AV Issue 53 by Alchemedia Publishing

ELEGANT DESIGN. ELOQUENT PERFORMANCE. Microflex™ Advance™

Ceiling and Table Array Microphones ex Advance Ceiling and Table Array Microphones fundamentally change audio capture possibilities in AV conferencing environments. Revolutionary Steerable Coverage™ technology delivers incredibly accurate voice coverage for best-in-class audio from participants in any location of a meeting es setup and allows to customise the microphones to meet any usage requirements. Elegantly. Precisely. Invisibly. Find out more at www.shureasia.com/mxa

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Community. Outdoor. Distributed. Engineered. Know the CODE. Speak to Hills AV today to unlock audio solutions for every project. P: 1300 445 571 (1300 HILLS 1) www.hills.com.au

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Samsung SMART Signage Displays

Samsung Smart Signage Platform (SSSP) takes Samsung dynamic signage to another level. Included in the new Samsung DME, DHE and UED series, SSSP offers quad core System on Chip (SoC) technology helping to boost power and provide more functionality for Samsung signage applications.

Images for illustration purposes only Specifications correct at time of print, but subject to change without prior notice 1 Samsung LED BLU Commercial Displays use LCD display panels with LED back or edge lighting. 2 DP Cables not included. (Sold separately)â&#x20AC;&#x201C;DP loop out not available on DM32E 3 MagicInfoÂŽ Premium S server client access software licence is required for networked applications, one licence required for each display (sold separately). Internet connection may be required. Data and subscription charges may apply. Usage may be subject to third party service provider agreements. Network infrastructure not included.

Samsung Smart Signage Platform (SSSP) Included with DME, DHE and UED ranges

• Complete Stand-Alone Signage Solution • Design Template options included • DME, DHE, UED series allows for PC free content scheduling and delivery to multiple compatible displays using DP Daisy chain² (excluding DM32E) • DME, DHE, UED series PC-less video wall with DP Daisy chain² (excluding DM32E) • PC-less touch using SoC player and optional Touch Module (sold separately). • Scalable for networked server based signage applications with MagicInfo® Premium S client access software licences (licences sold separately - one licence required per display³).

New Samsung Commercial Displays with Samsung Smart Signage Platform The new Samsung DME and DHE series LED BLU¹ displays introduce a sleek design. Helping to provide clients with a consistent look for their installations even when different model types are required for specific applications.

PC-less video wall from SD Card, USB (devices sold separately) or on-board memory in one display with DP Daisy chain²

USB Direct play back MagicInfoS Direct play back

www.samsung.com/au/business business.partner@samsung.com

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Zero Latency Zero Compression InďŹ nitely Scaleable Video over IP

Pro AV integrators rejoice, iMAGsystems has just simplified your life! Lightning is a 4k encoder/decoder matrix system that distributes high resolution video with the uncompromising quality you expect, using off the shelf network switches. Use Lightning for all your PRO AV video applications and reap the savings and simplification that networking provides.

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XTWO X-LINE ADVANCE Forward-thinking line-array design starts here. X2 X-Line Advance utilizes state-of-the-art EVengineered components and incorporates a range of innovative new features, all of which work together to surpass the capabilities of other line arrays, and all in a significantly more compact, flexible, and quickerto-set-up package.

KEY FEATURES & BENEFITS: • An unprecedented performance-to-size ratio provides the big sound without the big storage, transport, crew or labour costs • Advanced audio quality and control via exclusive EV technologies including Hydra plane-wave generators, high-output transducers, and proprietary FIR-Drive optimization • New Integrated Rigging System provides easier and faster set-up and set-down drastically reducing in and out time

X2 X-Line Advance includes full-range element X2-212/90 and the X12-128 — the most powerful subwoofer EV has ever developed.

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Aug/Sep 2016

REGULARS INDUSTRY UPDATE News from the AV associations: InfoComm and AETM

TERMINATION Light, Rain, Action.

58 FEATURES

Advertising Office: +61 (0)2 9986 1188 PO Box 6216, Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 Australia

Editorial Office: +61 (0)3 9998 1998 PO Box 295, Ballarat, VIC 3353 Australia

Editorial Director: Christopher Holder (chris@avapac.net)

Editorial Assistant: Preshan John (preshan@alchemedia.com.au) Publisher: Philip Spencer (philip@avapac.net)

VIVID FESTIVAL AV Asia Pacific goes behind the scenes of the visually stunning Sydney festival.

HAMER HALL DIVES INTO VIDEO Melbourne’s pre-eminent concert hall beefs up it video capabilities.

MCEC FINDS A PEARL Live streaming part of live for MCEC. Epiphan Pearl gets them there.

SCREEN TEST Orpheum Cinema’s show lighting upgrade.

STATE OF THE ART HOUSE Wyong and The P.A. People prove you can have a regional theatre that keeps everyone happy.

INFOCOMM16 REPORT Paul van Der Ent casts a critical eye over the Vegas tradeshow.

Additional Design: Dominic Carey (dominic@avapac.net)

Circulation Manager: Mim Mulcahy (subscriptions@avapac.net)

ANALYSIS

Graphic Designer: Daniel Howard (daniel@avapac.net)

Accounts: Jaedd Asthana (jaedd@alchemedia.com.au)

HIGH FIBRE The case for fibre is more than long cable runs. Is it time that Fibreoptic came in from the cold?

REVIEWS

CASIO XJ-Z257 Portable Hybrid Laser Projector.

PREVIEW: BIAMP TESIRALUX AV-over-IP Distribution Platform.

TUTORIAL

SOUND PRESSURE InfoComm International Education: Decibels and Sound Systems. alchemedia publishing pty ltd (ABN: 34 074 431 628) PO Box 6216, Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 Australia info@alchemedia.com.au All material in this magazine is copyright © 2016 Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd. The title AV is a registered Trademark. Apart from any fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. The publishers believe all information supplied in this magazine to be correct at the time of publication. They are not in a position to make a guarantee to this effect and accept no liability in the event of any information proving inaccurate. After investigation and to the best of our knowledge and belief, prices, addresses and phone numbers were up to date at the time of publication. It is not possible for the publishers to ensure that advertisements appearing in this publication comply with the Trade Practices Act, 1974. The responsibility is on the person, company or advertising agency submitting or directing the advertisement for publication. The publishers cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions, although every endeavour has been made to ensure complete accuracy. 5/8/2016

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ASIA PACIFIC

Presents

In Association with

AV Industry Awards: Finalists Announced The AV Industry Award’s panel of industry-appointed judges has assessed this year’s record number of entries and arrived at the following list of finalists:

Best Application of AV in a Commercial or Government Installation • Corporate Initiatives, for MCG and Etihad Perimeter and Parapet LED Signage • Rutledge AV, for AGL – 699 Bourke Street • Rutledge AV, for Novartis ANZ, Waterloo Road Campus Best Application of AV in an Exhibition or Display

AWARDS CEREMONY: YOU'RE INVITED You’re invited to attend the AVIAs awards ceremony staged at Integrate. Thanks to the support of InfoComm International, the ceremony will follow InfoComm’s Industry Reception at the conclusion of Day 1 of the show. That’s right: free drinks and nibbles followed by a celebration of the best the industry has to offer. And all wrapped up in time for you to make it to your dinner engagement. No RSVP required, simply head along to the Integrate Bar (on site) at the end of Day 1.

