of your equipment (with 3-wire power cords) into different AC outlets, the outlet’s “grounds” will be at different voltages, and therefore, so will the equipment chassis. Now, when you interconnected the gear with audio cables, AC current will flow through the cables’ shields to equalize the difference. 100 mA (milliamp) flowing through a 1 Ω shield will give an IR drop of 0.1 V. This is about a third of consumer or “semi-pro” line level, and only about -25 dB below professional. If it gets into the audio circuits… Using equipment with 2-wire cords won’t necessarily prevent problems because they still have electrical leakage, and it will flow down the audio cables to any 3-wire units. Using all 2-wire gear can still give trouble because their leakage voltages will be different and will produce equalizing currents. Furthermore, 2-wire equipment is required to have its leakage current limited by higher impedance, to protect you from electrocution hazards. (Unless there’s a design defect that got by the UL inspectors. You do trust them absolutely, don’t you?) But because of the higher impedances involved, touching a particular unit can increase or decrease the hum or buzz, which terribly complicates troubleshooting.

IMPORTANT: If you crimp a ring or hook lug to your wires, be sure that the crimper is properly sized for the gauge of wire, AND the particular type of lug. Lugs for the same gauge wire can have barrels of different wall thickness, and using a thin-wall lug in a crimper designed for thick-wall lugs will result in too little crimping pressure and an unsatisfactory joint. Make a test crimp and try to pull the wire out of the lug. The wire should break instead of pulling out. As an added protection, some mixers will solder the lug after crimping the wire in it.

Ground loops can also occur with the low-voltage DC current that powers your equipment, or even audio signals themselves. If you have an audio signal from one device passing through an unbalanced cable to another device powered from the same DC source, and the power cables to these pieces of equipment do not have exactly the same current times resistance, the IR voltage drop in the power cables will be different and the ground voltage at the equipment end will be different. If the equipment’s cases are connected to one side of the power (as most are, usually the negative), they will be at different potentials, and DC current will flow through the shields of the audio cables to equalize them. Unbalanced audio circuits can be severely disturbed by this situation, and even balanced audio circuits may be affected.

This DC current flow can upset circuits regardless of whether they have active or transformer inputs. A direct-coupled active input can have a DC offset introduced that is sufficient to swamp it, or at least, add to the audio to the point of overload.

Capacitor-coupled inputs can have the same problems if there is sufficient leakage current through the capacitor, or transient charge/discharge currents if the DC voltage level changes. DC current flowing through a transformer input can fully or partially saturate the magnetic core, producing much the same kind of distortion. Another problem occurs when HF noise such as from a switching- type (inverter) power supply travels out of the device over the DC power wiring, and then into another device over its power cable because both units are connected to the same battery. Using a power distribution panel that has filters at each output socket will help to eliminate this noise source. To be most effective, the filters should incorporate a parallel capacitor (to short out most of the higher frequencies before they can pass though to the next stage), followed by a series inductor (to block the remainder of the higher frequencies from passing through). The lower the high frequencies you want to block, the larger (physically and electrically) these two elements must be. You may have seen ferrite traps, split ferrite cores in a plastic housing designed to snap around the outside of a cable, but they are suitable for stopping only radio frequency interference.

While not a ground loop problem per se, if one piece of equipment has inadequate power supply filter capacitors, it may have its current drain modulated by the audio (or some other function) and cause the output voltage of the common battery to fluctuate. This variation may in turn affect other devices connected to the same battery (or power supply if you’re running on AC). You can solve this problem with “decoupling caps,” large electrolytic capacitors (1,000-5,000 MFD @ 20 VDC) installed across the power circuit, as close to the offending device as possible. WARNING: These capacitors are polarized and must be connected correctly. They may explode, or at least vent hot gasses if hooked up backward.

Be sure to use adequately-large wires to carry DC power to the various gear on your cart. A 1-volt drop is not significant in a 110-volt circuit, but definitely is in a 12-volt one. Also, stranded wire can have several strands broken in the process of stripping off the insulation, further increasing the voltage drop. Be careful to avoid this when making connections. As an example, 10-gauge wire is rated at 30 A for a 100 feet of household electrical wiring, but for 12 VDC it should be limited to no more than 10 A for runs of 10 feet. (Easy to remember: 10-10-10.) 10-gauge copper wire has a resistance of about 1 milliohm (mΩ) per foot, so 10 A and 10 feet gives a voltage drop of one tenth of a volt (0.001 x 10 x 10 = 0.1), or slightly less than 1% of 12 V. But remember that there will be this drop in both power wires, for a total loss of 0.2 V. (Another example: a smaller 20-ga wire is about 10 mΩ/ft, so it is good only for 1 A @ 10 ft, or 2 A @ 5 ft, or 4 A @ 2.5 ft, etc.)

