Alex Kolb

Thanks very much for the quick response Eric! It does indeed have bearings, which I gave a nice cleaning, and now it's delightfully smooth. Cheers, Al

Hi all, My arm post is squeaking and not smooth in it's rotation anymore. I've removed it easily, but I'm not sure what substance to apply. Any feedback is appreciated. Next show is Friday, and I'd love to have it smooth again by then. Cheers, Al

I've never worked with one, but it looks like a promising piece of equipment. My only concern is the menu interface, but that tends to be my concern on most follow focus units. The RT Motion uses a colour indicator for the menu. This allows more options as far as what you control than say a Bartech, but you would have to familiarize every AC with the colours durring setup. This menu interface does shave money off of what the system costs, as the alternative would be a more expensive LCD integrated in. I'm not saying don't buy it, because with new technology becoming more popular such as the Cmotion, ACs are having to learn new equipment more than ever. This was just the feature I noticed that will probably get some criticism.

Anyone with a picture of the FLEX?

Great thread! Does anyone who does steadi on American football games have a shoe that works well in that kind of environment?

While I see the resemblence, that's not at all what I said. I DO consider myself to be qualified to state that the techniques most operators are taught, by Tiffen and Mr. Holway, Mr. Fawcett, etc, MUST be working, otherwise there wouldn't have been any new operators joining our profession in the past 10 years or so. I'm fine with people improving on these teachings, and even coming up with their own, but when sharing this all I would like to see is that we don't attack the people who got us to this point in the first place. Tiffen and Tiffen workshop instructors tend to be the targets of a huge amount of negative comments, and I just don't think that's justified. I prefer some other companies to Tiffen, but I think if it wasn't for the original Steadicam (which many got into when it was CP, but the legacy lives on through Tiffen) and the Tiffen workshops, our industry would not be nearly as good as it is today. I'm not saying everyone has to love Tiffen, but I don't see why one side has to be wrong and the other right. There are more than two ways to skin a camera.

I won't say who's right or wrong, Jerry and Eric have way more experience than I do. What I will say is that I believe we all owe our livelihoods to Garrett Brown and his way of operating and teaching, which is what Jerry and the Tiffen classes continue to this day. So why is it that we now are turning on these techniques and teachings? You may disagree with them, but remember without them we wouldn't be employe, at least not in this profession.

I prefer pulling focus myself on TV gigs. My assistant should be there for my safety alone. If I had an FA, I'd want it to be an additional person, not my assitant, and I'd rather not have two people trailing me at all times.

Thanks Mr. Puli for the lead!

I've also experienced this. Great for those in Europe, where MK-V is a lot more prominent than it is in the US. Between the service bump and the new V3.5 and V4 electronics, I'm excited about MK-V again.

Thanks Rob! Always great to hear from one as well versed as you in live TV when it comes to these things, that being my area of work as well.

Not a brightness question, but I figure a lot of posts have already deviated into discussing non brightness features of various monitors, and I'd rather not start a new thread. Can a transvideo cinemonitor owner chime in about the tally? All the ops I know with one use an external tally over the built in one, and I'm not sure if it's because the built in one doesn't cut it. I also heard that the cinemonitor frame line edges go red when tally is live if you feed the signal in, but I may have misunderstood. Can someone offer feedback on this?

Thanks for the help guys! I'll be sure to write to BOXX, I think that'd be an excellent solution long-term. The audio "tally" was just a quick fix. For anybody who may be in a similar situation in the future, here's how we ended up using the audio tally. We rigged an interrupt switch to the vision mixer's tally output for my camera, and ran an XLR with the tone into the interrupt switch. Then we ran another XLR out on the other side and fed that to my wireless in-ears. Thus when the vision mixer was outputting the signal for the tally, it allowed the tone to pass through. Another solution that we considered (and other ops I contacted used) is to put your tally light (that you couldn't be flying anyways if you can't get a tally feed) on the sound board, and have someone manually cue the tone. Thanks again for the feedback!

I guess I should have mentioned that. It's an L1310.

Hey everybody, I'm working on a show where they can't get me a wireless tally signal. I have been in a similar situation before, and what they ultimately did was feed me an audio tally through my in ears. So when I was live, there was a tone in my headset. Weird, but at least I didn't have to go wired just for the sake of tally. I know of a few other ops who've done the same. Unfortunately I have no idea how to create this tone linked to the tally that can be fed into the audio board. The previous station hasn't returned my calls so I can't ask them. Anybody know how this works? Ideas of any kind are appreciated. Cheers, Alex

I know one or two ops who independently own the 1500 transmitter from LINK, but the full system with receivers and the likes is really an investment for a station. It is a fantastic system, though. Dropouts are just something you don't think about once it gets set up properly.

I also enjoyed the..um..."operating" on this show. John will have to confirm, but the movements made me think it was wireless.

30" doorway.

Personally I've had good luck showing them the EFP DVD where there's a spotter involved. They're addressing the safety talk towards ops, but in the process they show what a good assistant should be doing. Still, I'm sure there are better, more refined ways. I'd personally LOVE to hear from Rob V or one of the TV guys who have assistants as part of their team (sometimes even direct employees). They'd be able to give great insight as to training someone for the long haul.

Going back to what I had said about the safety release, I just wanted to point out I was only saying it would be wasted on me. I wasn't having a gobat Chris or his great design. My bet's on $5241.50

My question is why do it on the Techno? I mean I get some, but that last one would be so much simpler to do on steadi.

Is it just me, or does she have the arm in backwards on the socket block?

Also Janice, would you mind sending one of those $300,000/hr jobs my way sometime?? ;)

Janice, Eric, Afton, and the others, who exceed me in experience by years, word this much better than I will, but I'm just going to put it into a single sentence should some newbie revisit this thread with the same questions. The few thousand dollars you can save using components that will deliver the same quality signal, but are not designed with the intense use of steadicam in mind, are insignificant in comparison to the years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars you could lose if a director or DP doesn't call you back after the weather on set proves too much for your home-built cable. It's the same reason why we pay thousands of dollars for center-posts. I can go buy an aluminium tube for $20, but what happens when it bends in the middle of a shot? I'll just send it in to Jack at GPI Pro. Oh wait...

I agree with Mr. Grant. If I feel I would need to rent vest with a safety strap, I don't do the job. I'm sure there are some who are willing to take that risk in the name of cinematography, but I am not one of those people.