Sound Cart Mini-Cart Tour

in today's video I'm going to show you how I have my sound cart setup cue the royalty-free dubstep and stutter cog [Music] sorry anyway this is my sound cart mini cart so sound cart is the name of the company genius branding in my opinion they're based out of the UK the guy who runs the company is Mathew bacon he is a sound mixer who I believe just started making his own carts and it just caught on on the forums and the message boards people saw them and he grew it into a company and now his carts are available in most of the location sound dealers I got mine at Gotham Sound in New York City if you go to sound card TV that's his official website and I'm sure there's info there to point you at the the dealer closest to you if you want to order one for yourself so the mini cart starts at about 11:50 USD and then you can add all kinds of accessories onto it which will bring the price up probably closer to 1,500 to 2,000 bucks maybe it's super strong but it also is fairly light and you can get into some really tiny places with this cart and that's what I liked about it sound cart offer a ton of accessories for their carts they have an antenna mast they have boom pole holders they have cup holders you can add the casters you can add sliding shelves you can add folding shelves tablet holders script holders cable hangers the sky's kind of the limit with these carts which is really nice because they're super customizable the stock version of this cart without any accessories on it weighs about 28 pounds and it can hold up to 44 pounds I definitely have more than 44 pounds of weight happening on this cart overall and because I'm putting a rack case of equipment on here this is pretty heavy Matthew from soundcard suggested that we do some sort of brace on the shelf so we put in these triangle braces down here I decided to add the Castor's to my mini cart which give it just more flexibility as far as maneuvering you can basically spin the cart and in place and before if you had the stock feet that come with the stock mini cart you'd have to actually tip it back to turn direction or anything like that the other accessories I have a mic art or the antenna mast I actually have a boom pole holder on both sides so I can do two poles I have a cup holder on the back I have a cable hanger on the back I had a headphone hook but I moved it recently that's part of the fun of sound cart building is that you're always sort of tetra seeing new ideas and being like what if I put this here and what if I put this here so it's like a never-ending sort of rabbit hole of potential I guess you could call it there's a million ways to set up a sound cart I have mine set up this way because I work mostly in corporate commercial Eng documentary and so I don't need like a fully always built narrative cart which this is right now it's totally ready to go but a lot of days I don't even need anything that's happening right here I don't need the all the faders I don't need the screens any of that stuff so that's why I decided to put sort of like the the second level of things you'd want on a cart in a rack so I can take it on and off pretty easily the bag however is sort of the mainstay I can use that whether I'm wearing it or you know sitting down at this cart and I just put it right on the shelf instead of this rack alright so I'm going to talk about some of the different parts of this cart up top we have the bag in the middle we have the rack and at the bottom we have a case it's a pelican case it's a 1557 which i think is the perfect case for a mini cart because it fits just perfectly between the the wheelbase it's a lightweight case it's part of their Pelican Airlines so it is probably not something you'd want to have you know thrown into the back of a plane but as far as living on a cart it's cool only downside it doesn't have any wheels on it but if you're putting it on a cart that has wheels like I am I think it's a pretty good fit so let's talk about what I have here in my rack I'd say the most important part of this equation is the fader control here this gives you a nice long fader control over essentially your mixer instead of using the knobs you get to feel like you're sitting at a mixer which is nice it's got some other cool controls to the shortcut buttons here instead of having to dial through all the menus to do whatever you want to do you can just get to the point right here next thing here in the rack in the middle is the monitors some guys have their monitor up high and they have their mixer down hovering right over the the CL 12 but I like to keep my eyes near the faders and the screen so that's why I have these close together and up top here we have the remote audio speakeasy r1 this is you know it's just a few little speakers in here it's got a volume knob it's got a headphone jack it's got two inputs left and right so you can listen to either or both or sum them together as mono it's nice to have this if you're on set and you just want to take your headphones off for a little while but still be able to listen to what's going on set alright let's talk about the custom rack I've been getting a lot of questions on social media about this so this Rack is actually a custom-made rack I have them design it specifically for this configuration of what I'm doing here what's custom about it is it is not an even amount of spaces from top to bottom height wise this is a one unit this is a three unit and down here the sliding shelf is a one unit but if you look in here this gap this is two inches of space which is like a quarter of an inch more than your standard one unit rack I think a one unit rack equals 1.75 inches of space this gap I left here so that the CL 12 could pass through without banging into anything here if you just had two spaces here that would not be enough for this and I even have my wood sides on the sound devices I hate to say it I shaved them so that they would be flush with the bottom of the chassis it's really kind of hurt to do because it's beautiful wood but you don't see it in this configuration it's at the bottom but they are shaved off I remove the feet from the CL 12 to get it as low as possible and even then I still need it just a hair space to get it to to pass through the other thing that makes this pretty custom is the depth I'll include a link below for the sliding shelf this was really hard to find but this is about the most shallow sliding shelf I could possibly find which dictated how shallow the the rack could even be so the racks about 12 inches from front to back the Shelf is about 14 front to back so when it's fully tucked in and taken off the cart it'll stick up by one inch on the front and one on the back but that fits within the doors so once the doors are on it's still able to close up nice and tight the other reason I asked them to leave this