The most common connector used for low-voltage power distribution is the four-pin XLR, with Pin 4 positive and Pin 1 negative. Each pin is rated for 5 amps. This is sufficient to operate most devices, but may not be for recharging larger 12-V batteries. On my battery charger cable and the mating receptacle on the battery pack, I jumper Pin 1 to Pin 2, and Pin 3 to Pin 4, thus doubling the current-carrying capacity. WARNING: Some power systems use Pin 2 and/or Pin 3 for other voltages or charger inputs, so be careful not to use this high-current jumper format with them.

Editor’s note: Subsequent installments will deal with transformer balancing, optimal cable wiring practices, sound cart construction to minimize grounding problems and other practices to assure safe and noise-free operation.

Text and pictures ©2012 by James Tanenbaum. All Rights Reserved.

by Steve Nelson, CAS

I had some idea what to expect when I heard that the pilot we shot last spring for DreamWorks Television had been picked up by ABC. The one-hour pilot episode of The River was shot in Puerto Rico (PR) and, while it was no surprise that the new episodes would shoot in Hawaii, it was a little disturbing that we were nowhere to be found in the fall schedule. Eventually, the other shoe dropped and it was revealed that we would be a midseason replacement with a seven-episode order.

THE STORY

Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), famous television explorer and family man watched and loved by millions—think Steve Irwin crossed with Jacques Cousteau, dosed on acid, “There’s magic out there!” his tag line—has gone missing along with his crew, presumed dead somewhere up a mysterious and increasingly bizarre Amazon tributary. When his locator beacon is suddenly detected, a search is mounted, spearheaded by his wife and son (Leslie Hope and Joe Anderson) and their producer (Paul Blackthorne) with the twist that it is to be filmed for broadcast. The show was co-created by Oren Peli of Paranormal Activity fame and master of the “found footage” concept. His concept was to make a show that, while strongly written and acted, would have the look and feel of a documentary, but in the supernatural thriller genre. Scary stories of ghosts and magic shot like unscripted reality TV. On a river, in a boat, in the jungle.

THE CHALLENGE

What does this mean for the Sound Department? The first thing we learned before we even left for Puerto Rico was that it meant shooting with many cameras. Up to 14, in fact, and almost every type of HD camera: a couple of Alexas, the hero cameras, Sony EX-3s for the on-camera/actor cameramen, a consumer handicam and Canon 5D and 7D for mounting and random hand-held, and GoPros anywhere you could hide them. (That’s right: We’re shooting broadcast-quality video for a prime-time network show with the same $200 camera you buy to strap onto your board, your bike helmet, your skateboard, your dog. Welcome to our brave new world!) Not to mention the camera mounted on the miniature radio-controlled helicopter, the so-called Laser Beak. Besides the actual camera operators, whether cast and/or crew, Dr. Cole’s boat, the Magus, is wired for video, with a switching/edit room amidships. There are cameras and apparently microphones everywhere imaginable, including a few places not so imaginable. With so many cameras running, we captured so much, let’s call it visual data, that the problems I had sneaking in a plant mike surely paled in comparison with the work the editors had to do just to get through dailies. The visual equivalent of recording all eight tracks all the time. Oh wait; I did that!

With shooting underway in San Juan, I learned from Oren Peli, our co-creator and executive producer, that, in his world of “found footage” movies (The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity), the only microphone needed was right there on the camera, so why was I even there? We had several half-joking conversations about this, and I think I was able to persuade him that despite our flagrant deviation from his strict philosophy and aesthetic of this relatively new genre, I was bringing something better than that camera mike and that the studio and the network would be much happier this way. The company had already spent quite a lot getting both me and Knox White, my excellent and endlessly entertaining boom operator, plus several pallets of sound equipment, to this island location. I reckoned we weren’t in imminent danger of replacement by that camera mike.

