I'm curious to know what source of electrical power do you use for your external lighting equipment during "field shoots"? Are you using Gas power generators?
Handling electrical power for external shoots
- Thread starter Pedro Monteiro
- Start date
Ya. Gas gennies.
Put them as far away as possible (not so far the power loses juice though), and put heavy objects around it with blankets and blankets and more blankets...lol.
I just edited a scene recently, where the reverse of a shot had the gennie in the background audio...very slight, but annoying. We had ours pretty far away too...and completely blocked off.
I have a love hate relationship with generators.
That's exactly what I am dreading. Fuel generators are a nightmare in terms of noise, and I thought gas generators would be a great alternative, but apparently they still output a lot of noise.
The 1K and 2K Honda put-puts are pretty commonly used, and not horribly loud. I do get a kick out the the "whisper" gennies - the big ones on trailers that sound like an idling diesel locomotive. Whisper my a#$.
Box them off with plywood and hang furnie pads on the boards, usually works pretty well if you can keep them at a decent distance. Also helps to keep them out of the direction the mic is likely to point.
Regarding alternate power sources:
The feature that I 1AC'd had this interesting device that they got donated by the company that makes it. Some sort of hydrogen fuel cell power pack. The DIT was going to try to use it to run his station on the truck. Never quite got it working right - he kept having brown outs on the station. Bad thing to have during transfers or backups, so eventually he just went back to tapping the gennie. It seemed to work fine for charging scripty's laptop though, but something about the more powerful workstation, full size monitor, external drive array, etc just messed with its head. By our calcs it should have worked.
Seemed to be a great idea, but not quite ready for prime time. Apparently there was a short bit of testing using it to power lights during pre-production and that didn't really work either.
Box them off with plywood and hang furnie pads on the boards, usually works pretty well if you can keep them at a decent distance. Also helps to keep them out of the direction the mic is likely to point.
Regarding alternate power sources:
The feature that I 1AC'd had this interesting device that they got donated by the company that makes it. Some sort of hydrogen fuel cell power pack. The DIT was going to try to use it to run his station on the truck. Never quite got it working right - he kept having brown outs on the station. Bad thing to have during transfers or backups, so eventually he just went back to tapping the gennie. It seemed to work fine for charging scripty's laptop though, but something about the more powerful workstation, full size monitor, external drive array, etc just messed with its head. By our calcs it should have worked.
Seemed to be a great idea, but not quite ready for prime time. Apparently there was a short bit of testing using it to power lights during pre-production and that didn't really work either.
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I guess I usually see them around 100 feet away. Walled off and definitely behind everything.