744T

this is my summary for my book checked and corrected by Jon Tatooles from SD
last week. People seem to still use a computer to write to CD.

Sounddevices 744T
Retail price is $4250 but typically ???streets??? for about $3950 in the USA. Uses
Sony-compatible M and L Lithium Ion camcorder batteries or external 10 -18V
input that can also charge the batteries. There are two optional pins on the
Hirose 4-pin power connector, giving you a choice of whether the attached
battery charges while power is off or not.

Records 4 tracks to internal HD and/or removable Compact Flash Card memory (up
to 8 GB now available). Likely you use a 1 GB card [ or 512??] (~$65 U.S) ??? one
card per CD to write to. If hooked up to a MAC or PC via 1394 (Firewire), will
show up just as another removable hard drive so you can copy files right off the
744T drive onto your computer and burn CD???s or DVDs. Yes, it???s an extra step,
but you can do it several times a day to not add time to end of day! Or you pull
the CF card and write while using another card to record.

First deliveries were in November 2004. There is no mixed output of all 4 tracks
as of May 2005, but is planned they say. This would be good to feed Comteks and
backup 2Tr. media (DAT) of course. Only 2 pots for input level control. Said to
have pristine 24 bit sound quality. Early firmware versions had limited file
naming ability. Present (march 2005) firmware is quite flexible for file naming.
( upgrades are downloadable)
#
77-page manual downloaded from the product page:
#
One of the owners and a good advice person: Jon Tatooles
<jon_ (outside U.S.)This company is known for good support. There is a users forum at
# you have to register of course.

Personal suggestion: use only Sony brand batteries and chargers. Substitute
brands often don???t fit well and their life expectancy is usually very short.

Another transfer method is to take the CF card out of the 744T and stick it
into external CD or DVD recorders to transfer files to a medium you can send
away to film transfer into post computers or telecine. This is not always
compatible for the machine reading the CD later!! FireWire (400) works as an
interface to any computer and you can burn CD in external computer (there are
sporadic reports of problems here still in 2005). It must be one directory down
for DV-40.
.

Uncompressed Recording Time in Track-Hours
16/48 (5.49 MB/min) 24/48 (8.24 MB/min)
Storage in GB(1000 MB= 1 GB) 1 3.03 2.02
2 6.07 4.05
4 12.1 8.09
8 24.3 16.2

Sound Devices of course recommends running the latest firmware, which usually
fixes previous bugs and customer issues and adds new functionality. Download
firmware from #

Warning: With vers. 1.23 firmware use the prerecord buffer at maximum of 9
sec. NOT longer !!

This much of the text was proofread by Jon Taoles from SoundDevices!!

Various users reported various crashes at startup or shut down. These are
intermittent. And as of March 2005 there are less of these.

If you have the Pre-Roll set to some value like 5 or 8 Seconds, Power the
machine up and press record while booting, the machine will dutifully go into
record, but will record several seconds of Full Scale digital hash Noise.

Note from a user: ???the cool thing is that you can kill the power to it and when
you turn it back on it picks up right where you left off.???

From a field report BUGS as of May 2005:

A few weeks ago, I returned from lunch to find the 744T frozen (crashed) and I
was unable to do absolutely anything to it such as turning the light off or
powering down, etc. .. In any event, I had to pull all power including the 744T
battery to force a hard shutdown. After I re-powered up, everything was, and
has remained fine. One additional issue. After I got powered back up, the 744T
automatically offered to run the INHDD Repair Utility (normal procedure when
shut down abnormally) and when I chose Yes, the program scanned about 10% of the
files then automatically aborted the repair utility. SD still has no answer for
why that happened. Again, I closed out the utility, and everything else
(almost) was fine for the balance of the show (v 1.15).

However, I had yet one more problem. I began midway through the 35 feature
shoot, having trouble getting Tracks C and D (my iso channels from my mixer) to
register. The weird thing is that I would fire up tone and all 4 tracks would
register -20 on the nose. Funnier yet, sometimes (not always) this would
jump-start tracks C and D and they would begin to work. However, near the end
of the show, I lost Track C completely, although track D continued to work
intermittently.

check updates March 2005: #

First of all, it took quite a while to make all the cables for all of the
various connectors ???the maddening-to-the-uninitiated 5-pin LEMOs for time code
functions. For a while the 5 pins shipped from SoundDevices were wired with
input-output reversed. ( there seem to no quality control after construction ???
strange for a good company.)