SO MANY CAMERAS
SO LITTLE TIME

Next we learned that with up to 14 cameras working, there really isn’t any place for a boom operator, much less an actual overhead microphone. Most often all we could get with the boom were the slates. Fourteen cameras means 14 IDs and markers. (Including the GoPros, which, at 25 fps only, were not technically sync cameras since everything else was at 23.978 fps.) Sometimes the best entertainment was watching the slating unfold. When I told the camera assistant that he had to voice ID each camera, his job got a lot harder, remembering each camera in its sometimes obscure location and rattling off each ID in a charming Puerto Rican accent. By the end of the season in Hawaii, the guys were so fast that I even had to slow them down a bit so the poor dailies folks could sort it out. If the cameras were too spread out over the boat for Knox, I might have to sacrifice a radio channel or two just for slates.

In this new hybrid world of fake-umentary (scripted posing as reality, the better to scare you), we would have actors who would play the camera operators and be prominently featured. In subsequent passes, we would float in one actual camera operator and then the other to get the shots we actually wanted. If one of the actual operators got into another’s shot, it was accepted that he would be cut out. As it was acceptable to reveal the cinematic process by showing the cameras, the question of sound naturally arose. There was no sound person in the script I read, but for about a minute we entertained the idea that it would be OK to see the lavalier mikes as part of the documentary process. This concept didn’t make it to Puerto Rico before the myth of the on-camera microphone prevailed. Business as usual: hide the lavs, forget about how quality sound is actually recorded, even in our make-believe world. Cameras and cameramen are apparently sexy enough for network television, not so much sound guys and their gear. (Personally, I think it all changed when we put away our quarter-inch machines; Nagras were hot! John Travolta didn’t have a digital recorder in Blow Out; there’s just something about those spinning reels.)

Our fate was becoming clear: The River would be a wireless show pretty much all the way. Wire everybody always unless they were going in the water. Forget about sneaking in the boom for the close-ups or even hiding a mike; it just didn’t work like that. This wasn’t “tight and wide;” this was tight and tight and wide and wider and tight and one up on the rigging and so on until we ran out of cameras. At this point, all I could do was embrace it. Forget about mixing for perspective; that is so last century! If their lips are moving, put them on an iso track, make sure the fader is open, record the words on the pages and be ready for more. Even if you could see all the monitors, who has time to watch? Just mix, baby!

ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SEA

My work would be divided into two categories: Land-based, which meant I could work from the comfort of my cart with all 14 channels of wireless and the big Yamaha board, and waterbased, which called for a much more portable setup. Land-based mode would work if we were on the boats, dockside. Our first two days of shooting were interiors on docked tugboats, which, being built entirely of steel, require special consideration for radio work. We also built sets for some of the boat interiors. The scenes in Zodiac boats zipping through the mangroves or on our practical boats underway or traipsing through some inaccessible jungle, obviously called for a portable, studio-in-a-bag modality.

THERE WILL BE TRAVEL

The story unfolds in two parts: the pilot in Puerto Rico and the seven episodes shot on Oahu. Pilots are always a bit special and often quite memorable. This one was. Although PR has been a location in many movies and television, this was the first time for many of us. We were gifted with the participation of Luis “Peco” Landrau, our utility person. Peco (“Freckles,” he’s a rare Puerto Rican redhead) is an experienced mixer and boom operator who mostly does utility and second units for visiting productions. His uncle is a highly respected mixer there and taught him well; he is extremely professional, prepared for anything, speaks English and gets along with everybody. We were fortunate to be working with DP John Leonetti, who I’ve known for many years, very talented and a real gentleman. John brought enough of his people to feel comfortable and the locals who rounded out our company were very experienced and competent. Of course, when it’s not too busy in a place like this, the top crew is available and we had them. Our production staff was strong, led by line producer Bob Simon, local unit manager Ellen Gordon, and first AD Dan Shaw.

Our director, Jaume Collet-Serra, a Catalan of no fixed address, known for films likeOrphan and Unknown, was embarking on his first adventure in directing for television. The pilot sets the look and the tone of the series and Jaume really went for it, creating a multi-faceted, jittery, sweeping pace that never let up in its intensity. He loves to grab a camera and operate and was fearless, while still showing concern for the quality of our sound and the intelligibility of the dialog. The profusion of accents among our cast was of some concern. We had U.S., Canadian, three different flavors of British (including one doing American), German, Mexican (her character doesn’t actually speak English), and an American doing an unspecified South American accent. We discovered in post that there is no sound problem that can’t be fixed with subtitles. With The River’s “documentary” feel and its use of chyrons for dates and locations and characters, this technique worked very well both for translation and getting us through a few rough spots. I want subtitles on all my shows!

