Intro'd for NAB: The MixPre-3 and MixPre-6

Anyone know exactly what the "multi-functional star button" on the MixPre-6 does?

Also, do I remember correctly that it was core audio compliant? Would this mean you could use it with an iPad?
 
I haven't seen any mention in this thread of the market effect of the Zoom F4 & F8. There was a lot of moaning in some forums about how the Zoom "toys" were lowering the price of admission for 2 system sound work. When a new player enters a market like this the competition sharpens the engineering and the established players are forced to answer. Say what you will about the Zoom limiters, the construction of the battery compartment, the placement of the SD cards etc. They sure seemed to have motivated SD to up their game in the $1K price point arena to the benefit of all, even if the SD guys can now justify a MixPre to back up their more expensive gear.
 
ric8138 said:
There was a lot of moaning in some forums about how the Zoom "toys" were lowering the price of admission for 2 system sound work.
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Same thing happened in stills photography. Now the market is flooded with young players working for peanuts.

All the "bread & butter" work started to disappear around 2008 - 2011; that's around the period when dSLR cameras dropped to the $1000/$1200 point.

The same will happen with sound. Rode, Aputure, Zoom, Tascam etc are shaking the big players hard and prices are falling.

85% of the quality for 30% of the cost.

and YouTube/Lynda etc mean that the "how to do something knowledge" is just a click away.
 
Same thing happened in recording studios when Mackie and ADAT came out (sure, it happened incrementally before but these kinda signaled a big shift). Same thing happened in field recording when Nagra et al were replaced by DAT tape....and then DAT by various disc recorders.... Nothing new for sound.

Not sure I'd say the same thing is happening with mics, though. There's long been OK inexpensive microphones. But I don't see the price of top microphones dropping...and for location audio work, it feels like sales of the top $1000+ mics are growing (I don't have numbers to prove that, though). And for location audio, I don't know if there are any big players... Schoeps, Sanken, DPA, Zaxcom, Lectrosonics, Sound Devices aren't huge companies.... Maybe Sennheiser is big, but their film/video division ain't huge.

So I'd say the growth in low-end-but-decent audio equipment (Rode, Sennheiser G3, Zoom, new SD MixPres) is probably good for the higher-end companies.

It's perhaps not so good for labor and rental rates for some location sound mixers, but that's nothing new.

Or so it seems to me.

Jim "been through this in three industries now" Feeley
 
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doubledark said:
Same thing happened in stills photography. Now the market is flooded with young players working for peanuts.

All the "bread & butter" work started to disappear around 2008 - 2011; that's around the period when dSLR cameras dropped to the $1000/$1200 point.

The same will happen with sound. Rode, Aputure, Zoom, Tascam etc are shaking the big players hard and prices are falling.

85% of the quality for 30% of the cost.

and YouTube/Lynda etc mean that the "how to do something knowledge" is just a click away.
Click to expand...

With the exception of the very high-end, those doing this professionally are screwed. Everyone thinks cheap gear is good, but it's destroying the industry. I have a network client that started out cutting back on real cameras and using handicams. Then the sat trucks started being replaced with cell backpacks(LiveU, TVU, Dejero...). Now they are doing live shots and airing content from cell phones!- and NOT in breaking news/emergency situations. It's becoming SOP. And of course you have the young guys that are paying peanuts for gear and undercutting the entire industry and a lot of them not even realizing they're destroying any chance they have at making a living doing this in the future, because they have run the rates into the ground. I wonder if they see the irony of what they're doing to 'get in the door' is actually burning the house down.
 
doubledark said:
and YouTube/Lynda etc mean that the "how to do something knowledge" is just a click away.
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Pro level knowledge for location sound recordist is still severely lacking vs the multitude of info for camera dept or photographers etc.

Matt Price on YouTube (and to a lesser extent Curtis Judd) is the only YouTube channel covering this at all (except for the commercial ones from the dealers and brands).

