Sound bag advice

M

mharrison

Member
Hello there,

I mainly film in a studio and have a fixed setup, but soon I'm going to be shooting on location and need a sound bag. After browsing B&H and watching a bunch of YouTube reviews, I'm more confused than ever. I'd love your input. First off, here's the gear I'll be working with: SD 722 recorder, 2 Sennheiser wireless lavs, a Sennheiser shotgun mic, a Schoeps mic for indoor dialogue, a boompole, headphones (HD280) and accessories. Depending on how things go, I may upgrade to a SD633 in a year or so and would love to avoid buying a new bag.

Q1: Will one sound bag from Orca, Sachtler, etc. be sufficient? Or do people travel with a Pelican, then load up a sound bag when they arrive on location?
Q2: How do you protect your shotgun mics in your bag?
Q3: Can you get by without a harness? Or is that just asking for a trip to the doctor?

I hope none of these are super stupid questions. I'm pretty green when it comes to location shoots, so I don't even know what I don't know at this point.

Thanks everyone!
 
1. This is totally your call. 95% of my jobs I just toss the K-tek bag in my vehicle along with all my other gear, 5% of the time I put it into a Pelican 1620 when I'm flying or traveling in a vehicle with others.
If you use a hard case, you're not going to want to rebuild your audio bag every job (crazy waste of important time on location) so get one big enough to handle your needs.

2. I use Schoeps shipping tubes and they are then put into a safe area of my backpack or hard case.
3. Absolutely 100% get a harness. I recently forgot mine on a job and had to use the strap and within mins I was hurting bad. Absolute no brainer. Spend the money.
 
K-Tek Stingray and Orca are the bags that Location Sound people have been gravitating to in the last couple of years. The 722 and the 633 are similar in size but 633 is feather light. Pro-sound or Gotham in NYC and Location Sound in LA. Also Trew Audio. I am partial to Pro-Sound.com. Always good at assessing needs and giving good advice without attitude.
 
Like Andrew said.. If you have the cash ready to spend I think a call to a location sound store is going to help you greatly. Trew, TAI, Pro-sound, Location Sound, Gotham etc.
I'm a big fan of the K-tek bag. It's not perfect by any means but it comes the closest for myself.

The shipping tubes I mentioned I purchased directly from Redding Audio. I had a Schoeps repaired through them and it came back from the factory in the plastic shipping/cigar tube.
They won't protect the microphone like a PVC pipe or a hard case would but the footprint of 4 mic's is much more manageable now.

Here is a quick pic I found online of the tube (I got their CMIT shotgun length tubes)
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If that's not what you're looking for whichever sound store you call will be able to help you.
 
Transport and a working ENG type sound bag are two different items. No way could I carry 'everything' in an ENG 'bag'. That said, for transport, the gear goes in cases, (Pelican or whatever), on location, I work out of the bag (or cart). The heavier stuff, back-up mixers, recorders, additional wireless ect, (and the hundreds of other odds & ends) stays in the cases or on a follow cart. (hopefully close by). May be different for a OMB shooter though.
 
I have mostly Porta-Brace bags, but then I don't think the others were around much when I bought.

I haven't use a harness, though I may look into one now, but I mostly record SFX and so my needs and restrictions are not quite the same. Also most of the time I have been booming there was someone else mixing so I wasn't carrying gear. I have a larger "cary-on" sized stiff Porta-Brace bag that my working bag and mics etc. fit in for travel. When I have had to carry a lot of gear I used larger checkable plastic cases like the Pelican. I try very hard not to check audio gear so that is not a regular thing for me.

Now that I have been playing around shooting some stuff I'm in flux about what my bag needs will be. Another reason to have a crew... But that is a different story.
 
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