• Auditoria, for Ninjago Malaysia Best Application of AV in Education with a Budget Over $500K • MultiTek Solutions, for Geelong Grammar School of Performing Arts • Pro AV Solutions QLD, for University of Southern Queensland, T Block Synchronous Teaching Rooms. • University of Technology Sydney, for Superlab in UTS, Faculty of Science, Thomas Street Building • Videopro, for Griffith University, Visitor Experience Centres (Red Lab) Best Application of AV in Education with a budget between $100K and $500K • AVDEC, for the University of New Enland, VITAL STEMMEd • CHW Consulting, forCurtin University -Social Media Command Centre • Prendi, for The Wonder Room, All Saints Anglican School Best Application of AV in a Production • Resolution X, for the Prime Minister's Olympic Dinner • TDC – Technical Direction Company, for Projection mapping at Vivid Sydney

Montage Wireless Presentation System

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InfoComm16 Report Industry veteran and pundit, Paul van Der Ent, takes an unflinching look at the best and the worst of the Vegas show. Text:/ Paul van Der Ent

INFOCOMM16 NEWS IN BRIEF:

ClearOne’s new flexible View Pro E110 is designed to deliver highquality video with configurable 4:4:4 and 4:2:0 colour sampling, standards-based streaming formats, 1080p 60Hz, H.264based encoding with lossless compression, very low end-to-end latency, and full HDCP support. The E110 is also configurable with ClearOne’s new View Console software. ClearOne: www.clearone.com PAVT: www.pavt.com.au

• Get your daily news fix at www.avapac.net

Audio-Technica’s new ATND971 boundary microphone, ATND8677 microphone desk stand, and ATND931 gooseneck and ATND933 hanging ceiling-mount microphones all operate off an Ethernet connection. Transmitting audio and control data together over the Dante network protocol, the plug-and-play audio works with Dante-enables device while the integrated control function is compatible with software from a growing list of providers. Technical Audio Group: info@tag.com.au

Two new sets of Crown amplifiers: The DCi DriveCore Series offers a balance of functionality and affordability, providing the power and capabilities of Crown’s popular DriveCore Install (DCi) Series amps with a streamlined set of options targeted to deliver optimal value to small and medium-sized applications. In addition, the new Crown DCi-DA Series brings Dante networked audio options to the DriveCore Install amplifier family. Jands: jands.com.au Crown: crownaudio.com

Beyerdynamic’s Quinta TB wireless boundary mics are designed to optimise voice transmission in VC. In microphone mode the Quinta CU acts as a multi-channel receiver, allowing a maximum of four Quinta TBs to be operated simultaneously. Three-coloured backlit buttons with tactile feedback and Braille makes the device accessible, shows participants the status of the microphone, and enables use of the global mute, push-to-talk and push-to-mute modes. Syntec: www.syntec.com.au

Panasonic’s new three-model PT-RZ970 Series of one-chip, DLP Solid Shine compact laser phosphor projectors builds on the features and technology of the PTRZ760 Series but sports 1.5 times more brightness and improved picture quality. The PT-RZ970 features an airtight optical engine block as well as dual solid-state laser modules to maintain high brightness with no maintenance for up to 20,000 hours. Panasonic: 132 600 or www.panasonic.com.au

NEWS

arlier in the year I waxed rhapsodical in these pages about the 2016 ISE show — amazing show. The InfoComm show in Vegas is also compelling. Tempering that is my contention that the InfoComm show is quite a bit more provincial — if you can call catering to the world’s biggest market, in North America, ‘provincial’. General consensus suggests that Australians are less inclined to attend the longer-haul Orlando version of the InfoComm show and in those years, Amsterdam becomes a very viable alternative. InfoComm16 was, as ever, very professionally run, and well attended by a healthy cohort of Australians. Although, not all of us were healthy. There were a number of reports regarding Aussies going too hard and, in some cases, not even making it to the show floor for any of the three days. It’s unthinkable really, given the investment required to attend, and it’s a dreadful look. I guess for some individuals the carnal attractions of Vegas are just too great to resist. BEST IN SHOW?

LG once again had a standout booth with its impressive oLED product leaving showgoers slack-jawed. But pipping them to the post for the Paul van Der Ent ‘Most Impressive Booth’ award was Christie. The booth was incredibly well themed and did a tremendous job in demonstrating all of the Christie products. Pandoras Box was running all the content, evoking the atmosphere of game time at an ice hockey stadium (Christie being Canadian, and all). I spoke to the former owner of Coolux, who sold up to Christie, and he was delighted; as he should be. The stand inspired and excited people, and that’s what it’s all about. Other stands were quite lack lustre in comparison. Having AMX on the Harman stand… I just don’t think that works. Harman might be a brand that’s recognisable in North America (with Harman Kardon product) but it doesn’t cut much mustard anywhere else. I acknowledge that as Harman’s enormous presence in the automotive and consumer space increases internationally, that the brand will have more cachet but names

Bose’s new ShowMatch DeltaQ allows you to change the directivity, or ‘Q’ for each module, to better match the total array coverage to audience areas and distance with improved phase coherency. Bose says ShowMatch is suited to portable or installed applications alike. The full-range speakers feature four new Bose EMB2S compression drivers with dual eight-inch neodymium woofers. Modules come in 5°, 10° or 20° vertical coverage. Bose: (02) 8737 9999 or info@bose.com.au

Osprey’s new Talon G1 decoder can take in a combination of up to four streams at a time — RTP or UDP streams from network servers and/or .TS files from an external drive. The unit decodes the streams and displays them via HDMI output at resolutions up to 1080p/60. You can arrange the inputs and outputs in multiple configurations; ideal for multistream monitoring, point-topoint source monitoring, and digital signage applications. Corsair Solutions: sales@corsairsolutions.com.au

like AMX, JBL, Soundcraft, AKG and Martin are currently getting lost at InfoComm… at least the way Harman has its stand currently configured and designed. By the way, word is that Harman’s automotive and consumer office in Australia has extra space to move into. Yes, it’s more than a marketing office — it’s being used to deliver product. So Harman are most definitely ‘here’. MOST INTERESTING PRODUCT?

Biamp’s Tesiralux was probably the most interesting new product at the show. It was properly demonstrated and Biamp did a good job showing its capabilities. One mini caveat: Biamp guarantee less than a two-frame latency with the video streaming, but that’s point to point. Have a look at our full preview elsewhere this issue. It’s well worth getting to know. QSC continues to demonstrate its credentials as a company to watch. It even had a rebadged Lumens PTZ camera joining its product ranks as it moves into the commercial space. What’s the big idea? QSC is showing it can keep everything under control on its platform, not just audio. And why would you use QNet and QSys? Become it runs rock solidly on any ol’ network. You don’t need a special AVB switch or a $100,000 10G switch. Is QSC working on putting video on its platform? I won’t answer that, but you can take a wild guess. QSC wouldn’t be the first audio company thinking about how to respond to a digital world. Dante continues to be the dominant solution to the digital question for audio manufacturers. Audio-Technica is starting to respond. Shure is embracing Dante. AKG seems to be slow to get moving. I would say, all of these networkable microphone products released for video conferencing spaces are currently way too expensive for what they are. IS THE IT DEPT READY?