Compare that to the dozens and hundreds (thousands??) of channels on photography or general filmmaking there is on YouTube!!
 
doubledark said:
Same thing happened in stills photography. Now the market is flooded with young players working for peanuts.
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Which is why I switched to video after 20 years of large format ( 6x7cm, 4x5, 8x10 ) photography work, because there were too many players after the same job, the job paid a fraction that it used to, and I kept hearing the same refrain "we can fix it on computer", so practical image quality did not matter so much.

Video has been great because it's a LOT harder to master the core components of it ( camera, lighting, sound, motion, direction, etc... ) which has generally kept the beginners out of the business. But I don't expect this to last forever...
 
I hate to tell you this guys, but this is nothing new. I was a professional photographer back in the 1960's and in the 1980's, plus a part timer inbetween.

In the sixies the kids with small cheap cameras were replacing the guys with big expensive cameras. In the 80's weddings started being done with 35mm instead of medium format. Note: I am good at getting into things at the wrong time.

It is not so much the cheap gear that causes the problems, but the fact that kids can get into the business cheaply without having to go through the hard process of actually learning the trade. Just buy a camera and have some cards printed up. The fact that the customers are not educated to where they can tell a poorly done snapshot from a professionally done photograph, does not help either.

Then there are the universities turning out kids with very little practical knowledge who think because they have a degree they know everything there is to know.

Notice that the unions, which were supposed to train people into the trades, became a way to keep out the competition to the point where they would work overtime while their union brothers where laid off. Hey, I'm getting rich with the overtime, forget that solidarity stuff.

Then they elect a "Big money rules", president.

I just got a notice that the government will not help with my drug co-pays any longer. You think that means your taxes are going to go down?

Complain on guys, complain on...
 
graywolf said:
I hate to tell you this guys, but this is nothing new. I was a professional photographer back in the 1960's and in the 1980's, plus a part timer inbetween.

In the sixies the kids with small cheap cameras were replacing the guys with big expensive cameras. In the 80's weddings started being done with 35mm instead of medium format. Note: I am good at getting into things at the wrong time.

1)It is not so much the cheap gear that causes the problems, but the fact that kids can get into the business cheaply without having to go through the hard process of actually learning the trade. Just buy a camera and have some cards printed up. The fact that the customers are not educated to where they can tell a poorly done snapshot from a professionally done photograph, does not help either.

2)Then there are the universities turning out kids with very little practical knowledge who think because they have a degree they know everything there is to know.

Notice that the unions, which were supposed to train people into the trades, became a way to keep out the competition to the point where they would work overtime while their union brothers where laid off. Hey, I'm getting rich with the overtime, forget that solidarity stuff.

Then they elect a "Big money rules", president.

I just got a notice that the government will not help with my drug co-pays any longer. You think that means your taxes are going to go down?

Complain on guys, complain on...
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1)But it IS the cheap gear that allows the kids to get into the business too soon, because they don't have to be good. They just have to have a few grand(literally) or their parents buy them some inexpensive gear and BOOM, there they are knocking on everyones door marketing themselves as the best thing since sliced bread and they'll do the job for a fraction of the established guys, because they don't have any bills or loans to repay. 25 years ago guys spent at least six figures to get a bare-bones package to allow them to shoot network TV and had backgrounds with years of practical experience. Now kids complain that the $1K cameras cost too much and "what about this $150 tripod?". Well, good luck ever being able to buy that "real" camera and support gear, kids, because y'all are the big part of the reason the industry rates are in the toilet.

2)The universities and trade schools aren't necessarily bad at training them technically on some fronts(though some are). There are some schools out there with incredible programs and gear. What they are, is HORRIBLE at training them/educating them FINANCIALLY. As in, what they are worth and should be charging. They instill in them that they have to work for free or almost free to get in the door.
 
I spent around $70,000.00 on Sony equipment in the early 90's. Now it is hard to give it away. Today for less than 20% of what I spent, I have better cameras, immensely better editing equipment, less down time and I produce a better product.

