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Author
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Topic: Your today in pictures..
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted December 08, 2018 05:00 PM
Sound Success!
I’ve been a low level 16mm Guy for about a year now: Kodak Pageant, got it at CineSea! I’ve been a high level cinema audio guy for about 8 years now. Mixer, stereo projector-amplifier interface I designed and built myself, amplifier, nice speakers which once belonged to my Dad, which I had to re-foam the woofers to make them work again.
The problem with making these two things come together is the Pageant was never meant to connect into an amplifier. It’s mostly meant for institutional use: there is a speaker built into the cover that plugs into the machine by a ¼” mono phone plug at the end of a long cable. There is no Aux out, which is what an amplifier usually needs as an input. The difference between the two is voltage and impedance. My audio chain is looking for line level signals: about a volt. This speaker output should be capable of about 14V: enough to blow my mixer inputs sky high. Obviously I needed some sort of circuit in between.
The first go-round would have been just spectacular! I was going to do an 8 ohm dummy load with some sort of operational amplifier hum filtering and voltage reduction. It might need a heatsink, maybe even a fan. Since it would be active there would also need to be a power supply.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was overthinking the whole thing. The problem is the Pageant doesn’t have an Aux. output. Maybe the real solution was to give it one just like my Super-8 machines do. For example the Aux on an Elmo ST-1200 is just a pair of resistors in series connected across the amplifier output with a switch that cuts off the speaker when a phone plug is plugged into the Aux. jack. Aux itself taps in where the two resistors meet.
No power supply, no heatsink, no fans: much cheaper and simpler, if nothing else much less to go wrong.
-but would it work? Time for an experiment.
I grabbed two resistors, one ten times the resistance of the other, stapled them to a piece of cardboard, grabbed every clip lead I had and hooked it all up to the Pageant and the mixer. The line over from the machine is this really nice guitar/amplifier cable I just bought.
I chose the two resistors so the output impedance is the same 600 ohms as an Elmo ST: my audio system shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
It worked very well! I had to crank the volume on the machine higher than I like to get enough signal, so I’ll cut back the value of the top resistor in the voltage divider.
-but now I know enough to build it for real. (-no cardboard!)
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted December 09, 2018 11:44 AM
Ah!
-but part of the hobby for me is building the stuff! With electronics made in China so cheaply it isn't even so much a matter of the cost, it's the satisfaction.
When I was a teenager I built electronics as a part of my hobbies. It's what got me started. Then I ruined it for myself by going professional. It's nice these days to go back to work for myself building things I enjoy.
What's also nice is producing something exactly as I want it: the right electrical characteristics, the right connectors, even the right size and shape. It's a matter of deciding I need something and building to the need, rather than seeing what's available and trying to adapt the need to it.
Maybe somewhere else in the world there's a line level, 1/8" to RCA stereo adapter with a ground loop eliminator, a 60 Hz. hum filter and a high frequency roll-off, but I know for sure you won't find it on Amazon.com!
The big exception is my mixer: the day I can build something that good on my dining room table for 65 bucks, I'm obviously a lot more talented than I thought!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted January 04, 2019 09:58 AM
Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Something unplanned happened last year. We called up my Aunt and Uncle in Germany Christmas Eve and there was a big family gathering happening on the other end of the line. We said we wished we were there and they said “Then come next year!”
-so we did! (We really just called up to wish them Merry Christmas, but the situation evolved!)
We were there two weeks and did all sorts of great things. We stayed in my grandfather’s hometown, we visited the Porsche museum in Stuttgart, we went to a hockey game in Mannheim and we rang in the New Year in the Marienplatz in Munich. We love German food, but there it’s just “food” and you can have it every day!
I drove on the Autobahn a lot and am still fighting the aftereffects! My first day back driving to work I caught myself doing 80 in a 55MPH zone (I’m trying NOT to do that!)
One of the best things is we went to a family dinner party Christmas Eve. I haven’t been to a party with so many people named “Klare” since my grandparents moved to Florida in 1969!
One of the places we always visit is Rothenburg. This is a medieval walled city in western Bavaria. On the surface of it, it looks like something Walt Disney made from fiberglass down in Orlando, but this is the real thing. You don’t have a hard time finding buildings there that were standing before Columbus ever sailed.
Christkindlmarkt is a wonderful tradition: many German towns set up Christmas fairs with food, drink and Christmas crafts. There is this spiced wine drink: Glühwein. It feels great going down on a day when your breath is steaming in front of you. If you are willing to give up on your Pfand (deposit), you can keep your mug. Our luggage fairly rattled with them on the flight home! (Next Christmas we are making our own.)
This was the last day of Christkindlmarkt in Rothenburg. It was not only cold but a little rainy too.
