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Cheeseweasel

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    Working in the industry
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    Freelance audio engineer
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    BECTU
  • Full Name
    Tim Steer

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    Bristol, UK

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  1. In the past I've hired a couple of 1W link sets from Handheld Audio (on two separate frequencies for redundancy). It's just souped up Shure UHF-R radio mic kit with a more powerful transmitter, but it will absolutely meet your needs in terms of range and performance. The fact that it's based around radio mic kit means it's well suited to 'one-to-many' type links where you might need to send audio from one location to several speaker stacks, as you just tune another radio mic receiver into the correct frequency. Choose omni/paddle antennas as needed to suit your own system layout. https://www.handheldaudio.co.uk/hire-desk/hire-rate-card/ The Neturik Xirium system is great - the best-sounding wireless link system I've used, but when I did some tests with it in 2015 when it was first released, I couldn't get it to go 200m as a point-to-point link. Maybe it's better nowadays?
  2. Looks like a pretty shonky Avo-like copy. The wonky faders and off-centre labelling are a nice touch. It brings to mind the story of the Avolites guys walking around the 'Chinatown' section of one of the trade shows with a lawyer and a big hammer, and smashing up the copycat consoles that had clearly infringed their IP.
  3. Why not hire a small, conventional (Lodestar etc) hoist with a pickle? It will be cheaper than buying something unsuitable from Screwfix and bodging it. If you don't know what this is, how to rig it, or have never used one before, then you should seriously stop thinking about motors and come up with another way of moving this set piece. I don't mean to sound harsh, but rigging and operating motors are hazardous activities.
  4. It shouldn't matter that the event is small - from an invoicing point of view, a sound engineer is just another line item, like a desk or a radio mic, and the production company will be hiring you out at a fixed daily rate (and making a healthy margin on your day-rate). The minimum you should be charging in London is £250 per day - decent corporate A1s charge closer to £300. E2A: That's not to say that there aren't companies out there that will pay less, but they'll tend to use younger/less experienced techs as anyone who is decent at their job is charging £250+ and won't work for less.
  5. Get in touch with Soundtech, Martin's distributor in the UK. They should be able to source the part for you if it's still in production.
  6. It's certainly not standard practice though, and I wouldn't want anyone reading this thread to think it is. Using mic cable for DMX is definitely 'Disco Dave' territory, and I've never come across a serious company that does it. Yes, it works a lot of the time, but it's bad practice and there are solid engineering reasons why it's a bad idea (if anyone wonders what they are, read up on transmission line theory and characteristic impedance).
  7. Now that's definitely something you only do once!
  8. Video mapped onto a surface the same shape as the content, across four or more projectors blended together. And filmed cleverly so as not to show the light sources from the projectors. Quite a cool piece of art.
  9. +1 recommendation for CPL. I freelance for them from time to time and their kit is always immaculate and their project managers are nice guys. From past experience of working at a university film & television department, I found that the preferred supplier rules could usually be bent if there were serious savings to be made, or the equipment was especially niche.
  10. Just to give some closure to this old topic... I ended up going down the Fibre-Optic Rotary Joint (FORJ) route, as suggested by OperaLX. We designed a mounting system for the FORJ and had a machinist modify part of the existing power slip-ring assembly to accommodate the FORJ on the end of the slip-ring stack. I was keen for a way of sending the ISL (trunk line) between Luminex switches past the crane's slew, as we already own a bunch of Luminex kit which forms a backbone network with separate VLANs for ArtNet, TitanNet, audio system control and a few other bits and pieces. It was useful to be able to make all of these available on the crane. For safety reasons we also needed a reliable wired comms link between crane operators and everyone else on the ground, so I created a separate VLAN for Helixnet, with HXN base-stations at FOH and above the slew. A couple of industrial network switches fitted with bi-directional SFP cards did the conversion between copper and fibre for sending through the FORJ. These use Wave-Division Multiplexing to send the Tx and Rx signals used in traditional fibre communications down a single piece of fibre at different wavelengths, meaning we were able to use a single-channel FORJ rather than a dual-channel model (which tend to have more complicated optics and cost a lot). The system performed well all weekend without any noticeable dropouts, and has enough excess bandwidth to accommodate bigger and better things next year. Thanks for everyone's input! Cheers Tim
  11. This won't be an issue. It's a large crane with a cabinet of 20 copper slip-rings of various sizes fed from a gear off the main slew. They won't all be needed for powering the crane's systems, so either some could be removed from the spindle and replaced with data slip rings, or the spindle could be extended fairly easily by one of our fabricators.
  12. After a bit more research, the slip ring idea seems by far the most technically elegant way to do this. A quick search for 'ethernet slip ring' turns up all sorts of products designed to pass multiple gigabit ethernet, low voltage power and HD-SDI lines across a rotating joint. It seems they are fairly commonplace in industrial robotics.
  13. I certainly don't need the full gigabit bandwidth, but there is still a fair bit going on apart from the sACN, e.g. there is potential for multiple HD video streams to be sent over the network on a separate VLAN and I'd like an over-engineered solution with plenty of excess capacity. Point taken though - if it's more reliable to have a slower connection could you suggest some hardware? This is my other line of thinking. It will all depend on the available space on the crane structure, but sending TitanNet wirelessly to control a second console on the crane would seem like a good idea. I'll be meeting with Avolites in a couple of weeks anyway so I'll get a chance to pick their brains. It still leaves the issue of the various other data I need to get up to the crane though. I like a lot. I would much rather have an answer to this problem that doesn't involve any wireless technology at all. They also seem to manufacture capacitively-coupled slip rings designed to pass ethernet up to 1000BASE-T, which could be ideal for me as I can mount a couple in the crane's power box with the rest of its slip rings. I'll give them a ring next week. https://www.bgbinnov...0Capacilinc.pdf
  14. I'm trying to get my head around an upcoming show that will involve lighting a large crane with a variety of moving heads, architecturals and LED video panels. Lighting/video control will be located in FOH, a distance away from the crane itself. The interesting part of the puzzle is that the current creative vision involves the crane endlessly slewing round throughout the performance, which rules out any sort of cabled connection. Power won't be a problem, as it will be delivered through a system of slip-rings built into the crane, but getting data across the gap won't be as simple. We generally send sACN, Artnet and TitanNet, as well as various other network data for audio system control etc down VLANs on a gigabit ethernet connection, based around Luminex Gigacore switches. In an ideal world, I would like to send the gigabit trunk line wirelessly up to another Gigacore in the crane via a point-to-point link. The network will be fairly busy during the show, so the connection would need to be reliable and fast enough to be able to cope. The distance for the P2P link will be around 10 metres, and at 180 degrees rotation, will have the crane's main truss between the two transceivers. I found this old topic on the subject, which contains no definitive or very satisfying answer: https://www.blue-room.org.uk/index.php?showtopic=50868&st=15 I'm aware that running a cable is always preferable to even the most high-tech wireless alternative and the general advice is probably not to do it, but I wondered if anything had changed over the past seven years. Towards the end of the linked topic, microwave links are mentioned. I have no experience with them but would be interested to know if a microwave-based solution might work. Thanks in advance. Tim
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