Cantar, ergonomy by and for sound mixers
Cantar, ergonomy by and for sound mixers
Stephane Albinet went to Russia with a Cantar-X on the shoulder:

A well served mission statement, a good piece of advice... and here I was, off to Russia (during winter, outdoors shooting) for 15 days with the CANTAR-X, very beautiful, very new, but...

Working by myself, because local assistant was very ' local ', so having to handle boom by myself together with the NAGR… I mean CANTAR-X over the shoulder.
Live recording of a rock'n'roll group into multitrack because production of course was requiring the facility to release an audio-CD with the music...
Recording stereo mike together with dual channel on one single machine...

Cantar really gave me all facilities. Even if I had preset (to feel safer) some routing at DC Audiovisuel, I very quickly got rid of them to adapt settings to each sequence (random access memory, read-only memory...)

Here is an example of a tricky situation when I had to boom by myself...
- Track 1: boom mike 48V powered on IN mic 5 (right-handed!)
- Track 2: radio-mike mix for 2 track mixdown (on the right-hand side)
- Track 3: radio mike 1 on IN mic1 (attenuation ON)
- Track 4: radio-mike 2 on IN mic2 (attenuation ON)
- Tracks 5&6: stereo mike on IN mic 3&4 ganged (live ambience)

Tracks 1&2 were sent to HD camera and to radio monitoring receivers, the recorder leaving me the choice to modify output mix and output level which thus can be different from mixdown.

Strong points:
- Really 6 tracks PLUS mixdown / OR really 8 tracks (which is rare),
- Possibility of 2 track mixdown to make production or myself feel safer... or for the dailies,
- DC 12V power consumption (reported and real) and weight,
- Preroll which saves a lot for wild tracks and ambiences (like the DEVA).

Apart for a few weak points inherent to a device designed for over-the-shoulder use (one can feel lack of linear faders) and weather conditions (-20°) which have put to hard test the three "liquidchristic" (sic) modulometers and the rotary faders, I was lucky to work with a recorder which deserves the best third millennium sound mixers. But the most significant is the great feeling in the headphone and the excellent transient response, in short, how to get an elephant into a VW without any damage, and with gloves!!!!

I wish you as much pleasure!

PS: I nevertheless had to use an external monitor black box for faster play back of simultaneously-recorded stereo tracks rather than changing headphone settings on the recorder. The black box also allowed me to play back takes for mono or L/R listening of the mixdown which is only L/R supplied.
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