A word here about our lovely cast. This was a truly international ensemble and a more generous, spirited, cooperative, talented, friendly and respectful group could not be found. They all seemed to understand that if this endeavor were to be successful, all the parts would have to work, including sound. Under the circumstances, with so much wiring going on and so much action, this was key. No complaints, endless patience and a costume designer who really got it; the wardrobe was very forgiving and easy to work with.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

It had been a long time since I’d had to do extensive over-the-shoulder work. Back in the (very) old days at Entertainment Tonightwith a BVU 110 over the shoulder, a couple of lavs and a short stick, tethered to a running cameraman chasing stars down the red carpet. Or doing docs with a Nagra, hoping that the take-up reel hadn’t jammed leaving me with a massive pile of spaghetti under the lid. Since the breakout of reality TV and the digitization and further miniaturization of our gear, bag

work has made major strides. How then to gear up for maximum flexibility, ease of use under challenging conditions, best use of equipment I already own, and cost efficiency? The goal was to have two separate recording packages so that I could quickly transition from one to the other. Since I have 14 channels of Lectrosonics UHF wireless spread across four frequency blocks, it was an easy choice to stay with Lectro, enabling me to use a subset of my transmitters in all situations. But what about receivers? The Octo-Pak is very desirable but perhaps a bit over budget for a pilot; for this gig it would be the Venue Field, giving me six tunable receivers in a single box. Of course, if there were more than six speaking parts in a scene, choices would be made; no matter how many wireless you have, sooner or later that will happen. A little research told me which blocks would give us the least interference (almost anything is good where we were going). I would install the appropriate modules and be ready to make a seamless transition from cart to bag mode. (One note about the Venue Field: about the only thing that can go wrong with this all-but-bulletproof device is that there is a chance of damaging the battery contact, a flimsy metal tab. Not a big deal, but it is a good idea to have a spare in the kit.) An eight-track, fully featured recorder/mixer would be required; for the pilot I tried a Sound Devices 788T with a CL-8 controller. As a longtime Deva user, it took a little getting used to the different interface. It is a brilliant unit and, once I gained confidence that I could work it in a pressure situation, the Deva 5.8 stayed on the cart. Since I was using the Venue, I had not the forest of antennas resulting from a bag full of receivers, but antennas are still required. On the pilot I used two log periodic sharkfins, mounted on plastic rods which got me good range. I also picked up a Comtek M-216 Option 7 transmitter so that all Comteks would work from either setup. Shove it all into a Petrol bag and it is very easy to pick it up and go, potentially without changing actors’ wires or Comteks.

RUM DIARIES

Yet another camera operator, Laser Beak. They could really thread a needle with this. Puerto Rico is far. From the West Coast anyway. First you fly somewhere far, say, D.C., then you fly quite a ways further. We were put up in the capital, San Juan, which gave us good access to our dry-land locations and wasn’t too far a drive to Rio Grande, near El Yunque rain forest, and our little river. A U.S. Territory, Puerto Rico is a spicy mix of Spanish, Caribbean, and U.S. American. Spanish is prevalent, of course, but English is also spoken and taught. The currency is familiar but distances are measured in kilometers. With its Spanish colonial heritage and architecture and tropical setting, you feel like you’re in another country but there are four Costcos on the island and many strip malls with all the familiar chains. It should be noted that the Costcos here carry an excellent selection of local rums, quite reasonably priced. As the city grew, parts of the infrastructure did not keep up; there is little in the way of reliable mass transport, everyone has a car, so traffic can be bad. It is painful to be stuck in the morning rush hour on your way home after working all night, but that is really not so different from anywhere and at least we were in a chauffeured van. There are many great restaurants in San Juan, just none close to our hotel. We were at the Hotel Caribbe, one of the original tourist destinations from the swingin’ Rat Pack ’50s, refurbished nicely, located a long walk from Old San Juan and a shorter walk from the newer strip where most of the hotels, casinos, and restaurants are and where film crews usually stay.

