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Mandar
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Post by Mandar »

came across this amazing article.... just read on ;)


A few minutes after dawn on a Thursday in late July of 2007 the
Morning Light – a 52 foot sleek-hulled racing boat – crossed the finish line of the 44th Transpacific Yacht Race off the coast of Diamond Head, Hawaii against the luminous backdrop of the mid-Pacific sunrise.
On board, in addition to the youngest crew ever to complete the nearly 2,300 nautical miles of the Transpac race, one of the longest and oldest competitive sailing races in the world, was an incongruous collection of audio and video equipment that had nothing to do with navigating the race, but everything to do with capturing the experience of open-ocean sailing since the start of the race twelve days earlier.
Tasked with capturing the audio for the Morning Light project, Production Sound Mixer David McJunkin faced a series of formidable obstacles during the lengthy preparations leading up to the actual race that forced him to implement some highly unique solutions in recording the production tracks.
Wind, salt water, and the unpredictability of daily life on board a sailing boat in open water were just a few of the problems Dave had to overcome during this film that chronicles the year-long run-up to the race. Crew selection in Los Angeles, training off the coasts of California and Hawaii, and the climax of the film, the Transpac itself, presented numerous challenges to the production crew. Chief among them was the fact that during the race, Dave would not actually be on the boat to monitor his equipment. Everything had to be relatively autonomous, inconspicuous, and there would be no extra space onboard the Morning Light for backup gear. There would be no re-takes, no second chances, and no room for error if they wanted any useable audio at the end of the race.
Our Technical Director, Mike Paul sat down with Dave after the completion of the race to get an idea of what was involved in the production of the Morning Light project, and to learn what solutions Dave implemented to get the audio that production wanted. Following is the interview.
MIKE: Tell me about how you got involved in the Morning Light project.
DAVE: I was first contacted by the film’s Producer, Morgan Sackett. This was in July of 2006. Morgan was referred to me by my good friend Glen Berkowitz, who knew that I had done a fair amount of over-the-shoulder multitrack type jobs. We started talking and I thought it sounded interesting as well as pretty scary to take on something like that, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt it would be an exciting opportunity.
MIKE: And the race was going to be a year later?
DAVE: Yes, they were already talking about gearing up for the 2007 race. They knew it was going to be a long process to get the production ready and get the crew that they were assembling ready.
MIKE: What were you told during the interview about their expectations for sound?
DAVE: And why I took the job anyway? From the get-go, Morgan realized the complexity of the sound issues because one of the main things they were dealing with was the fact that on the actual race, which was still a year off, they weren’t even sure if they could get a chase boat that would be fast enough or have enough range to keep up with the Morning Light for the whole race and be a suitable camera platform.
MIKE: And the Trans-Pac is ostensibly a 6-day race, right?
DAVE: Typically, but in the Morning Light’s class, the winning boat will usually finish in about eight days. Other boats, like the big catamarans, would finish in as little as six days.
MIKE: So, since you couldn’t be on the Morning Light during the race, the plan was to get as much coverage as possible from the chase boat?
DAVE: Well, when we finally got a suitable chase boat that would make the distance, we discovered that it likely wouldn’t be able to keep up with the Morning Light the whole time, because it could only do 25 knots. With a really strong tail wind, like those they would normally get in that race, the Morning Light could do 28 to 30 knots. So, we were thinking that there could conceivably be days where we might not even see the Morning Light, and I wanted to be on the chase boat with a backup recorder and another set of wireless and an antenna just so that I could, you know, record whatever backup tracks I could record.
MIKE: What kind of power, if any, was available on the boat?
DAVE: We had very little power available on it.
MIKE: Was there a generator on board?
DAVE: That was one of the first things we tried when we started doing the training sessions in Hawaii. We mounted a small Honda generator in a waterproof case on the deck but the problem with that was that the deck of the boat was severely tilted when the Morning Light was under sail. Since the generator was only designed to run on a flat surface, it would just keep stalling, but even if it hadn’t, it would have overheated in this little waterproof box that they had built for it. What we ended up doing was to put in heavier duty alternators and more of the big 12V marine batteries that they use to power the boat when the engine is not running.
MIKE: Could they run the engine during the race?