In addition, the kids are smarter and more tech savvy.
 
Braindead@70 said:
I spent around $70,000.00 on Sony equipment in the early 90's. Now it is hard to give it away. Today for less than 20% of what I spent, I have better cameras, immensely better editing equipment, less down time and I produce a better product.

In addition, the kids are smarter and more tech savvy.
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Technology advancement is always a double edged sword. I remember thinking several years ago back to the $100K F900's we used to use on a certain series and saying "imagine what we could have done if we had had these C300's (that cost $14k)".

As far as the kids go, just because you're tech savvy doesn't mean your a good creative type. I see footage butchered all the time, because the edit suites are full of "tech savvy" button pushers that know the software inside and out, but don't know how to tell a story.
 
Braindead@70 said:
I spent around $70,000.00 on Sony equipment in the early 90's. Now it is hard to give it away. Today for less than 20% of what I spent, I have better cameras, immensely better editing equipment, less down time and I produce a better product.
Click to expand...

This is always the two sides. Those that have experience and know what they are doing get a nice boost from cheaper better equipment. But the other side is that people get to play with high end tools at a fraction of the cost so you end up with a lot of people with the hardware and not the skills.

It's an old story it just happens faster with computer based tech since the advances come fast and furious. VFX companies were going out of business by the cart load a few years back because they couldn't afford the constant upgrade costs.

The trend I have seen that is bothersome is not so much that the price has dropped but that the quality expectation has dropped. I think it kind of self reenforces. You pay less you expect less. After awhile the "less" becomes the new normal.

In addition, the kids are smarter and more tech savvy.[/QUOTE]

In some very specific and narrow ways I agree. They can text faster than I can type, but they can't tell you anything about basic electronics and have no clue what makes a car go. I head one explaining just yesterday that Mercury was not dangerous, only breathing the fumes were dangerous. This is VERY wrong BTW. They have a lot of "facts" from the internet that are just no where close to real knowledge.

For post sound at least 50% (and up to 80%) of the job is learning how to communicate with the director so you are talking about the same things. The rest is mostly about concept and story telling, leaving only maybe 10% to technical chops. The last "tech savvy kids" with little experience can do well at the other 90% though conforms pretty well with the 10,000 hour rule (it takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to get really good at it).
 
Just noticed I and Run&Gun said pretty much the same thing... Great minds and all that ;~)
 
Yes sir!

The "tech savvy" kids thing actually came up little while back on a shoot. Our producer said something to that effect and my audio guy, who has a daughter in her second year of college and son in high school corrected her and brought up a good point. "Kids" today are tech consumers. To go along with what you said, they can text like crazy and use social media in their sleep, BUT very few of them actually know anything ABOUT the tech, as in how it actually works, how to make it how to fix it, etc. Our computers, our technology was developed by the baby boomers and Gen X-ers(which I fall into). Most of the millennials are just users/consumers of the tech that has been handed to them and they have embraced it fully and it's consumed them and taken over their lives and they can't function without it.
 
When I was a kid, we had to use paper and pencil. Why I had to make my own paper and I had to mine graphite to make pencils. I walked five miles up hill to school and five miles uphill going home.

Old timers are funny. They always gripe about the ease of life and ignorance of the the young. Remember when baby boomers chanted "Never trust anyone over 30"? Well, they are over 30 now, so don't trust them.
 
You know Paul, all of the above is true. When I was a "kid" I thought 30 was close to death. I thought just about everything I came up with was new and never before thought of. The difference with age is you find out that a lot of what you discovered your father discovered and your grandfather discovered, if you have kids you will find your son discovers many of the same things.

Technology changes and whatever you learned on and are fond of will become obsolete. And for all of the new things gained you also loose some things. So the trick is to understand it and not turn into a grumpy old man about it.