The recorder looks good, sounds good, and is fairly easy to learn and use.
Navigation is generally simple and organization is fine???.

Technical issues with the 744T:

File and folder naming, renaming, and organizing still have steps to go. This
has been vastly improved in the new firmware (1.23, but see below for 1.23
issues), where alphanumeric characters have been added and four-digit take
numbers have been removed. However, you still cannot rename or delete filenames
on the 744T and folders are still limited to calendar days by the clock. This
has been a bitch on shoots that consist mostly of split days that spend half the
shoot day in one calendar day and the other half in the other.

The only way to get files off the hard drive is to FireWire them into a laptop (
or transfer via the SD removable memory card. Ed.), and this is tedious. The
FireWire connection is incredibly tenuous. I have to sit around and play
jiggle-and-repatch games with both ends of the FireWire cable (yes, I've tried
several different cables in case it was the cable) in order to get the 744T to
notice that it is connected to the computer and vice versa. More frustrating is
the 744T claiming it is connected to the computer, yet not mounting on the Mac
OS X (10.3.8) desktop. When you have to transfer files in a hurry between takes
to get a film break out on time, and this starts happening, it's not happy time.
On top of this, when the Firewire does connect, it transfers very slowly. I
know Sound Devices is hard at work at cleaning up the FireWire connection, so
this will probably improve. Obviously, once the machine can mirror directly to
an optical drive, a lot of these hassles will go away, but for now I'd be happy
with simply a rock-solid connection to the machine.

It might be that I'm doing something wrong, but as far as I can tell, the line
inputs are too hot. I couldn't get the +4 dBu outputs of my Cooper 106 down to
-20 dBFs on the 744T, even with the line level input controls (both physical and
menu-based) on the 744T cranked all the way down. I had to attenuate the
Cooper's outputs by -5 dB to get there, but as this is done on easy-to-bump
faders on the Cooper, it's a less-than-ideal solution for a would-be permanent
calibration setting. A wider range of line level input would be lovely. Maybe
there's a function to reduce it, but in both of the gain controls I could find
in the menu system (6 dB being the maximum reduction) wasn't quite enough.

CT.: the 744t reliably accepts the code and auto rolls/auto stops with the
external rec-run source. Now it will be a breeze to run a backup on rec-run
video shoots by just letting the video camera control the roll. [of course TC
overlaps due to the prerecord buffer will have to be sorted in post]

Duplicate Timecode problems:

Courtney: I just finished my first commercial job with the 744T and turned in
CD-R's with the BWF files for Telecine. Got 2 Calls from Telecine Bay while on
the set. They claimed that 3 different Takes (from different Scenes) were not
on the disks I gave them.

Of course there was nothing wrong with the Disks and they DID contain the takes
in question. The problem is caused by the FOSTEX DV-40 being used in the
telecine session not being able to deal with any duplicate Time Code. I had had
the 744T set for 8 second pre-roll. When shooting commercials sometimes they cut
and then say "once again right away--Roll Sound!". On the 744 with pre-Roll on,
If you hit the Stop Key, then after a couple of seconds Hit the REC key; if the
entire PRE-Roll time has not elapsed between the 2 Key-presses, the 744 will
create the new file with a Timecode Stamp that overlaps, in time, the previous
File's end. (it will also contain duplicate audio to the end of the previous
file for the amount of the overlap).

On the 744T there is no problem cuing through or listening to these files. But
once you burn a disk and put it into a Fostex DV-40 that most of the Telecine
houses use, any file who's timecode overlaps a previous file on the disk will
not show up or be playable. This is because the DV-40-- when placed in TC Chase
mode-- examines all the files on the disk and builds a TC based Play list. It
finds the file with the earliest TC Header and puts that first. Then it
calculates the end TC for that file and looks for the next file that has a TC
Header Greater than the TC-Out of the previous file and so on. If the next
file's TC Header has time ...
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