AVB’s profile has been given a real boost now that Biamp has put the ‘V’ in AVB with Tesiralux. It shone another spotlight on AV’s convergence with IT. Up until now the message has been: AV people need to understand IT better, so we can help IT people understand AV better. Right? But

Three new I Series Compact models from Community: the 6.5-inch IC6-1062 features greater LF extension for its cabinet size and a wide dispersion 100° x 100° fabric dome HF on a shallow waveguide; the single eight-inch IC6-1082 and symmetrical dual eight-inch IC6-2082 are available with two rotatable horn patterns (120° x 60°, 90° x 60°) paired with high output 1.7-inch diaphragm HF compression drivers. Hills: www.hills.com.au

BrightSign’s new BrightBeacon capability enables businesses to connect digital signage to their customers’ mobile devices. By elevating digital signage to a two-screen experience, audience participation can be highly targeted and potentially offers businesses near-limitless potential in maximising the impact of their digital works. Midwich: www.midwich.com.au BrightSign: www.brightsign.biz

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is IT ready for AV? I think the answer is clearly: no. They don’t get it; they don’t get AV’s requirements. with products like Tesiralux and the Lightning products from Australia’s iMAG (that are based on the Aptovision BlueRiver chip) I’d suggest we turn the question around: is IT ready for AV? I think the answer is clearly: no. They don’t get it; they don’t get AV’s requirements. So it’s not enough for our AV product to be ‘network ready’, rather is it IT Department ready? By which I mean, for any new project or upgrade, the IT people will use IT project management processes, and in just about every case, those processes don’t suit our requirements on the network. And the process takes too long. For example, I’m penning this article while on site at 7pm waiting for one of the major telcos to change ports on a switch so we can get a VC room working. Trouble is, the telco people we have on site, ready to provision the system, don’t have have anybody back at their office rostered on tonight. So we have a network-based AV system that IT can’t service, because IT isn’t ready for us. This will be an ongoing problem in our industry. I believe there will come a time when IT will insist we just stick all our gear on our own network — they won’t want to know about it. IT can’t deal with the ports we require for all the changes, and they can’t deal with the lack of security we sometimes require for our gear to function properly. And back to AVB for a minute: Biamp can cheerfully point to the fact that Cisco is now making AVB-ready switches but those switches won’t talk to all the other switches in your client’s

Datapath’s Fx4 is a nextgeneration multi-display that offers four outputs from a single box. The Fx4 is capable of DisplayPort 1.2 capture at 4K/UHD at 60fps and HDMI 1.4 4K capture at 30fps. All inputs and outputs support HDCP content and can be programmed and controlled independently of the platform through either a local USB connection or the on-board network interface. Suitable for projects of all sizes. Midwich: www.midwich.com.au Datapath: datapath.co.uk

Meyer Sound's Galileo Galaxy network platform offers more processing power than Galileo. Galaxy is fully networkable, with multiple units sharing 24-bit/96k multi-channel audio via an AVB network. Maximum input count has been increased from six to eight for 7.1 systems, and a new generation of FPGA-based processing with 96k floating point resolution delivers increased dynamic range, a lower noise floor, and super-low latency of 0.6ms. Meyer Sound: www.meyersound.com

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core, so I can’t imagine the IT department wanting to retire all its 2960s or 3560 enterprise switches because you want to introduce AVB onto the network. Which is why QNet is so popular right now — you don’t need to do anything for QNet to reside on a standard network. CLOUD SURFING

Manufacturers’ reliance on the cloud was very evident at this year’s InfoComm. First problem: security in the cloud. In my case, the job I’m working on (or not, as I sit here waiting) is a large multinational. I can tell you, they won’t go to a cloud solution because of the lack of security. That includes something like AMX RMS or Crestron’s Fusion, which by default rely on the cloud. The other consideration before you put all your chips on the cloud is Australia’s iron-age upload/download speeds — you might have 10G network but that won’t help if you have dialup internet speeds. HEARING ASSIST: ALL EARS

There’s some real movement in the world of hearing assist systems, and it highlights the inflexibility of Australia’s building code. The building code mandates coverage quotas and most of us have been laying loops in the floor to comply. Just to point out a few things to consider: a traditional hearing loop lacks security. You might suggest that on the 17th floor of a high-rise, it doesn’t matter. But I’ve done tests where I can pick up that hearing loop on the 12th floor and up to the 20th floor. And this is why many larger enterprise customers are turning to infrared systems. As an aside, most hearing aids don’t even have T-loop coils built into them anymore, because the quality of the transducers are just so good these days. Increasingly, hearing aids have bluetooth to connect directly to a smartphone, and I think this is the future of hearing assistance. Certainly, Sennheiser, Williams Sound and Listen Tech agree. These companies have systems that use wi-fi. The building code will have to catch

QSC's Q-Sys I/O-USB bridge and Q-Sys PTZ IP cameras offer a new networked AV paradigm for soft codec integration for meeting room systems by integrating an IP-based camera to USB bridging solution. It leverages standard USB 2.0 drivers for webcam video emulation and AEC speakerphone audio, eliminating the need for special drivers to integrate Q-Sys with modern PC operating systems. Technical Audio Group: info@tag.com.au QSC: www.qsc.com

Natively equipped with seven inputs, Analog Way’s VIO 4K multi-format converter enables the conversion of a multitude of signals including dual-link DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI, 6G-SDI Optical and universal analogue, into an array of output signal formats up to 4K 30Hz or 4K 60Hz with the optional upgrade card. Axis AV: info@axisav.com.au Analog Way: www.analogway.com

Paws Button: ClearOne’s maverick lady owner brought her pooch to the show, sans lanyard. Little wonder that ClearOne’s products are far from ordinary.

Vaddio’s RoboTRAK, is its newest technology for intelligent presenter tracking, designed to allow instructors to focus on the teaching, not the technology. Optimised for larger venues on a small venue budget, RoboTRAK offers precision video making presentations as effortless as possible. Midwich: www.midwich.com.au Vaddio: www.vaddio.com

Listen Technologies’ family of ListenWiFi products distribute high quality audio over a wireless network to end users’ smart devices. The line now has multiple access points (allows venues to expand the number of users from 60 to over 1000), twice the channels (now supporting up to 24 stereo channels), and international language support. National Audio Systems: sales@nationalaudio.com.au Listen Technologies: www.listentech.com

Pencil Thin: The bezel wars continue. Samsung’s new UH55F-E will give you an all-but seamless video wall.

The InFocus Mondopod is now ready for 4K. The Mondopod giant touch tablet supports all-in-one videoconferencing and collaboration with an 80-inch touchscreen interface. You can create and share documents, spreadsheets and webpages, and it features built-in 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 256GB hard drive, Windows 10, and Microsoft Office 2016. Westan: www.westan.com.au InFocus: www.infocus.com

SoundTube’s ceiling speakers feature Dante-enablement, allowing direct connection to the popular audio network. National Audio Systems: sales@nationalaudio.com.au SoundTube: www.soundtube.com

High Lumen Projectors

Designed for Exceptional Performance Epson G, Z and 4000 Series Installation Projectors are powerful performers in virtually all venues including lecture halls, bars & restaurants, houses of worship and more. These projectors utilise advanced display technology such as Edge Blending, 360 degree and corner projection and short throw lenses for flexibility. Features include: • 10,000 lumens and WUXGA resolution for bright, colourful, brilliant images • 24/7 operation for continuous and reliable use for almost any application • Versatile connectivity including HDBaseT • Easy integration with Crestron, AMX and Extron compatibility For more information vistit www.epson.com.au/installation *Compared to leading 1-chip DLP business and education projectors based on NPD data, July 2011 through June 2012. Colour brightness (colour light output) measured in accordance with IDMS 15.4. Colour brightness will vary depending on usage conditions.