Analog, or at least real time transfers and expensive storage had a plus in that as an assistant, or editor, you had to listen to everything, and make choices of what to have online. But in listening to it all you knew the library with a much greater depth than one does today. I wouldn't go back to spending hours and hours transferring and trimming sound files but there was an upside to being forced to do so. We noticed that we were often going back to old recordings not because we didn't have newer ones that were probably better but because we didn't know the file based sounds nearly as well as the ones we had had to spend a bunch of time with. Library software helps but it's not quite the same.

For theatre 1/4" tape has the advantage of being able to do an edit almost on the fly in rehearsal. Computer systems are much more flexible and one can do what would take a huge pile of tape decks to do BUT a simple edit can sometimes take a bunch of time because instead of cutting tape and making a note on the cue sheets you have to reprogram and then trace that change through. If it's a complicated cue that can take some time. Again I wouldn't go back.
The other down side to the theatre example is that today operators just push the GO button. Many have no idea of what to do if something goes wrong because they are never asked to do anything but hit GO. When you had manual mixers and real tape decks the operator had to "learn the show" and they were very intimate with what the designer intended to happen so if something went wrong a "good operator" could save the show. The flip side is you didn't always have good operators and then you never got the show you designed.

So it's a trade off.

But there is a trend that goes back aways that has taken the focus off of knowing how to physically do stuff, and is much more focused on the virtual world. Back in the dark ages boys (it was a sexist era) had to take shop classes. Even nerds like myself ended up knowing something about engines and drafting and metalwork etc. This mostly died out in the 80's -90's and a lot of schools don't have any shop classes anymore. It's not a "flaw" of later generations, it's just that nobody was teaching it. Programing is a type of building something and kids love to build stuff.

My point I guess is that not trusting , or listening, to anyone over 30 is as big a mistake as discounting anyone under 30. I hear millennial bashing a fair amount and it's pretty stupid. They are just as smart as we were. Like us they think they are smarter than any generation before them. They have more skills in certain areas and less in others. The difference have more to do with external factors than internal ones, expectations etc. But all generalizations paint a BIG group with a broad brush. Kind of like all stereotypes have a grain of truth someplace, it's what the stereotype was built from. At the same time they are mostly wrong when applied to individuals.

My best advice to "kids" is to listen to the why's of creaky old farts and don't pay a lot of attention to the how's.

The "why" transcends generations the "how" is very age dependent.
 
Paul F said:
When I was a kid, we had to use paper and pencil. Why I had to make my own paper and I had to mine graphite to make pencils. I walked five miles up hill to school and five miles uphill going home.
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We used charcoal...

But it was the 60's so we were high all the time and went downhill to school both ways. ;~)
 
Well, I will say it again, in a different way. Nothing has changed since I was a kid, except which toys are important.

You guys talk like all the kids back in the day could fix a car, build a bird house, etc. But only about 5% could do that. The rest were numskulls. Just like today.

Who do you think are writing all that neat software, designing those cheap toys? Why, that 5% of the kids are.

When I was a kid they taught girls home ec, and secretarial skill & boys shop, math, sports. Why because those were the skills the BoE though would get them jobs. They were when the BoE were kids. University now teach kids the skills that they think will make the Uni a lot of money (Aren't student loans neat that way?) They do teach uni students one thing, not to work with their hands. Here mechanics are self taught, cooks usually are street people. But the kids behind the registers are uni students, sometime with PHD's, who can not make proper change even when the smarter than they are cash register tells them what it is.

But the 5% moves the world on while the other 95% suck their thumbs.

And, I hate to say it, but being smart is not what makes them better than the rest. Before my disability I was smarter than 99.99% of the people in the world, all it got me was into trouble (smart and wise are different things). I wound up like most of the dummies: old, broke, isolated, on assistance. Only unlike them I do have some toys, drive a convertible, and am fairly healthy; and while only 2/3's as smart as I used to be, I can actually keep to a budget. Not being so smart, I do get along with people better than I used to. Smart is over rated.

Still, I remember the old days real well. They are over rated too.
 
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