Cantar - Text 2
Cantar was designed to be “all terrain” and multi-functional, meaning that it could be both set up on a trolley or carried on the shoulder. It was thus intended for use in both fiction and documentary filmmaking, outdoors and in the studio. It could thus be used in a complex sound recoding system, with its numerous inputs and parameters for the sound recordist to manage, or as a lighter and more flexible device, carried over the shoulder with a hand-held boom, while recording ambient sound outdoors for example. It should be noted however that Cantar was not really designed to regulate the inputs while recording. The arrangement of numerous potentiometers and the choice of knobs and not slides did not make it possible to turn the inputs on and off quickly. In order to regulate the sound live, one had to acquire a control panel with faders connected to the Cantar: the Cantarem.[7]
It should also be noted that Cantar was more expensive than other multi-track digital sound recorders on the market, positioning Aaton at the very high end. In January 2004, the device cost around €12,000 without options, against some $9,500 US for the Zaxcom DEVA II. Many sound recordists, however, did not see this high price as a true drawback, because of the device’s technical performance and its ergonomics, each of which was greatly superior to its competitors.
A Device which Connects the Operator and the Machine
Above all, Cantar was the first digital sound recorder to provide a “conceived for the hand” ergonomics which was very different from the other equivalent machines on the market at the time. One need only compare it with devices such as the Nagra V, The Zaxcom DEVA (Zaxcom being the standard in the United States) and the HHB Portadrive.
Through this redesigned ergonomics, Beauviala brought to fruition his desire to break with the conceptual paradigm established by the Nagra, whose connections were on the side and perpendicular to the machine, and on which the potentiometers were located on the front. On the Cantar, what had to be handled during the recording was on the top of the machine; the indicators were on the front and the connections were on the top, almost parallel to the device, giving additional protection against shocks and avoiding a “dishevelled” appearance (Beauviala’s term). The operator’s comfort, by virtue of being able to rest one’s hand on the upper surface of the machine, and the manoeuvrability of the device were greatly improved as a result.
It was a question of “taking advantage” of digital technology, of making it possible to arrange the components more freely, because a sound recorder using a hard disk no longer required reels of magnetic tape or a tape head, which necessarily had to be situated on the top of the device. In addition, the mixing panel on the top of the Cantar enabled the sound recordist to create a final sound mix on site. This is a highly revealing detail which was also at the heart of the device’s design. This mixer represented the possibility for the sound recordist to devise his or her own interpretation of the sound during the film shoot, meaning to maintain a creative role and not simply be a “compiler” of files or a supplier of raw materials, of data. This mixer can be seen as the element linking the Nagra magnetic tape devices and the world of the digital. It enabled the sound recordist to provide a soundtrack which was relatively faithful to his or her personal vision of the film’s sound right from the viewing of the film’s rushes. In this way the sound recordist could take control of the recorded material and not delegate everything to the post-production stage.