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Light Work: Panasonic’s light ID (identifier) technology uses a smartphone’s camera to send high-speed data transmission from a light source flashing away at several thousand Hertz behind the display. You need an app, but it is nifty. Great for signage and museums.

up, because it currently doesn’t know how to deal with these types of systems (how do you measure coverage on a BYOD wi-fi hearing assist solution?), but they are the most useful and convenient for the hearing impaired. BRING IT

BYOD isn’t a ‘thing’ for Gen Y and millennials, it’s just a natural part of life… like free wi-fi. And anyone with Chromecast or Airplay isn’t going to pat you on the back for making BYOD possible at work; again, it a natural part of life… like barista-made coffee. But it does open up a whole can of security worms. Companies, on one hand, love BYOD — because it saves them money on hardware. But it means they have to put that money back into beefing up security. So here’s that question again: is the IT industry ready for us? The show had no shortage of wireless control

Martin Professional has extended the reach of its Rush lighting series with the launch of three cost-effective additions — the MH6 Wash, MH7 Hybrid, and MH8 Mini Profile. The MH6 is a compact yet powerful LED wash light head that’s fast and agile with a 10° to 60° zoom. The MH7 Hybrid combines the capabilities of a beam, spot and wash moving heads in a single fixture. Show Technology: sales@ showtech.com.au

Bosch expands its network-based Dicentis Conference System line with four new product offerings: the Dicentis discussion Basic, Dicentis discussion Voting, Dicentis discussion Language, and Dicentis discussion Extended. The four new models share the same form factor but sport different interfaces and feature sets. The products use open-standard Omneo network IP technology for a flexible, scalable and future-proof investment. Bosch: sales.communications@ au.bosch.com

The Bose ShowMatch is a lower-profile upstart bro of RoomMatch. Could it see Bose cracking the mid-level rental market? Bose also had the nifty 1U PowerShare adaptable power amp.

systems for BYOD run by nice-looking apps. These products will feature varying degrees of security. Still, in my opinion, there’s not enough separating these systems from something Apple and Google can do for pittance. And in the home automation sphere, these smartphone apps don’t require a lot of expertise to install — the antenna guy can do it. So big business is quite rightly pushing back a little: ‘you’re charging me $200,000 to control this room when I can control my house for $5.95?!’ Of course the $5.95 app won’t be secure, but for many smaller businesses it probably doesn’t need to be. FIBRE REGULARITY

OMG22 LOL: Atlas showing it has a sense of humour.

I think people now fully recognise the benefit of fibre. But they’re still worried about the cost of fibre, which has come down enormously. They’re more concerned about not having the skills to terminate it or test it. The other side of the

The Ricoh PJ WUL6280 laser projector is designed to keep up with the diverse needs of houses of worship, education organisations and modern work environments. The lamp-free design of this DLP projector allows for more than 20,000 hours of use, and the 6000-lumen brightness makes it suitable for conferences, events, signage and more. The PJ WUL6280 has five lenses to choose from. Ricoh: www.ricoh.com.au

Ashly has a new digital mixing console pitched at the permanent installation market, such as schools, gyms, churches etc. The digiMIX24 is a compact 24-input mixer with plenty of DSP, iPad control and intuitive mixing interface. NAS: nationaudio.com.au Ashly: ashly.com

Lectrosonics’ miniature SSM transmitter is only 65.2g with the battery — perfect for when size (or the lack of it) is everything. It’s still built from steel, and enjoys the customary Lectrosonics audio quality. PAVT: pavt.com.au Lectrosonics: lectrosonics.com

Gefen’s new EXT-UHD600 line of 4K 600MHz products features three splitters, a 4x1 switcher and a 4x4 matrix. The HDCP2.2compliant family of products takes HDMI 2.0 to its highest spec of 4K 60Hz at 4:4:4 colour space, along with HDR support. Amber Technology: ambertech.com.au Gefen: gefen.com

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You’ll Get Square Eyes: LG’s OLED arch display again turned head and craned necks. Don't fret, the new product is now available and LG has opened a new Business Innovation Centre in Darling Harbour to meet demand/interest.

3-in-1: ATEN’s fall-off-a-log-easy, HDBaseT-based video wall engines on show. News in: Madison Tech is now distributor of ATEN in Australia.

equation is the fibre-ready appliances: they’re twice the price as the equivalent Cat product. That should hopefully rectify itself as the volumes go up but it’s hard to justify the extra cost sometimes. LIVE STREAMING

Everybody Loves a Montage: Plenty of collaboration systems on the floor. Display Note’s Montage, out of Ireland, is one of the better ones.

JBL continues to stand behind its popular Control series with updates to its loudspeakers. The 23-1, 25-1, 28-1 look more contemporary and features a flatter/wider frequency response and a higher max SPL. Jands: jands.com.au JBL: jblpro.com

LG’s 86-inch Ultra Stretch commercial display features an impressive 58:9 aspect ratio. It has a brightness of 500 nits, Ultra HD resolution (3840 x 600) and an IPS panel to ensure accurate colour saturation and contrast at wide angle viewing. LG: lg.com.au

Everyone is now a broadcaster — there’s no technological or investment barrier any more, the tech is cheap and capable. Universities have seen the advantages of live streaming for years but business is starting to get onboard, especially companies with a team of reps out on the road. These businesses love live streaming because it means the reps don’t have to come into the office for a meeting, they can stay out in the field, where their bosses want them. This approach fits in with business’s desire to keep the workplace as small and as flexible as possible. But with the reduction in the office space of new fitouts, there’s always a decent-sized, flexible room that can be used for

Casio’s new LampFree models include four WXGA and three XGA models. All seven of the new models are equipped with a 1.5x zoom lens. The Advanced Series can also be used to power other devices with HDMI terminal connections such as Intel WiDi or Miracast wireless display adapters and stick devices. Shriro Australia: casioprojector.shriro.com.au

New seven-inch AMX N-Touch Panels are available in both tabletop and wallmount options, and based on the Modero S Series hardware design. They give users a generously large control interface to AMX SVSI Networked AV systems. Control over SVSi covers virtually all aspects, including changing which video content is shown on a screen, changing windowing processor presets or starting and stopping recordings. avt: avt.tech AMX: amx.com

education, meetings and these townhalls which will be streamed to reps in the field. As AV people it’s worth pointing out that if you have 500 reps in the field, that you need a live streaming system capable of handling that kind of traffic. It’s about who’s got the IP addresses and the bandwidth — resulting in yet another conversation with our friends in the IT department. It’s a bit tricky to set up in some cases and there are a lot of streaming solutions out there to choose from. The big guys like AMX have a solution, as do the specialists like Livestream, which often work on a license basis. One thing’s for certain, live streaming is going to become more important as we distance ourselves from the physical workspace. CRESTRON WATCH

You can’t talk about InfoComm and not talk about Crestron. I thought its new audio DSP platform was very good. It did highlight the fact to me that, as an

The TOA A-5000 Series digital mixer amplifier sports a Class D amplifier (in 60W and 120W versions), is small and efficient, cramming a whole lot in — integrated DSP, support for networked PC control and real-time monitoring of levels, five-band parametric EQ on all channels, compression, mute/duck setting with adjustable threshold and release. Hills: www.hills.com.au TOA Electronics: www.toaelectronics.com

With Chief’s Fusion Modular Series, you can use the common components of Chief’s multidisplay mounts with its new online configurator to get the parts needed for your most creative applications. Enter the number of displays, display model and configuration details and Chief will provide a customised list of the parts needed to meet your exact specification. Midwich: www.midwich.com.au Chief: www.milestone.com

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020

NEWS

CLEDIS As Crystal: Sony unveiled its Crystal LED Integrated Structure (CLEDIS). The ultrafine LEDs are only 0.003mmsquared allowing for a larger black-to-surface ratio

industry, we’re losing our collective audio knowledge. People in the industry find it hard to believe because it’s such an intriguing field to be in, but the kids aren’t studying it. Crestron’s audio DSP platform had an immediate familiarity to it for anyone with any live sound experience. This will include the younger person who’s been in a band or who did some DJ gigs in their past. It feels right to me. I also like the amplifiers. I like the way they slot into a rack. The packaging is really clever. SAILING THE BLUE RIVER

We touched on Aptovision earlier and it used InfoComm to again talk up its new generation chip. I think this time around, the established players with encoded video products had more time to respond to the Aptovision challenge. Mostly the line was: Aptovision is great but not if it’s going to take up just about all your bandwidth. So it ties in with my ‘Is IT ready for AV’ observation. With Aptovision’s chip, yes we can now stream uncompressed video without any latency, but is the network ready? And even if you do have the 10G network with an IT department that wants to play ball, the moment you want to connect to a WAN or send video across the country or internationally, then that’s another story. That’s not the fault of Aptovision, but we all know what the NBN is like in Australia. So I think there’s plenty of life left in HDBaseT. Firstly, because it’s not an IP networkbased protocol, the security of it is superior. And if you’re looking for frame sync there are applications for it. Including law courts, where latency is unacceptable for legal reasons.

