Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525020
24 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Fall 2024 Wideband Low Field Venue for wireless receivers, then added the Venue rack mount receiver, still in use today. I still had a quad box of the 187 Lectrosonic VHF receivers and four of the transmitters. They worked, though the quad box had to be on the edge of the frame for reception. Good news: They did not get ruined. History lesson: The DAT (digital audio tape) system was a small cassette with varying lengths of a very thin magnetic tape. It recorded two tracks of digital audio, a generational leap from the analog reel-to-reel system that the venerable Nagra recorders delivered. The DAT recorders were not without their quirks. The digital tape recorded in a linear fashion, so transferring the audio was a "real time" affair: a five-minute take took five minutes to transfer. The cassettes were fragile, and prone to mechanical failure after storage. Still, IT WAS DIGITAL. At that time, there were two cameras, the Arricam that used these long reels of plastic with holes in it called "film." The B camera was typically used as a Steadicam, rarely were there the "wide and tight" nightmare setups. With a three-perf pulldown, a 1,000-foot camera mag runs about fourteen minutes, and there was hardly ever a take that ran over five. We only put body mics on actors for un-boomable shots, usually the Steadicam walk and talks down numerous corridors. The camera video tap was transmitted over a system that had rock-steady reception, but with a three-second delay. I had an audio delay box for the video village Comtek send, and a second Comtek transmitter for "live" sound. This way, the sound was in sync with the delayed video at the village. The delay would annoy the actors if they could hear a delayed Comtek "leak" on set; on occasion, the wrong Comtek would be grabbed and the special effects people would get embarrassed when their dialog cue to open an elevator door came three seconds too late! This particular video system was abandoned by the second season, and the camera video was transmitted over a UHF TV channel. The picture was crappy but at least it was "live." The second season of Grey's was twenty-eight episodes long: Four episodes were held over from the first season, since the reveal that McDreamy had a wife ("So, you're the woman that's been screwing my husband!") was a great cliffhanger for season one. We shot twenty-four episodes. The Veterans Hospital in Northridge had built a new shiny outpatient building constructed after the Northridge earthquake, and we used as much of it as we could. The iconic catwalk with the vast window wall was a trademark Grey's Anatomy setup. It had a cavernous interior, open to three floors, the bottom floor housed the outpatient clinic, open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the place sounded like Union Station, or, on some days, like the Chicago Board of Trade. We could not interfere with the VA (Veterans Beau Baker CAS long, long ago