Sound Devices 664

Anyone who is involved in the location recording industry will be very familiar with the name Sound Devices. They are a manufacturer of mixers and recorders, with a reputation for reliability, quality and usability. Last week Sound Devices announced their latest portable mixer, the 664. 6 inputs, 4 outputs, inbuilt 10 channel recording on dual cards, full timecode ability (clockwork provided by Ambient) and far more make this a very exciting release.

Myself and Richard Thomas had a good poke of one of these today at the Plasa 2012 Expedition at Earls Court in London. Funny enough they had a sign mislabelling it as a “644” which seems to be a common mistake (no doubt due to the Sound Devices 744 recorder) . All I can say is it looks like a very very nice unit that just about does everything we could hope for. The menu system is great and easy to use. Display is good with plenty of info. And unsurprisingly, to those of us who are used to the way Sound Devices products operate, it is fairly familiar.

Sound wise, we didn’t have a great listening environment, nor our usual mics to test it with, but we were able to take one of the Shure VP-89 Shotgun mics from the stand and plug it in. Both the pre-amps and the headphone amp seem to be crystal clear in terms of cleanliness and quality. We had the limiters off initially and still it sounded reasonable at high gain levels; distortion is something that is hard to achieve.

The Shure staff at the expo were themselves not familiar with the operation of the unit, so I still have a few operational questions, “How do you mark a false take?” being one that springs to mind. I’m sure that will be covered in the manual when it gets released. And i’m a tiny bit concerned the metadata is a bit too difficult for anything run and gun, or even high paced one or two man drama, as you have to go through the file menu to get to the metadata entry screens. Perhaps I will still keep a pen and paper handy.

Having said all that, i’m impressed and my order of a 664 is definitely going ahead. Really looking forward to getting hold of it, getting it out on set and putting it through in paces in the real world.

The opposite of retired

Apologies about the lack of posts on this blog. It does not mean I am retired, infact very much the opposite! I have had a lot of exciting jobs keeping me busy of the past few months, these include work on the following:

Russel Howards Good News Series 6

BBC1’s Maestro At The Opera

Rubinrot – German Feature Film: http://www.rubinrot-der-film.de/

Driftwood Short Film : http://www.driftwoodfilm.co.uk

and many many others.

Also I have had the opportunity to gather a few bits of new sound kit, including a lovely sounding Filmtech LSP4 mixer!

My Filmtech LSP4 Mixer!

Now with about a month of mileage in my hands under it’s belt, it seems to be proving itself both reliable and easy to work with. Best of all, with it’s 4 direct outputs I can get 4 ISOs + a 2 track mix onto my Tascam DR-680 Recorder to cover any requirements. Perfect. Except it does weigh a bit when it’s on the shoulder.

~Mark.

January 2012

So far, 2012 has turned out to be an interesting year, with a selection of short, but exciting projects for me. Here is a bit about my work in January.

My first job of the year was continuing a series of interview shoots for one of my favourite charities, Macmillian Cancer Support. The nice people there do such a great job to help those in need, it was a pleasure to ensure their videos sounded great and that people can learn about their new services from them. Keep an eye on their website and youtube pages for the videos in the future.

Macmillan Website: http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Home.aspx

Following on from that was Hermit, a Met Film School project by Sussannah Bragg. I spent 11 days as a Boom Operator working alongside Sound Mixer Don Nelson and a genuinely great crew.

Shot on 16mm film, it is the story of Izzy Blue, a famous writer who has not left her room for most of her life. After she suffers writers block, she looks to the world and her bizzarre family for inspiration.

 

I wish the project the best of luck in the Post Production stages and look forward to seeing it make the rounds at film festivals this year.

~Mark.

Two Years In, Time To Blog

After two years spent as a location sound recordist in the world of independent film production, and with my main website under re-construction, I thought it was time for a blog to keep those of you who have been following my progress updated with what I have been working on. I will try to put up as much content as I can, but there may be copyright and disclosure issues from time to time, especially with picture content.

Hopefully this blog can provide an enjoyable and informative read.

See you on set!

~Mark.