Avia is for Audio: Crestron’s Avia is a line of audio DSP tools to simplify audio programming in meeting spaces, hospitality venue and other rooms.

INFOCOMM: ALL CHANGE

My overall reflections of InfoComm16 are big picture in nature. I think we all know, intellectually, that our industry has to move more to an IT-style service-based model. But practically it’s very hard to make that transition. One thing I know: currently we’re giving it away. We’re giving away our knowledge and experience; and the fact you’re doing the best work and have the smartest people isn’t getting reflected in what you can charge. This has to change. That services model and the repeatable ongoing business model is what is required. But I fear Australia is too small to support it. And the big telcos are moving in to take most of the ongoing service contracts anyway. Telstra and Optus are carving up the market, with others like AAPT and Verizon mopping up the stragglers. Telstra and Optus are certainly doing a lot of work in videoconferencing. Why? Because they have the bandwidth… the AV gear is a secondary concern. Apart from VC they’re also doing a lot of management of digital signage for the bigger corporations. It’s not a time of doom and gloom but it is a time of change and that change is coming whether you’re tooled up for it or not. I look forward to working through some of those changes in a future issue.  Ed Note: Paul’s views don’t necessarily reflect those of the publisher brave enough to print them. Yell at the publisher regardless. Send vitriol to the editor’s desk: chris@avapac.net

Christie, winner of the PvDE 2016 Booth of the Show gong. Inspiring, practical and an integrated showpiece of Christie kit.

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022

PREVIEW

Biamp Tesiralux

AV-over-IP Distibution Platform Product Manager Chris Fitzsimmons talks AV AsiaPacific through Biamp’s big new product release:

esiralux adds video to the Tesira platform. In the initial announcement we’ve unveiled the Tesiralux ‘twins’: the encoder and decoder. Some people have expressed some surprise: “What’s an audio company doing releasing an IP video product?”. We may have been doing a very good impression of an audio company for the last 10 years but for much of that time we’ve had 100 years-plus of combined video encoding experience beavering away in a back room. Our team was supplemented back in 2014 when we employed a number of people from LabX, which was a third-party IP developer for people who wanted to use AVB. I’m not the first product manager of Biamp video products, I’m just the first guy who’s allowed to tell anyone about it. Biamp is conservative and we waited until we were sure. None of our gear comes back, it doesn’t break and we can’t jeopardise that reputation. ONE PLATFORM

The big idea is we’ve created a unified AV-over-IP distribution platform. It’s not a case of needing a separate DSP platform and a video-over-IP platform and getting them communicating via hand signals or analogue cabling or typing in IP addresses. This is a single environment upon which an AV integrator can build an AV-overIP distribution network. They can have all our DSP and all the good stuff we’ve been working on in Tesira for the last 10 years, plus the highest quality video processing. Like everything else we do, Tesiralux is on AVB and the products are fully part of the Tesira platform — no new software, no new

environment, just new inputs and outputs. The video encoder features DisplayPort and HDMI inputs, and the decoder has HDMI outputs. Both have standard mic/line Tesira inputs and outputs. You can use that mic/line I/O together or separately from the HDMI — they’re like one of our audio expanders gene-spliced into a video encoder. So you can take the two mic inputs and do what you want with them: combine them with the HDMI or route signal all around the Tesira platform as you wish. VIDEO PROCESSING

Tesiralux can accept 4K 60Hz, 4:4:4 colour because we use the latest HDMI 2.0 spec inputs. We’re not allowed to call them ‘2.0’ but they are — HDMI believes we should pretend everything’s the same but it isn’t. You’ll see other vendors with 4K 30Hz or 4K 60Hz 4:2:0 because they have bandwidth restrictions on those older HDMI connectors. HDMI 2.0 allows for full 4K 60Hz 4:4:4 colour. The v1.4 HDMI connector has bandwidth restrictions (10.2Gbps) but the 2.0 connector allows 18Gbps — essentially, the silicon on the connector is different. HDMI doesn’t want to talk about 2.0 because it doesn’t want snake oil merchants selling bogus ‘2.0 cable’. GUARANTEED SYNC

We can take eight channels of embedded audio over the HDMI or DisplayPort inputs, separate those channels out in the Tesira software, and route them off into an audio processing signal path and do some EQ or AEC, then re-integrate those into the stream. From there you could send them out of one the HDMI outputs of one of our decoders and know the audio will be lip synced

— there’s no manual tweaking of delays to be done, it’s lip sync guaranteed. Alternatively you could take separate audio from the mic/line inputs and embed them into the video stream — all guaranteed to be time aligned. You can do this via the software — match outputs to be time aligned, put them in the same delay/EQ group and they’ll be lip synced. There’s no work that has to be done by the system integrator to get those inputs synced because Tesira is in charge of the whole piece. Each one of these Tesiralux devices has a 4K scaler onboard. We have a FPGA programmable device doing the work. It’s not a fixed system on a chip, it’s a real brute of a video processing engine. EDID management is done at the end point. There’s no ‘EDID manager’, each decoder negotiates with the display to get the right resolution. BANDWIDTH

If you look at 4K 60 4/2/2 10-bit video, which is a baseline that video production uses today, that represents about 9.95Gbps of data. If your customer has 10G infrastructure then happy days, you can have uncompressed 4K video. AVB will use 75% of the available bandwidth — so we’ll be doing a little bit of compression down to 7.5Gbps. But that’s just one scenario: Biamp has very granular bandwidth control in the software. So you can choose to scale from 4K down to 1080p (if you don’t have 4K displays then there’s no point sending 4K video). Doing that, you’ve already quartered the output and there’s no need to compress. We can also alter the frame rate. So if you’re sharing spreadsheets you don’t need 60fps — unless you’ve had too much to drink the night before, that footage is not moving! You can

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PREVIEW

It’s not just another encode/decode product. We have our integrated audio DSP that everyone trusts. We have this AVB piece that no one else has. drop the frame rate down to 15fps in software, and quarter your bandwidth and, again, there’s no need to compress. However, if you do want to compress, we have an MJPEG compression engine and that goes down to 20:1. WHY MOTION JPEG?

We chose MJPEG compression over the alternatives because it suits Tesira’s applications best. And when it comes to light compression, we think MJPEG has the right combination of latency, perceived image quality and efficiency. It’s a DCT (discrete cosine transform) compression, not a wavelet compression, and that means the kinds of artefacts you see are slightly different. For commercial and education content, spreadsheets and PowerPoint mostly, we believe the DCT artefacts are more gentle. With wavelet compression, you tend to get some softening of edges, which is no good in Powerpoint. SHARING BANDWIDTH

AVB is really where it’s at for video-over-IP networks. AVB has guaranteed bandwidth reservation which protects other content on a converged network. It means we can share bandwidth on a network with telephony or other data, without crushing whatever else is going on. If you look at some other video-over-IP products

they basically want the whole damn plug. They’re going to take all of your 10G connection and there’s no way to dictate how much of that switch it uses, it’s just greedy. AVB is a suite of standards that does a number of things. It guarantees QoS; it guarantees delivery with no more than 2ms of latency over seven hops. It does that by making a pipe for media traffic — separating it from other traffic on the switch and doesn’t let media traffic outside the pipe and other traffic inside. So by default it takes up three quarters of a channel of a network port. Our Tesira bandwidth controller allows us to choose how you fill that pipeline — frame rate, compression, resolution, the parameters that affect the size. Dialling up the bandwidth controller affects the reservation you want to make. It also means that if the IT department tells you that you’ve only got 5G of the 10G network you can dial down to 5G and stick to what the customer wants or can accommodate. AVB is the real secret sauce when it comes to running a truly converged network. AVB SWITCHES

AVB switches are somewhat expensive at the moment. The Cisco Nexus 7000 series — Cisco’s big data series — is AVB capable. The Cisco Catalyst 3850 is a mid-sized 48-port switch and AVB capable. But Cisco has other smaller switches that we can’t talk about yet that will soon have AVB capability. They’ll be in the subUS$2000 range. There are other vendors, but Cisco is a lynchpin as there are lots of ‘Cisco Houses’ that won’t make the jump to Netgear or some other vendor. TIME IS RIGHT

There’s a mountain of IP video products at InfoComm 2016. Not long ago our concern was perhaps we’re a bit early to market with Tesiralux but that’s not the case. One thing’s for sure, we don’t need to make the HDBaseT pros/ cons argument anymore.

