Sound Devices put to the test in Turkmenistan
Published: MEA
TURKMENISTAN: Veteran Sound Mixer Christopher Brown rented a Sound Devices 664 Production Mixer for a National Geographic shoot at the edge of a flaming methane gas crater in Turkmenistan known by locals as the Gateway to Hell.
‘That was my first experience with the combined mixer recorder,’ explained Mr Brown. ‘With the 664, I had five people on wireless mic, and the boom, and so that worked well.’
After Turkmenistan, when he returned the 664, he learned about Sound Devices 633, a smaller six-channel mixer with integrated 10-track recorder with features similar to the 664. ‘Basically, the 633 had the same menus, the same workings of the 664, which I’d just used, and I really liked the mixer and the multi-track recorder all being in one unit. The 633 had all the tracks I needed and it was in a compact package. That’s key when you go to the remote places I have to work in.
‘Most of the shows I do, we’re in such harsh environments that I need to record. And recording is so important to me; because of conditions, I’m usually not tethered to the camera. We’re separated by distance, or we have to move around,’ he continued. ‘I’m sending a two-channel, left and right, wireless camera hop, but the cameramen have a hard time monitoring sound from the camera when perched on the side of a cliff. It’s critical for me to record and multi-track. We can’t always rely on sound-to-camera.’
Having used the 633 now on a different shoot, Mr Brown has found a number of beneficial features to the mixer including PowerSafe technology and timecode jamming. ‘I love how I can record WAV files to the CF card and then to the SD card I can record audio MP3 transcription files that have a timecode stamp in it, in the metadata. I use that a lot,’ said Mr Brown. ‘And I’m able to say to the client at end of day, “We can email these MP3s out for transcription”. I’ve used that feature the most.’
In addition to the 633, Mr Brown’s gear bag includes Lectrosonics 400 Series wireless mics, SMV mini-wireless microphone transmitters, Sennheiser 416 boom mic, Lectrosonics SRB dual-channel camera hop and Sony MDR-7506 professional headphones.