DAVE: They would, periodically. Even though they don’t use the engine to propel the boat during the race, they will periodically power it up to charge the on-board batteries because they need the power for their own needs. They have multiple navigation computers and communication radios; they have some cabin lighting, port and starboard lights and a light on the top of the mast that sort of identifies you in the middle of the night because even though it’s a big ocean, you could conceivably bump into another boat. So, that was the deal. You’ve got all the other problems associated with shooting on water: high winds, salt spray, and very little power accessible.
MIKE: In the setup they described to you, how many tracks did you think you’d need to record?
DAVE: Well, we thought anywhere up to eight tracks.
MIKE: Was that all for radio mics on the crew?
DAVE: We ended up with six of the crew on radio mics, because that’s as many as would ever be on watch at the same time.
MIKE: What did you end up using for wireless?
DAVE: I used a Lectrosonics Venue receiver mounted below deck, and the Lectro MM400b transmitters with Countryman B3 mics in a lanyard for the six crew members. The way it works on the boat is that people are constantly switching out watches and they had a four hour watch system, where the entire crew would rotate through every four hours.
MIKE: Would they just hand off their transmitter to somebody else?
DAVE: Yeah, that was the thing, and that’s why I ended up building a lanyard system where they could just hang the mics around their neck. I had windscreen material built into the lanyard.
MIKE: And the transmitter was in the lanyard too?
DAVE: No, we couldn’t put the transmitter in the lanyard because it was just too much weight. It would have irritated them
MIKE: Any plant mics on the boat?
DAVE: Besides the lav mics, we ended up having two deck-mounted shotguns. One was mounted just behind the main mast under the boom and the other was on the rear mast with a camera. We also had some Sanken CUB-01s; the little boundary layer mic. We had three of those – one on each of the two wheel housings and one on the ceiling of the Navigation station, which you’ll see in the film because they had a camera they could mount down there with a little LED panel light.
MIKE: What kind of shotguns were these?
DAVE: We used Sennheiser MKH60’s wrapped in condoms with a Rycote Softie over it. We taped the condom up all the way past the connector. The shotguns worked perfectly and they did get pretty wet even though there wasn’t a whole lot of wind. I ended up using Scotchgard™ on the fur of the Softie because we would never have the opportunity to clean it out there, as there was very little fresh water.
MIKE: So, with six radio mics, two shotguns, and the three CUBs, I’m counting eleven tracks right there?
DAVE: That’s eleven tracks right there, but what I did was to have the two shotguns and the radio mics go to the Aaton Cantar, and the three CUB-01’s ended up feeding video deck channels. That’s how we got everything.
MIKE: Why did you choose the Cantar?
DAVE: From the beginning, I immediately thought of the Cantar as being the only realistic solution. It already had a really solid reputation as being reliable and coupled that with the fact that it had low power consumption and water-resistance built into the design, it just seemed like the logical thing. I borrowed one to try out during some initial camera tests in late July or early August of 2006, and I ended up buying it right after. It’s like the old Remington razor ad, “I liked it so much, I bought the company”. I knew that the Cantar was going to be the only way to do it.
MIKE: I should ask the question, where is all this equipment on the boat?
DAVE: Right, well whatever we came up with was going to be below decks, because the Morning Light could take on a lot of water. It was a boat that was originally designed for in-shore racing and it had a hole up in the bow where ropes led through – it’s not normally the kind of thing that would be in a boat designed for offshore racing. Consequently, in rough seas, it could take on a lot of water so we wanted our gear down below deck where it was going to be relatively safe. When they were outfitting the Morning Light, they built these shelves out of carbon fiber just below the deck between a bulkhead and a steering support strut so everything was up off the floor, away from the bilge and any water. The Venue was mounted there, and the Cantar was bolted to the side of the shelf.
 

MIKE: Now, since you weren’t going to be on the Morning Light during the race, who operated all of this equipment?
DAVE: Well, the only crew member from the production was our on-board cameraman, Rick Deppe, who was uniquely suited to this because he was a professional sailor. He is actually hired out as crew on these racing boats, so he knew exactly what he was up against. He’s done the TransPac, the Volvo Ocean Race and many, many big races before. He had, over the course of years of sailing, picked up cinematography along the way, and became an on-board camera operator. His other show is “Deadliest Catch” on Discover Channel, so that will give you an idea of how hardcore this guy is. But, he’s a really good guy, and I enjoyed working with him. Anyway, Rick was going to be the only guy onboard the Morning Light during the race. He had three installed HD cameras that were feeding remotely operated (Video) decks down below, and a hand-held camera to shoot anything the installed cameras missed, so he would be operating the Cantar.