Our IP video solution has significant points of difference. It’s not just another encode/decode product. We have our integrated audio DSP that everyone trusts. We have this AVB piece that no one else has. And we put all that in the Tesira wrapper, so you don’t need to manage or learn two different platforms or somehow get them to talk to each other. PUTTING THE ‘V’ IN AVB

We made a deliberate choice to go with AVB 10 years ago. We knew this day was coming — we knew Tesira would one day include video — so we knew we needed a networking platform that was going to cope with audio and video. Biamp has talked about the benefits of AVB for a long time but the benefits of the bandwidth reservation only comes into play when you’re in the multi-gig world. Previously it was about reserving audio bandwidth but that’s only a couple of hundred Mbps. But as soon as you’re talking about a 6Gbps+ video payloads then you need AVB, because the alternative is to manually set up each switch. No one wants to do that. That’s just a headache. Which is why most IP video vendors are using all the bandwidth, they’re not expecting anyone to make a converged network with their product. BIAMP FUTURE

We sell tens of thousands of channels of AEC every year: people love it, it’s reliable. With Tesiralux we’re saying: you can do the whole system now. We can do video and audio. We’re not doing video walls and presentation switchers but if you want to move audio and video around a building and manage a network in a converged fashion then Biamp is the way to go. you can trust us because we have a reliable product.  More Info: Biamp: www.biamp.com  Australian Distributor: www.midwich.com.au

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NEWS

Screen Test Orpheum Cinema’s show lighting upgrade. Text:/ Robert Easton

he Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace is a very old, heritage cinema complex in Cremorne, NSW. It has a number of cinemas, one of which seats over 800 people. The venue is also famous for its 87-year-old Wurlitzer pipe organ which rises up through the floor, played on special occasions by professional organists. It’s a beautiful room with classic decorative lighting throughout, both halogen and neon.

also 650W Fresnels, with another system of LEDs. Two old Martin MAC 500s — one of Martin’s original moving lights — were put in the theatre years ago for band performances and other music events. We replaced these with the new Martin Rush MH1+ LED moving light. For what they wanted, which was pretty much a direct replacement for the MAC 500, the Rush works very well.

STAR OF STAGE & SCREEN

50,000 HOURS

Unusually for a cinema, there’s a stage area that runs the length of the screen. Showtech’s LED fixtures were installed in the main cinema and we couldn’t be happier with the results. The previous stage wash, top lighting and side lighting fixtures have been replaced with the new Showtech LED Fresnels and Profiles for the front wash and the stage wash. There’s no back lighting, obviously — there’s a whopping great film screen there. We’re using long 15° lenses on the LED profiles. Three very old 650W Profiles installed on the bar were replaced with one of these new LEDs — they’ve gone from 2000W down to 180W of power. And it’s not just a power saver, the LEDs have much better colour rendition, great intensity and a decent CRI. With the side lighting, we’ve replaced six 650W Fresnels with two of the LEDs, again giving a massive power saving. The next round of installations will be replacing all the footlights,

In cinemas particularly, lights are mounted in such a way that they’re very difficult to get at — they’re up very high and there’s no safe access to easily replace the lamps. Having the 50,000-hour run time of these LEDs saves a lot of precarious lamp-replacement labour. Cinemas always pose challenges during the installation process. The first film of the day rolls at about 9:30am, and the last film screens at 1am the next morning. Naturally most of the work needs to be done out of hours and it’s very rare to be able to shut a cinema down for business hour installations as that’d cost a lot of money. DIMMING CONTROL

The lights are now DMX-controlled rather than through a dimmer. It’s so convenient to just pop in a little control panel rather than full dimmers — the electrician literally took another line off the distribution board and ran it straight to the

lights. The cost factor also comes in, as dimmers are more expensive than a little control panel. Each of the three cinemas have individual control. That needs to be the case due to the fact the bio boxes and projection rooms are in different locations and all controlled by an individual control system. Cinemas have a high level of network security due to the sensitivity of what could be on their servers. As you can imagine, they don’t want certain files being ‘hacked’ so they tend to isolate any control to individual cinemas, keeping it of the network. CINEMA SENSIBILITIES

The other challenge is that cinemas are very dark places — they’re designed that way where everything is black. We had to work with the in-house electricians to ensure the Orpheum remained totally compliant with digital cinema protocols. These are some of the unique challenges you wouldn’t run into with your average theatre install.  Orpheum: www.orpheum.com.au Show Technology: www.showtech.com.au E Productions: www.eproductions.com.au

Rob Easton is the owner of E Productions; a Sydney-based events production company providing lighting, audio and video installation and technical support services.

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cost-effective total-solution topography. In addition to displaying lossless, real-time market data and news sources over dedicated, permanent feeds, the ATEN solution additionally allows the export of information from any traders’ station to any other feed in the firm. THE CORE: VM1600 MODULAR MATRIX SWITCH MODULAR MATRIX SWITCH VM1600 • Connects any of 16 video sources to any of 1 6 displays • Video wall — allows you to create custom video wall layouts via intuitive web GUI • Seamless Switch — provides continuous video streams, real-time switching and stable signal transmission

the seven individual panels making up the outer front and bottom edges of the main video wall, as shown in the diagram below. THE ATEN SOLUTION

ATEN’s solution met this challenge with its VanCryst series of cascading switches, signal splitters, and signal extenders. Based around a core of two VM1600 Modular Matrix Switches, each loaded with 2 x 4-port HDMI and HDBaseT modules, the ATEN solution allows complete onMAIN TRADE ROOM the-fly linking of every available source-to-display path over a highly reliable, simple-to-deploy,

VM1600 Modular Matrix Switches provide modular integration of HDMI and HDBaseT signals with on-the-fly signal translation and scaling. The two-core VM1600 switches link the main floor’s 4 x 4 video wall installation (measuring around 3m x 1.7m) with the smaller 2 x 2 display located in the private office of the chief trader, and further integrate into this core system all of the remaining smaller displays in the boardroom, lounge, and training centre. The network topography involves dedicating a single slave VM1600 to serving the 4 x 4 main video wall on the trading floor, while the master VM1600 divides its feeds between serving eight channels to this slave switch, another four feeds to the remaining chief trader’s video wall, and another three feeds to the lounge, boardroom, and training centre’s video displays. One last channel serves the firm’s general PA system. All video walls and feeds are further linked via RS232 over HDBaseT Ethernet channels, allowing CONTROL ROOM for fully centralised power controls for the two 40 M video walls and remaining displays.

