Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/634968
19 Just who sets these standards anyway? For professional sound mixers, social media has become an indispensable tool for networking, for learning about new equipment, new techniques and for job advice. Lately, it has also become a place forum to develop unwritten rules within our own community. We all benefit from learning the do's and don'ts of work ethics from each other. Unfortunately, the "workflow stan- dards" that get tossed around online do little more than to divide us in choosing sides of an argument. Posting about these types of "standards" often results in belittling those that don't live up to them. The distinction between standards and common practices is important, par- ticularly for product devel- opment. "Common prac- tices have every effect on the products we create," continues Moore. "We have different receivers avail- able. When we are looking at movie and location guys, how they use it in a bag or on a cart; that affects the design. For example, when we designed the LR receiver, that was designed for the DSLR. "It's a challenge to try to design a product to appeal to as many people as pos- sible. If you make a prod- uct too broad, then you fail to serve anyone and you end up with a product that doesn't fit anywhere. When we designed the LR, we really did have specifi- cally the DSLR miniature requirement in mind. That's what drove it. We couldn't put an LCD on top of the unit since other things had to go there. That goes against a bag setup, but we have bag units. You make it specific to a task, and let people adapt. Don't compromise it too much. It's a juggling act, it really is." " A kit with two lavs and a boom is standard." " It's standard to record to two different media sources." " A mono scratch track to camera is standard practice." Don't Stand for Standards! by Doc Justice Lectrosonics LR receiver Even the manufacturers that design the equipment have their own guidelines on "standards." "From a manufacturing point of view, when we say stan- dards, what we're looking at, is something that has been established by a committee," says Gordon Moore, President of Lectrosonics. "What we're talking about here are common practices." Sound Devices 688 with SL-6 via SuperSlot