MIKE: How much training did he get?
DAVE: Well, he had his hands full with all the video gear. So I wanted to keep it simple for him, and it ended up that way. I showed him how to go from Stop to PPR on the Cantar, and once he was in PPR, he could roll it from the remote boxes I built on deck. I showed Rick how to power the Cantar down to change external hard drives because we ended up getting some 160G LaCie Rugged drives that were buss powered from the Cantar to record all of the audio on, and we figured that one hard drive would not be enough, so we had a total of four, and...
MIKE: So Rick would swap out the drives when they got full?
DAVE: That was the plan. I went over it with Rick, and he was supposed to power down the Cantar at night to conserve power and start a new Day Folder on the Cantar drive. He knew how to swap the drive out if necessary, but as it turned out - he never turned it off the entire 12 days of the race!
MIKE: Because the race ended up going twelve days instead of eight?
DAVE: Yeah, right. I thought he was powering it down at night, so instead of it creating a new folder on the hard drive every day, we ended up with one Day folder which was from the start of the race, and all twelve days worth of files were in that folder. This was on spread over two different hard drives, because the Cantar had never been powered down to start a new folder. I guess it just thought, “Oh, this is a really long day” and kept on recording. He swapped the drives at one point, but he just hot-plugged the new one.
MIKE: What if they filled up all of the LaCie drives? How would you get them another?
DAVE: Throw a spare in a dry bag, toss it in the water, and they’d scoop it out... hopefully (laughs).
MIKE: Did you ever have to do that?
DAVE: Thankfully, no.
MIKE: How would you resolve any audio problems during the race?
DAVE: Rick and I would talk every day. Due to a lack of wind, we ended up basically pacing them the entire 2500 miles. We would talk every day on the walkie-talkie and the worst audio problem we had was when a line got wrapped around one of my deck-mounted shotguns. They had built me a mic mount under the boom out of carbon fiber and epoxy, and on the first day of the race, a line got wrapped around the shotgun windscreen and snapped the mount clean off. That mic ended up being used as a camera mic.
MIKE: You mentioned a remote system earlier.
DAVE: Since Rick was going to be the only one on board, and he would be above deck most of the time, he needed to be able to control the audio and video equipment from wherever he might be. Pace HD Systems ended up installing all of the video decks and they had their own remote system. At first, we were just going to have one remote to throw the video decks as well as the Cantar into record, but it turns out that there would be times where we wanted to roll the Cantar but we didn’t want to roll the video decks so it had to have its own independent remote. That way, it could be rolled if he was just using the hand-held camera, which he was using a lot, or the night-vision cameras, which were on different video decks. Basically, the Cantar had to be able to roll with any combination of video decks, or not at all, you know, just record for audio alone.
MIKE: But the Cantar had no remote capability at the time, right?
DAVE: Yes, but around this time, Jean-Pierre Beauviala (from Aaton) got involved, and he was fascinated with the project so he really took ownership and got very active in helping us figure out a solution for our remote problem.
MIKE: With the result being the Cantar’s ability to go into record when triggered by external time code?
DAVE: Exactly.
MIKE: Was the Cantar triggered by the video decks?
DAVE: No, it was triggered by a custom modified Aaton GMT time code generator. The GMT had a big round button on the front panel, and when the button was pressed, the GMT would output time code. If you pressed the button again, it would freeze the time code. The Cantar would then interpret the frozen TC number as a stop command. All the while, the Cantar’s internal time code generator was in free run, and outputting code to the video decks.
MIKE: The Cantar was the TC master for the whole boat?
DAVE: Yes. It fed everything. The cool thing about the using the GMT was that, thanks to Aaton’s custom modification, the start/stop function of the big round button could itself be remote controlled. Also, the GMT would run for about 150 hours on a standard 9V Alkaline battery. I put in a 9V Lithium and also ran external 12V to the GMT, so even if something went wrong with the external power, the 9V battery should have powered the GMT for the whole race.
MIKE: So what did you come up with for the deck-mounted remotes?