THE JUICE: EXTENDING CONTROL, MAX CONVENIENCE

The VM1600 switches are supplemented by two primary VanCryst subsystems: the first is a collection of dedicated ATEN extenders and HDMI/HDBaseT signal splitters/extenders (VE8xxx and VS182A models), and the second primary subsystem is the VK2100 Controller. The ATEN extenders allow the extension of all HDMI/HDBaseT signal transmissions (including the RS232 channels) up to 100 meters, while the VS182A splitter allows the distribution of incoming A/V data feeds by splitting a single feed among multiple independent channels. Finally, control over each source-to-display path is coordinated using a single VK2100 controller with bespoke firmware customised by ATEN. This arrangement allows the main 4 x 4 video wall to serve a constant supply of on-the-fly exchange information to dedicated display channels, while simultaneously allowing any trader to override the main trading floor display to share developing market news and trends from his or her personal trading station. Finally, all feeds in the entire system may be centrally controlled by the chief trading officer using a single iPad.  Contact Info ATEN: sales@au.aten.com TRADER ROOM Madison Technologies: 1800 00 11CHIEF 80 or HDMI HDBaseT Extender madisontech.com.au VS805R

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FEATURE

Text:/ Derek Powell

Fibreoptic cable’s advantages are manifest. So why does Cat rule the roost? Derek Powell wonders if it’s now the time to ‘pull the other one’.

FEATURE

was excited when fibre transmission of video and audio first became a possibility for audiovisual installations. Though it’s more than a decade ago, I recall thinking how wonderful it would be to have unlimited bandwidth for uncompressed signals and to lose all the problems of distance limitations, electrical interference, earth loops and more. Then I found out that fibre was fragile, difficult to work with and everything about it was expensive. And this has been my enduring impression of fibre… for years! So I stuck with Cat cable even through all the problems and issues and seemingly never ending upgrades from Cat5 to Cat6, to Cat6a and more. Now (like many others in the AV game) I’m finding out that everything I ‘knew’ about fibre being fragile; impossible for mere mortals to terminate; and as dear as poison; is now out of date! That just leaves the good parts — like plenty of bandwidth (even for 4K with room to go 8K); clean signals and the ability to go as far as we want with digital signals. So it’s time to take a fresh look at the state of the art in fibre. We’ll talk to a new crop of ‘fibre evangelists’ and check back to get some real-world experiences from people who’ve taken the plunge and gone with glass in a big way.  CASE FOR FIBRE?

Fibre does get used — a lot. But up until now, the key driver has been distance. With fibre, you can go kilometres, not just a hundred metres. So wherever long distances are involved — stadiums, big entertainment venues and all sorts of telecommunications — glass can’t be beaten. Until now, that single factor has been front and centre in marketing fibreoptic products. Take a trawl through the catalogues of the ‘big three’ audiovisual manufacturers and phrases like ‘long haul transmission’ and ‘long-distance solutions’ are front and centre in most fibre product descriptions. Optical transmission will take you where copper won’t and that alone seemingly justifies any price premium. That isn’t the only advantage, though. Security, electrical isolation and freedom from interference are key advantages that glass continues to boast over Category cable. BANDWIDTH: CAT OUT OF THE BAG

What about the vast majority of applications that aren’t in a stadium or on a defence base? The emerging key advantage of fibreoptic is one that it’s always had: bandwidth. This is where fibre shines compared with the category experience. While copper-based category cable (unshielded twisted pair or UTP for short) has made remarkable strides in accommodating higher bandwidth requirements over the past 15 years or so, it has done so by re-engineering the structure of the cable and creating a succession of new types. Most people would have had their first

experience with Cat5 cable, which gave way to Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a, Cat7 and now on the horizon is Cat8. Upgrading a UTP-based data or video distribution system to higher bandwidth has meant stripping out old Cat5-based cables and installing new Cat6 or better cables to cater for higher resolution and higher data rates. By contrast, fibre-based infrastructure can use the inherent bandwidth in the existing cables to handle upgrades by simply changing the endpoints and the terminal and switching equipment. Today, the fibres themselves have the capacity to soar past even proposed 8k video resolutions and 40 to 100 Gigabit data rates. So far, even the proposed Cat8 copper cable is only being considered for up to 40 Gigabit and then for distances under 30 metres.

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Security, electrical isolation and freedom from interference are key advantages that glass continues to boast over Category cable.

TAPPING REAL WORLD FIBRE EXPERIENCE

So do the advantages of fibre make a difference in the real world of everyday audiovisual applications? For a spin-free assessment, we checked in with Michael Walker, infrastructure and equipment manager for technical services at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC). Starting in 2013, MCEC upgraded its backbone video distribution systems from Cat6a to fibre, using AMX Enova DGX digital media matrix switchers with fibre input and output cards. “The fixed installation services, typical of the ones we provide in our meeting spaces are definitely best served by fibreoptic infrastructure,” Michael declared. “Fibre cables are flexible, you’re able to move them about within the roof, you’re able to upgrade right through to 8K purely by changing your endpoints and motherboards around, so you are only in the walls once.” PIXEL PERFECT

However, MCEC’s Michael Walker was also keen to highlight fibre’s other strong points, like its relative immunity to interference. He noted that shielding can be a real weakness of Cat6a cable. “All it took was a badly connected shield on one patch point to suddenly open the entire cable to interference,” Walker explained. “With HDBaseT, as soon as you get RF interference on the cable, you immediately lose signal – it’s switched off as soon as you get interference. So one of the key reasons we went to fibre is because we’re a very heavy RF environment, and one loose piece of shield suddenly created a high level of risk that we would lose image to the main display.” Michael is also very positive about the benefits of fibre for MCEC clients. “We heavily target technology events and the big technology users,” he told AV Asia Pacific. “For clients like Cisco or Microsoft, a pixel perfect image reproduction on the screen is critical to showcasing their product in our venue. Now, when we are able to offer full bandwidth uncompressed video in real-time over fibre, that’s a massive selling point”.

Cleerline (the blue cable) has rethought fibre to make it more flexible and easier to work with.

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FEATURE

Seen The Light: “[We can] upgrade right through to 8K purely by changing our endpoints and motherboards around, so you are only in the walls once,” — MCEC’s Michael Walker.

MANUFACTURER’S PERSPECTIVE

ZeeVee manufactures a wide range of video distribution platforms that aim to deliver high quality HD to Ultra HD content across any network — coax, fibre, and CatX. Despite his products supporting such a wide variety of infrastructure types, Bob Michaels, CEO of ZeeVee, has strongly held views on the benefits of fibre. “Historically our core products were built on RF networks using coax,” Bob explained. “So when we looked into moving into the IP realm, we wanted something that would address distance requirements because many of our customers want video to travel more than 100 metres. So fibre was a solution we looked at initially.” Even though ZeeVee offers products that very effectively utilise copper infrastructure, Bob pointed out that bandwidth and distance limitations still continue to come to the fore in real-world installations. “We go to places now where they’ve got Cat5 infrastructure and they want to move to 4k,” he said. “We let them know they can’t move to 4k unless they move to Cat 6a, and even then we can only promise 100 metres. But what if they have a university campus? Why do you want to run fibre between the buildings and not run fibre within the buildings?” In Bob Michael’s experience, the reason is more than a fear of the unknown, but a significant dose of complacency. “This is the kind of thing I hear: people say, ‘I’ve been in the AV business 45 years and I’ve used Cat cable throughout that time, so this is what I’m going to use… and boy it is difficult to terminate fibre’.” SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH FIBRE?