The small slice of Puerto Rico that we experienced on our days off during our three weeks there was lovely and entertaining. Tropical climate, nice beaches, diving, snorkeling, sightseeing, eating & drinking, music, clubs. Knox and I even managed to work in an excursion to the beautiful island of Vieques to see the amazing bioluminescent bay. (That only involved a drive to the marina on the east end, a boat to the island, a van ride to the nature center and dinner, a bus to the bay, an electric boat on the bay, then finally, a dip in the psychedelic water, and then the whole thing in reverse. But so worth it!)

Working there was great. There is decent infrastructure and good crew used to working with Hollywood productions. We had a cozy but well-outfitted truck to share with video assist and a very attentive owner/driver. We were lucky to have Peco, who had been working with all these people forever; it felt very much like family. Working in a tropical place, it is not a matter of if it’s going to rain, but when, and the locals certainly get that. The first thing off the truck is the easy-up, which is automatically sandbagged: rain protection always. If it’s not raining, the sun will scorch you, so you’re covered both ways. The question is why does it always seem to rain right at wrap? Since we were working near or on the water in a pretty wet area, mosquitoes were plentiful, but nothing that a healthy dose of DEET wouldn’t solve. (Sorry, but I’ve learned that none of those alternative repellants, from Avon Skin So Soft to whatever natural product, are at all effective.) However, even after slathering on the DEET for our frequent night work—scary things do happen at night—I found myself terribly bitten. I thought I had bed bugs, which was ruled out after the hotel tore apart my room in search of them. It turns out they have some particularly nasty no-see-ums, biting midges. The best solution I found was long pants and long sleeves at night.

There is no soundstage in Puerto Rico outside of a television station. Instead we built sets, boat interiors mostly, in a dank and airless warehouse. The best that can be said about this place is that it was right next to one of the aforementioned Costcos and wasn’t too far from the hotel.

Our river location was on the east side of the island, below El Junque rainforest, near the town of Río Grande, on the Río Espíritu Santos, about 45 minutes to an hour from our hotel. It’s not much of a river; at points you could throw a quarter across it, but it is quite navigable and gave us long runs in either direction with little spurs and mangrove choked banks. It feels isolated even though it is close to the road, a couple of villages, and apparently an airfield. It is lush and green without the constant rain and restrictions of shooting in the actual jungle, but the wide shots would require some digital set extension and augmentation to really sell the Amazon. The boat playing the Magus was a full-sized, 60-foot working vessel not designed for this kind of environment. The art department did a great job of dressing it way down to give it a profoundly abandoned look, but it was very challenging to get it over the sandbar at the river’s mouth. We were lucky to be there during a full moon that was actually closer to the Earth than usual, which created a higher than normal high tide and allowed us to make it upriver.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

Once we got underway, and once we got our heads around the concept of such a multiplicity of image capturing devices and their effect on our work, it was business as usual—almost. All departments share many common problems working on boats: cramped space, not really production-friendly. Kind of like a big insert car on water, it is hard to make changes once you’re moving, much less stop or return for something you need. One issue that particularly concerns the sound department: what motivates the boat? Since we were using practical boats, there was the self-powered option. However, the few times that we fired up the twin diesels on the Magus, they were so loud that it was difficult to think, much less record dialog. Fortunately, we had Dan Malone heading our marine department. Dan is a guy who makes you both feel safe in all situations and that he understands your needs. He provided a large skiff which was used as a working platform and to push or pull the Magus and the smaller S.S. Hopewell—the boat that takes our intrepid travelers to find the abandoned Magus. Its engines were powerful enough to do the job, yet quiet enough, and the skiff long enough, to keep them at a respectful distance. The conceit was that the relatively quiet motor noise could be justified and blended with actual motor noise in the final mix. As these were working boats, we could have a pilot in the wheelhouse actually steering; this was not the case in Hawaii as you will see.

If the boats were moving or parked offshore or if we had a rugged and distant jungle location, I needed to grab my studio in a bag, the appropriate transmitters and mikes and go mobile. Knox would join me to manage the wiring and get the slates and maybe even boom a shot. Onboard, it could be challenging just to stay out of shot—did I mention that there were lots of cameras and never a tripod? I could often find a safe perch on the upper deck, which gave me a nice view of the surroundings, if not the action, and lots of fresh air. Sometimes the ferrous construction would limit my radio range; we might remote the antennas or I might have to scamper down from my crow’s nest to get closer. We did have a video assist operator who was responsible for wrangling the many monitors attached to the many cameras, but once on board, he had his problems too. If it was feasible to set myself in view of the monitors, I would take advantage, but usually they were crammed in a corner with too many people so it seemed best to find a relatively comfortable spot, keep my eyes on the script, and imagine what it would look like. This worked well; it kind of took me back to the very old, pre-video assist days.