DAVE: I built two remote boxes. I bought some little plastic project boxes with rubber gaskets to make it waterproof, and I installed some waterproof switches on the outside. I also installed a big red LED on the box. Since the Cantar outputs a “Tally” voltage pulse from its 15-pin Options Port when it goes into record, I wired that to the remote box LED with some opto-couplers and resistors, so when Rick would press the remote box switch on deck, a bright red LED would come on to confirm that he was in record.
MIKE: Where were the remotes located?
DAVE: We had one remote box on a little rear mast, which was a popular place for Rick because he could get a wide shot of the whole boat from there, and the other was on the main hatch where everybody would go in and out below deck. Rick would shoot there quite a bit too, so we put one there and the two remotes basically covered the whole deck. We probably could have done more, because Aaton’s remote system with the GMT allowed for multiple remotes wired in parallel, but two seemed enough.
MIKE: How far was the remote from all you equipment below deck?
DAVE: The longest remote was about 20 to 25 feet away. It was about a 50ft cable length, but I had to wind it through several bulkheads and keep it out of the way.
MIKE: Did you have to remote anything else?
DAVE: I had to remote the RF antennas. I put one antenna for the Venue system as well as a Sennheiser transmitter antenna on the rear mast as well. I took one of my Sennheiser Evolution transmitters and modified it to take a coax output so that I could remote the antenna above deck because carbon fiber, once it’s grounded, becomes a very effective RF shield, as we found out. I had the other Venue antenna down below deck, and I put it near a porthole so that it was only going through glass.
MIKE: What was the Sennheiser transmitter for?
DAVE: The Sennheiser transmitter was fed by the mix output of the Cantar. There was a matching Sennheiser G2 receiver on the hand-held camera. That way, Rick could hear the wireless mics on the crew that were being recorded on the Cantar and record a scratch track on the camera.
MIKE: So, with all the gear in place, how did you expect to handle the varying audio levels on the Cantar during the race?
DAVE: Well, he challenge was that we had to cover everything from whispers and normal conversation to trying to get a scream above gale force winds without me being able to make any gain changes once the race started. Rick would have his hands full just trying to get the shots he needed, and we realized that he really wouldn’t have time to be adjusting levels on the fly. So, I started by setting the Cantar to record in 24-bit to take advantage of the dynamic range. We had limiters on five of the Cantar inputs, which we used, and I felt the Lectro Digital Hybrid radios also had enough dynamic range that I’d be ok. On the morning of the race, I just dialed in our levels conservatively and let it go.
MIKE: Did you get a chance to test out the system on open water before the race?
DAVE: Yes, during the last training session that the crew did in April. The kids who would make up the crew, although they all had quite a lot of sailing experience, wanted to feel confident that they could handle a boat of this size on an extended overnight race so they basically just went way out into the Pacific – kind of looped around for a few days and navigated imaginary waypoints with all the production gear aboard and running.
MIKE: Was this out of Hawaii?
DAVE: Out of Honolulu, yes. We flew over to Hilo to meet them a couple of days into it, as they were going to dock in Hilo and take a night off. It had been really windy during those two days at sea, and the Morning Light had taken on a whole lot of water. They would later block the hole in the bow that let in all the water, but this was before that so by the time it got to Hilo, there was about six inches of water in the bilge.
Now, for all the other training sessions in Honolulu, we had dock power so they would run a de-humidifier below deck all night to dry things out. In Hilo, however, we had no power. And even if we did, we didn’t have the de-humidifier there. Everything just sat overnight with all this water in the bilge. They pumped most of it out, but there was still enough in there that it was still very, very wet.
MIKE: How hot would it get below deck where the equipment was?
DAVE: Well, in Hawaii, we were dealing with an ambient temperature of about 95º on the hottest days, but the aggravating element was that there was only about four inches between our top piece of equipment and the deck, and since the sun would beat down on the deck all day long, it would get much hotter down below than the ambient temperature.
MIKE: Did the equipment work ok for the test, even with the heat?
DAVE: Everything was working when they came into Hilo, but the following day we tried to fire everything up, and the only thing that still worked was the Cantar and the Venue. Eventually, the video decks came back, but they had to physically take them out of the boat, and dry them out in a hotel room overnight with the air conditioning.
MIKE: And this is when Pace HD got involved, right?