This is always a beautiful town, but decorated for Christmas on an early December night it became almost magical.
This is a classic photo. -not because I took it, but because everyone takes it! I shot this first in the Summer of 2002: I thought it was pretty. Maybe a year later I was at the airport and I saw a poster for world travel: there it was again! I saw a TV documentary about POW camps in Canada during WW2. One of the men that guarded the camp still had a pencil sketch given to him by a German POW: the same building again. Maybe a month ago I was in a German restaurant near home, there was a painting on the wall: once again the same picture.
This is called the Plönlein. It is two streets in Rothenburg that come through the city wall and have a skinny half timbered building squeezed into their intersection. If you pay a little attention, guaranteed you will see this photo wherever you are sooner or later.
Naturally I couldn’t do a lot of film things with all the international travel, but I didn’t waste the opportunity. I bought two ‘scope lens brackets from FFR and had them shipped to my Aunt and Uncle’s home. They came home to New York in our suitcase.
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Dominique De Bast
Film God
Posts: 4486
From: Brussels, Belgium
Registered: Jun 2013
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posted January 06, 2019 02:02 PM
Waw, Steve, Beautiful pictures !
Today, like every year on the 6 th January, people eat a special cake in Belgium (and I think in every Catholic cultured countries) as this day is when the Wise Men are supposed to have visited Jesus. In French, the Wise Men are called les Rois Mages, the Kings Mage. So, in the cake, there is a small object hidden (it differs from one bakkery from another, some people collect those objects and in some bakkeries there is even one or two gold coin hidden in one of the cakes). The one who find this object is the King of the day.When you cut the cake to give a part to every guest, you may see the small object so to avoid any cheating, a classical tradition among many families is to ask the youngest kid to hide himself under the table and to give the name one by one of the persons who are there to give them a part. When there is only one kid, guess who becomes the king if the family and the chance do well the things ;-) Often, the King can choose a Queen, some bakkeries give one crown with the cake, others give only one. This tradition comes actually from the Roman time. Once a year (also on what is now the 6th January, I think) they choosed by chance a slave and he became the master that day. The same tradition exists in France as well with the same cake (the only difference is that you find it all the month long while in Belgium you don't find them much after the dedicated day). I know in Spain the cake is not the same, I have no informations about Italy, Portugal...I don't know if the Belgian Royal family eat this cake but I know the French president does. It'a a giant cake (to share with all people working with him) but there is no hidden piece in it since a president cannot...become a king ;-)
Popular tradition…
The cartoon crown is provided in the box.
Incredibly delicious !
The small (porcelain) piece...
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Dominique
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted January 10, 2019 02:42 PM
German Trains
Haupbahnhof, München
(I love this picture! Other than the very realistic looking people, it could be the front cover of one of the many glossy Märklin or Lehman model train catalogs I’ve had!)
Months ago, we suggested to my Aunt and Uncle that we travel together to Munich for a couple of days. They accepted with the condition, that especially being Winter, we travel by rail. I didn’t fight back too hard!
I’ve done short distance travel by train in Germany: It’s basically not much different than the commuter trains we ride quite often at home, but this was several hours of travel!
We boarded in the suburbs of Heidelberg bound for Munich. The train departed and began to accelerate. After that it kept accelerating. Just about then it accelerated some more! It's not that it just lept out of the station like a scared rabbit, it just kept building up speed for many minutes and the accumulation became pretty impressive. Once the train reached speed it just stuck at the exact same speed for easily 30 minutes at a time. The straight sections were laser straight and seemed many kilometers long. The curves were gradual and banked: on the table in our compartment, our drinks leaned inside their cups.
It was smooth, but not necessarily quiet. It was not airliner loud, yet not car quiet either.
We heard the train blow its horn only a few times, and only when approaching stations. There were very, very few road crossings the entire trip. I saw one way out in the countryside.
The striking thing was inside tunnels. That fast train inside that confined space seemed to compress the air a lot. It was necessary to gulp a couple of times to make our ears work right again.
What was interesting was in many places along the way there were what looked like little villages: many gardens with some sort of shack or old travel trailer right in the middle. My uncle explained that these were community gardens. The residents of local villages would come out and garden their plots and store their tools in the sheds so they could be kept on-site.
There were a lot of beautiful forested regions and a few cities too, including Stuttgart. At one point I'm pretty sure we passed a large factory marked "AGFA", but that may just be the beverage services talking!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
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….anyway I landed up with this little lot ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
driving down the motorway flat out with this load ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
scary stuff, but I made it home as the last photo shows. The first two photos Pat took.....
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
That photo also led to comments from another person that once worked there the same time as myself....amazing what a single photo can do in this magic world of the internet 
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