When the boats were tied up to shore, it was possible to work from the cart. I could park in a comfortable spot and push my RF cart close to the water’s edge. I keep all the radio equipment, receivers and transmitters (Comtek and IFB) on this cart, which is tethered to my mixer’s cart by means of an Aviom digital snake. This allows me 16 channels in both directions via a piece of Cat-5 network cable up to 300 feet long. (I’ve gone even longer than that with no ill effects.) Of course, this adds another cart to the package, but I find the increase in flexibility more than worth it. Rather than remote all those antennas, we move the whole package—antennas, receivers, transmitters, power—drop anchor, connect the Cat-5 and you’re good to go. Aviom makes a good product, born of rock and roll, surprisingly sturdy and very transparent.

We had a few days when we were working with the inflatable Zodiac boats. Four boats, two with actors, an actor cameraman or an actual camera operator on each, simultaneously shooting as we zipped down our little river through the mangroves to where we emerge to find the Magus. We were in a follow boat trying to stay out of shot and yet within range of the video transmitters and my audio transmitters. Those Zodiacs are loud and the very dense mangroves and the water really do soak up the RF. This would have been a good opportunity for the Zaxcom TRX series of recording transmitters. When things get stretched beyond the limits of RF transmission, there is always the option of putting the studio in a bag in the boat with the camera and the talent, pushing “record” and sending them on their way. Sometimes that is the best choice; mostly we were able to keep our link by virtue of good driving. Reminding the actors to speak above the motor noise also helped. The situation is made more complicated when the actors are not only piloting the boats but operating the cameras, but with the coverage shot by the real camera operators and our persistence, we got the scenes.

As night falls on the river, along with the bugs there is a rising chorus, an onslaught of sound, quite formidable and immediately recognizable once you’ve heard it. It is los coquís (onomatopoeically: accent second syllable, rising pitch), the little frogs, the unofficial mascot of Puerto Rico, out looking for love every night. Barely an inch long, they raise quite a racket and there is no controlling them. I went to some trouble to get some nice clean coquí tracks, heading out on a small boat away from our encampment with a small Olympus pocket recorder. It was surprising how noisy it was out there when all you’re recording is frog wallah. It is a distinctive sound, quite lovely and, for Puerto Ricans, very nostalgic, and it is all over the soundtrack of the pilot. I had thought this unique sound would be used throughout the series for continuity’s sake, but it was left in the Caribbean. Although coquís had been introduced to Hawaii back in the ’80s, they were considered an invasive pest (along with almost every other animal and plant on the islands) and eradication programs were undertaken. I never heard one over there.

The water work fell into the middle of our schedule; once we finished out in the wild, we fell back to our stage work for a few days and then finished with one of our few days shot on location in the city. Then pack it up, ship it home and adíos. A final word of caution regarding departure from Puerto Rico: My equipment had been air freighted out of Los Angeles by a reputable firm and had arrived intact at our stages in San Juan. If you find yourself working down there, do not assume that your outgoing shipment will be treated with the same respectful diligence. Absolutely be sure to supervise any packing for the return trip.

WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK AFTER THIS BREAK

To be continued in “Up The River in Hawaii.” What? There are no actual rivers in Hawaii? Good point but we didn’t let that stop us. Learn how in the next issue.

In the fourth season of 1000 Ways to Die, a show produced for Spike TV, crewmembers voted unanimously for union representation. The company responded by immediately firing all the workers.

On February 27, the IATSE and Teamsters Local 399, supported by the Writers Guild, SAG, AFTRA and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, organized a picket line at the offices of 1000 Ways. On February 29, picketing expanded to include the Burbank offices of Original Productions, the parent company of the 1000 Ways production company. Original Productions also makes Deadliest Catch, Storage Wars and Ice Road Truckers.

Local 695 members provided active support at both locations. Soon thereafter, Spike TV declared that it would purchase no episodes made with scab labor and production was halted.

The process has now entered a new phase and the International has “bannered” several companies affiliated with Original Productions. This is a lower profile demonstration to inform related companies that Original Productions continues to be subject to organizing efforts. It also serves notice to Original Productions that they remain a target.