DAVE: Yes, all of the Pace HD video decks got installed after that session and then we did one more session in Los Angeles in June, just before the race. They used that session to test the Pace equipment, and it worked flawlessly.
MIKE: Did you learn anything else from the test run out of Honolulu?
DAVE: Yes, in fact, one of the Lectro MM400b transmitters had gotten lost, wrapped up in a sail or in a sail bag, and was under water in the bilge for about two days before we found it.
MIKE: So, did that transmitter still work afterwards?
DAVE: For about an hour (laughs). I found out that the MM400b’s really are waterproof, but the one weakness they had was that the anodized coating couldn’t stand up to the prolonged salt water exposure. The newer MM400C’s are supposed to have a better coating, but during the shoot I ended up talking to a lot of “boat” guys, and they turned me on to a marine product called Boeshield T-9®. It’s like a spray-on Teflon wax that they put on boat parts that will likely corrode, things that are made out of steel, etc., and we ended up just spraying it on all of the transmitters. By this point, the transmitter cases were already badly pitted by the salt water, so I wish I’d found out about it earlier
MIKE: How would the salt water affect the transmitter casing?
DAVE: Since there was little fresh water on the boat to spare for rinsing the transmitters regularly, the salt would start to cake where the o-rings for the frequency select dials are located. The salt cake would corrode pits, and pretty soon the case would be eaten away to the point that the o-ring wasn’t making contact anymore, and water would leak in. But, even with all the pitting and corrosion, the MM400B’s held up for the whole race.
MIKE: Other than the gear on the Morning Light, what did you bring with you on the chase boat?
DAVE: I thought there would be hours or days where we might not be able to see the Morning Light, so I needed to have our chase boat system be as completely redundant to the Morning Light’s gear as possible. I had another Cantar with me, a duplicate set of Lectrosonics receivers, this time UCR411a’s instead of the venue, and a Lectro batwing antenna mounted on a boom pole that I could point towards the Morning Light when it was in range.
 

MIKE: And how far away could the chase boat be and still pick up the radio mics from the Morning Light?
DAVE: Depending on the angle of the Morning Light relative to our chase boat, I could get anywhere up to a half mile on open water, but only if I was hitting them from the side. If I was hitting them straight on, like from the bow or stern, it would drop off severely. What seemed to be happening was that their bodies would start getting in the way of each other when they would line up on the side of the boat. You’ll see in the picture; when a crew member isn’t doing something else, you get your weight on the windward side of the boat to counteract the fact that the boat is tipping over. As nice as that looks, it means that the wind is spilling off the sail, and they want to get it as vertical as possible to increase speed. So, there would be all these crew members with radios on, lined up in row on the side of the boat, and that’s when the RF suffered if we were in line with the Morning Light.
MIKE: Did you shoot the whole crew selection process?
DAVE: Yes, but I don’t know that any of that will make it into the film. It pretty much should start with them training in Hawaii.
MIKE: At what point did you actually start filming the action?
DAVE: Well, the interesting thing is that while they were training to learn the boat stuff, we were “training” to learn how to pull this production off. We would try different things, different cameras. I’ve never been on a job where we’ve used so many different formats. They would try one camera, and then another and they would decide against them for one reason or another. About the only thing that stayed constant throughout was the Cantar and the Lectrosonics. We ended up never changing those.
MIKE: So this is coming out next year?
DAVE: October of 2008
MIKE: Any reports back from Post yet?
DAVE: According to the Assistant Editor, so far all of the audio is clean, and everything syncs up, which blows my mind. On the chase boat, I had my little PDA, and I was using Aaton’s “Arcan” Bluetooth interface to log takes and metadata – basically doing sound reports – and I just told the post guys that since they’ll pretty much get no notes from the Cantar files on the Morning Light, they could at least go back and look at my PDF sound report and compare it to get an idea of what was what because I kept my track assignments the same as the Morning Light Cantar.
MIKE: And how much data did you end up with at the end of the race?
DAVE: It was just about 160G in total, but that was just the race itself. We probably had hundreds of hours, because we shot all the training sessions going back for months.
MIKE: So, would you do it again, knowing what you know?
DAVE: Oh yeah, sure. It was fun. I had a great time. I just don’t want to become known as “The Boat Guy” (laughs).
MIKE: Too late.
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