space here was I knew I was gonna utilize it on this side here I have the CL 12 sort of scoot it over to this part of the to the left as it can go because then it leaves me enough space here to put in this audio route BDS this is a really simple one it doesn't do any sort of East smart information like the one up here does in the bag but what this is doing is it's telling me what the cart battery has for voltage and I can turn it on and off here but it's just nice to have it right on the face of the unit so you know what's going on there's one other small customization about this rack which is you can't really see it but down here below this one unit rack sliding shelf rack there's a little space I asked them to leave so they left me about a quarter inch of space because I knew I was gonna have to find some way to put mounting to the bottom of the rack to get it to go onto the shelf and that's what I'm gonna show you now so you're looking at the bottom of the rack here these are NATO rails which are made for cameras I think you can mount all sort of camera accessories onto these these two rails are accepted by a couple clamps that are mounted right to the Shelf of the cart over here you can just tighten these guys on the side once it's in and stays in place and if you want to get it back out you just loosen them out and it slides right back out let's talk about how I have this rack interfacing with the bag so I wanted the ability to break the bag off and also have interrupts about hour between both sides of this system the rack and the bag that took some custom wiring which I've done myself to keep it as simple as possible as far as plug-and-play I've utilized some nitric 10 pin connectors and I'll show you here on the back of the rack there's a patch base set up our first patch point is for power only the next two are the noise are ten pins and across those 20 pins collectively they're sending signals to and from the bag to the rack the other thing that's nice about this setup is if you're working in narrative and you're sitting down for most of it and then you know you have a scene coming up where you can't take the cart with you to wherever you're shooting maybe it's on a rooftop maybe it's out in the woods that's when it would be nice to be able to break this bag off of this cart without having to unplug a zillion things and and worrying about if your power source is gonna follow you along and how to power the bag and all that so what i'm doing here is take a look in here there is a PSC pelican life battery this battery can power this entire rig for about four and a half hours what's cool about this battery is while it's plugged into AC power so if you're on set and you can get some AC power its charging the battery the whole time so in order to get redundant power what I'm doing is I'm feeding my cart battery into the SL six her OC four and that sets of the be the primary source which means that by default the MP one would be the secondary source if I kill the power down here on my cart switching power source to SL 6 MP one I have not interrupted that take and it just jumped over the other power source the thing is if you don't use MP ones and you're using East smarts like I am the workaround for this it's a little invasive but I did it and I think it works great because it gives you away and I'm just throwing some ideas out at you on how to get a second input and all I really did was I just very neatly went in found the two contact points on the battery terminals or where the battery you know would line up into the slot and hardwired those into a DC jack which you see here on the top of the SL six so then I made a cable from to go from the output of this BDS which is using an e smart battery to plug into the SL six and because I'm keeping an East smart battery with the bag at all times that's acting as a backup battery source yes I would lose the screens and I would lose the CL 12 faders but as you could see here it didn't stop rolling on the take it was a seamless transition and that's the most important thing to me a couple other things I want to mention the way I have this bag setup is very similar to how I have my small Eng bag setup so if you're interested in how I have this bag configured I already made a video it was like my last video but it's pretty much configured the same way I like to have them almost identical so when I'm bouncing between them one day small one day large everything's in the same place same kind of wiring everything so check that out if you're interested or if you do have questions about this anything here just leave in the comments and I'll answer them for you the other thing I think worth going through on this because I feel like we're gonna get questions is my antenna setup up top I have these two shark fins they're called Sharky's they're made by a company called bet so I really like bet shows company they make really solid gear I use their timecode boxes the TC x2 s as well and they're great so these are powered fins you can add more game than you ever would or you can Pat them down this antenna here is a SNA 600 a dipole antenna these fold down they fold up you want them upright and you want the vertical these are commonly used for transmission with like boom operator or you your utility so you'll often see these on sound cards and I'm just sending an output from my mixer that you know takes the boom operators microphone plus my voice if I want to talk to him on the talk back and I'm transmitting off like an smq V and that's plugged via SMA cable directly into the BNC of this antenna and it just gives you more range and you would get with using whips and on this side here we have the contact mini mic that's a half wave antenna it's a pretty long one so I have it pointed down right now if you're outdoors you could probably send it up but that is transmitting essentially your video village mix that in this equation is coming off of a contact BST 75 216 which is like their base station transmitter okay if you're still watching right now congratulations you're super into sound cards just like I am this has been a pretty deep dive I hope you maybe got some ideas out of it at the very least and yeah you have any questions hit me up in the comment section if you liked it hit like if you liked it a whole lot you can hit subscribe the last video I did got a ton of new subscribers so if you're one of the new subscribers thanks for checking it out and thanks for doing that and I'm gonna just keep making videos because I like sound stuff a lot alright later [Music]

Channel: Hub Location Sound // Jim Keaney

Views: 22,539

Keywords: sound cart, soundcart, soundcart mini-cart, production sound tricks, location sound recording, production sound recording, mixing, mini cart, minicart

Id: -sNVnqQ8p7E

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 02 2019