Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469942
34 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Summer 2022 him to be extremely pleasant, reasonable, and fabulous throughout. Our next batch of flying dailies demonstrated that the PDR's worked perfectly. Their timecode was accurate, they synced up easily, continuously recorded throughout, regardless of G Forces or altitude and they sounded great. After our initial single actor flights, we started having sorties with two planes taking off at the same time, sometimes with plane-to-plane dialog being recorded. We often had two planes going up in both morning and afternoon sorties. We needed more PDR's and more Y cables. I ordered a bunch more of both. All the PDR's performed impeccably. Of the literally hundreds of sorties, we only had one single PDR failure. Sometimes the sorties would last for hours, but no matter what, the PDR's would keep on recording. We even had an instance, when because of a mechanical problem, the plane had to make a forced landing at a different naval air station and we weren't able to retrieve that PDR until it returned the next day. Regardless, we were able to recover the previous day's recording easily. Among the many nice features of the PDR's was their ability to record two mono tracks from a single input at two different levels. I would always record one track at a level a few db's lower than the other track. If someone got really loud and started blowing the hotter track, the lower level track always stayed undistorted. OK, I can see that I'm starting to sound like a spokesman for Lectrosonics. I'm not, I have no affiliation, but I do love their products and obviously I am now especially enamored with the PDR. Working around the planes, we learned that there was great concern about something the Navy called FOD, which stands for Foreign Object Damage. (Everything in the Navy is represented by an acronym.) Anything that could get loose in the cockpit inflight would be considered FOD. Any foreign entity on the runway that could potentially interfere with take-off or landing would also be considered FOD. We had to make sure nothing that we were attaching to the planes could ever turn into FOD. For Navy airmen, every day begins with a "FOD walk." The entire squadron lines up across the width of the runway and walks its entire length, eyes to the ground, retrieving pebbles, loose screws, etc. The Commander told us that each morning before the FOD walk, he would place a tiny brass button somewhere on the runway. If the brass button was not found and returned to him during the first sweep, he would order a second, then a third. Until that button was retrieved, no planes would be cleared to take off or land. They also do FOD walks every morning on all aircraft carriers. FOD is serious business. It was surprisingly quiet inside the cockpits of our supersonic fighter planes. After the first flight, we listened back to the recordings from two FX mics I had mounted inside the plane's cabin. They essentially recorded a steady flow of air. The extra mics weren't really giving us much, and they posed the risk of the Navy would have had to approve of that change, which would not be a quick process. What to do? We had a week to re-group before we were scheduled for our next flight. I went back to my on-base Navy housing to try to come up with a new strategy. The Day One flight had confirmed that the Y cable that Par had made worked perfectly, but without the 744 and 411's, how could I capture the inflight dialog? The Y cables were built with two female TA5 connectors to feed two SM's. I got on my laptop and began looking through the Lectrosonics website, and found that they made a little standalone recorder called a PDR. The PDR accepted a female TA5 for an input. There were two versions of the PDR. The single AAA battery model was almost identical in size to a single AA battery SM, and the PDR was capable of jamming timecode. It would record two tracks of WAV files onto a removable micro CF card at very high quality. Great! With a 16GB micro CF card, the PDR would easily record audio for many hours, certainly long enough to record any length of flight (sortie) we would be filming. According to the specs, the PDR would be able to make recordings of a quality similar to a 744. I immediately ordered two of them from Trew Audio. We found that indeed the PDR's easily fit in exactly the same place where the SM's had been. When attached to our existing Y cables, they should produce recordings equal in quality to the SM's. Because they would be placed where the SM's had been, they would not require Navy approval. However, the change to the PDR's meant that Cruise would lose the ability for remote-controlled starting and stopping of the sound recorder in flight. With the PDR's, my plan was that just before the actors were to climb into their planes, either Huck or I would put the PDR's into "record" and attach them to Y cable. This meant that the PDR's would be recording continuously from that point on throughout the entire sortie. They would not stop recording until the plane was on the ground and one of us could retrieve the PDR to push "Stop." We explained to Cruise the switch to the PDR's and the reason for it, and how the change would negate his ability to remotely start and stop the sound recorder. He completely understood the situation and was fine with it. I had never worked with him before. I found The custom built Y cables and a Lectrosonics PDR