Is anyone here thinking of wirelessly transmitting audio directly to their RED?

[Stephen Pruitt]

Hi all. . .

I'm just thinking out loud here.

No one likes cables running into their camera while they're shooting, and yet a lot of us would like to capture audio on the RED, assuming that they can actually keep the audio in REDAlert and REDCine (which apparently strip the audio out right now).

Has anyone thought of strapping wireless receivers on the RED and then just broadcasting the audio signal from their mixer straight into the RED? Four receivers and you've got all four channels covered and with no cables running off the DP. Is this a commonly used procedure? Or stupid beyond measure?

Stephen

[NateWeaver]

Doing one or two channels is common in the ENG. Most Sind guys I know would wince at 4 channels of wireless, in addition to however many channels they are already dealing with on the mixing side.

So possible, yes. Likely with an experienced soundguy? No.

[Alexis Hanawalt]

I see that usually done for reference audio on narrative shoots - makes it really easy as editor to sync up non-jam-synced audio by just looking at the waveforms in FCP. The problem is that even the best wireless audio systems are subject to interference and quite frequently get that audio "flutter" sound.

[Cail Young]

Biggest problem with wireless back to camera is RF interference between the transmitters and the recorder, which are generally really close together and will not be noticed unless someone is confidence monitoring (which, of course, should always be the case, but you never know...)

Other than that it's a brilliant idea if money's not a huge concern. Intermodulation isn't really an issue any more with modern radio systems so 4 channels of send on top of whatever your inputs are isn't so much an RF problem as a $$$ problem.

Ideally someone builds a small multichannel send-receive pair, but that's just me dreaming. Even the smallest portable receivers will get unwieldy when there's more than 2 of them.

[Stephen Pruitt]

I was talking to an experienced sound professional once and he mentioned something about broadcasting a timecode signal into a camera using a Lectro wireless system. What was he talking about? And what would be gained by doing so?

Thanks much. You are champs in my book.

Stephen

[Mark Phelan]

Yes, I was thinking of doing it for interviews. Makes sense to me, but I'm no sound expert and would be glad for someone to show other pitfalls to the idea.

[Cail Young]

I was talking to an experienced sound professional once and he mentioned something about broadcasting a timecode signal into a camera using a Lectro wireless system. What was he talking about? And what would be gained by doing so?

Makes sense for tape-based systems because it lets you put the LTC track in an audio track on the tape alongside the REC RUN TC. Not much sense for digital cinema because you can just as easily jam to the same LTC and the camera will put that code in the file along with TOD.

EDIT: By which I mean you'd still run that wireless link, but you'd plug it into the TC in rather than an audio in. This may actually have been what he was talking about but I have definitely heard of the first option being used as well. Note that because the RED has a jammable internal TC generator permanently linking TC isn't necessary, you should be able to just jam after each bootup and leave it alone.

[Stephen Pruitt]

Okay. . . thanks very much Cailyoung. . .

Stephen