Most people have the same reasons for avoiding fibre. The prevailing view is that fibre is fragile; demanding and even dangerous to terminate or splice; and fiendishly expensive. That was true five years ago. Now, there are new players in the fibre interconnection market and things are very different. Bob Michaels introduced me to Robert D’Addario, who is managing director of Cleerline, and a powerful evangelist for a new breed of fibre products. “Six or seven years ago,” D’Addario recalled, “we looked at fibre as a medium for the next generation of connectivity, in particular because nobody was

really tackling the major hurdles our customers were encountering, namely the danger in connecting it, the difficulty in terminating it, and the fragility of the glass while installing it. And we really solved all those issues.” MECHANICALLY MINDED

Robert’s Cleerline fibres, now available in Australia, take a different approach from the earlier methods of fibre termination such as fusion splicing and epoxy polish. His terminating system is a new variation on the much simpler mechanical splicing methodology which is achieving widespread acceptance in the market. “A mechanical splice is, essentially, about mechanically butting up two pieces of fibre within a V groove channel, with some index matching gel,” he explained. “In a mechanical connector, a piece of fibre goes from the ferrule and prepolished end to the middle of the connector. There is an opening in the back where you put a cleaved fibre. Affix and terminate the fibre and you’re done. So it becomes a much simpler process.” Mechanical splicing is not the preferred way of terminating fibre in every application and Cleerline products can accommodate other techniques. In telecommunications cables, for example, where even fractions of a dB count, other methods like epoxy/crimp connectors and fusion splicing are still used. However, Robert points out that audiovisual interconnects typically have a much higher ‘link budget’, meaning that the losses in the termination don’t become a significant factor. He’s not shy in pointing out the upside of his system. “Our fibre is 200 times more durable,” he told AV Asia Pacific. “We’ve simplified the ways of terminating it to the point where we’ve reduced the steps by 50%. We don’t offer training; we offer instructional videos — that’s how simple it has become.” AROUND THE TWIST

It is staggering to see how these fibres can literally be tied in a knot – and still pass pristine video. There’s some real science behind this new fibre construction as Robert explained: “We incorporate a polymer in the glass itself that eliminates the need to ever get down to bare glass,” he revealed. “When you get down to bare glass, that’s when it’s the most fragile; the most sensitive to the elements, to humidity, dust and oils. That’s why, despite the sophistication even

within a mechanical splice style connector, you still have to be very precise. But our fibre is always coated, it’s always protected, and you don’t have to worry about it. So it won’t puncture soft tissue, it’s much easier to install, and it will actually take a bend, with this polymer coating, of 2.2mm and maintain a 30-year life expectancy.” FIBRE REGULARITY

Mechanical splicing methods, such as the one Cleerline uses, are certainly making an impact. Although prices vary widely, two of the ‘big three’ already offer mechanical splicing kits for their fibre products and many contractors have already upgraded their skill sets to embrace the new techniques. While MCEC doesn’t use Cleerline fibres in its infrastructure, Michael Walker is definite about the cost advantages presented by mechanical splicing in the wider sense. “The improvement in fibre terminations has actually been a massive game changer,” he says. “Mechanical splicing has taken over from fusion splicing – which is what I was anticipating. For me, that’s gone a long way to removing the final vestiges of residual risk we were taking in moving to a full fibre deployment. Now, our on-going maintenance and repair risk has just faded to less than or equal to copper infrastructure.” “To go with fibre really is a no brainer,” Michael continued. “The difference in price these days between glass and copper is insignificant when you consider the labour cost of going in behind the walls. If you drop fibre to every point, your bandwidth requirements are managed far into the future.” With such strong endorsement from manufacturers and end users, perhaps it’s time we all took a fresh look at this revitalised technology. 

REFERENCES ZeeVee: www.zeevee.com Cleerline: www.cleerlinefiber.com MCEC: www.mcec.com.au AMX: avt.tech

FURTHER READING: Search ‘MCEC Fibre’ on avapac.net for Andy Ciddor’s full story regarding MCEC’s fibre upgrade.

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FEATURE

Hamer Hall Dives into Video Text:/ Preshan John

elbourne’s Hamer Hall is the city’s preeminent concert hall, and like most performing arts venues, had a growing need for the Broadcast & Multimedia team to add permanent high-quality video recording capabilities to its services. But given the sacred nature of the aesthetics and acoustics of Hamer Hall, anything conspicuous was verboten. The Arts Centre chose to install four camera systems, each made up of three components — Panasonic 1800 AK box cameras with Canon lenses, mounted on Telemetrics robotic pan/tilt heads for remote camera control. The broadcast control room packs a Ross Carbonite switcher hooked up to a few TVLogic screens for display. During a Hamer Hall performance, a single operator mans the robotic remote for control of the four cameras. The great thing about the Telemetrics robotics system is that it’s silent — which is crucial because the acoustics of the Hamer Hall is such that a scrunched Maltesers packet would be clearly audible throughout the space. Alison Murphy, Manager, Broadcast & Media, says, “We love the setup here, especially for hirers and orchestral shows. There’s a touchscreen where you can pre-program all the moves for the cameras with the Telemetrics system — you can start at A, end at B, and make that a zoom and a pan to the oboe solo. So you can rehearse all the shows and essentially come up with pages and pages of presets for each of the four cameras. Having presets is integral to the use of this setup.” As you can imagine, this kind of workflow is worlds away from having one hand on a camera’s

focus ring and the other on a tripod arm — but it does mean a whole show can be filmed, recorded, and broadcasted with a very small crew. There are also one or two ‘hands-on camera’ operators in Hamer Hall itself, to get the shots the robotised cams can’t. The Video Devices PIX 270i rackmount video recorder plays an important role in the network of equipment. The PIX 270i is capable of multidrive recording on up to four SSDs to allow for redundancy and backup. A timecode generator, frame rate converter and scaler are all built-in. Inputs include 3G SDI, HD-SDI, and HDMI. It’s also fully networkable and expandable, with 64 channels of both MADI and Dante audio I/O for more demanding applications. Hamer Hall’s two Video Devices PIX 270i recorders sit in the rack room of the Broadcast Control area. Murphy: “The main reason why we use these is you can assign them to an IP address, remotely hit Record, name the files, and back them up to our internal servers.

“The Video Devices PIX 270i runs SSDs, and we can transfer the files quickly via USB 3.0 or Firewire. Sometimes hirers want to take the media straight away so they bring in their own SSDs, record the media, and fly back to London or wherever they’re from.” Hamer Hall’s technical makeover has increased the venue’s capability and versatility in recording, handling and producing media. Not only does it increase the regularity of big-name artists coming through its doors, but the updated tech means interns and casual operators are trained in an industry-relevant environment.  Arts Centre Melbourne: www.artscentremelbourne.com.au Video Devices: www.videodevices.com Australian Distribution: www.corsairsolutions.com.au Panasonic: www.panasonic.com.au AVID: www.avid.com

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FEATURE

MCEC Finds A Pearl

The Epiphan Pearl livestreaming system racked and ready for action in the bio booth of MCEC’s freshly freshened Clarendon Auditorium.

Text:/ Preshan John

ive streaming is hardly considered a specialty service anymore. Most performance venues are realising it’s virtually a requirement to stay with the times in an increasingly online, inter-connected world. TV channel counts are dwarfed by the gazillion options available live on the Internet, and stream-hosting websites like ustream.tv and livestream.com have never been busier. The Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre cottoned on to this and made appropriate shifts in its own tactics, adding live streaming capability to its busy function centres and rooms. MCEC’s system of choice was the Pearl by Epiphan. Having already deployed several Epiphan products, brand loyalty and familiarity played a part in the venue’s decision. “We’ve used the Epiphan product range for quite a period of time now. We have a variety of their different products. The Pearl units are serving us really well,” says Paul Rumble, Senior Manager Technology Services, MCEC. Pearl is a solution that allows you to integrate live streaming functionality without requiring a complete overhaul of your pre-installed AV systems. It’s designed for live video production, and provides switching and recording functionality in addition to streaming. Up to four HD video sources can be connected to the rack unit, all of which can be displayed in a variety of

configurations. Audio feeds come into the Pearl system via HDMI, SDI, or analogue TRS inputs. Live streaming has its benefits. For one, you can have an audience size that’s much bigger than the number of seats in the room — an invaluable proposition for a place like MCEC that hosts large events. Paul Rumble: “We had a customer recently — it was their second event with us — and the first time they came in, their event had so much interest that they couldn’t take any more registrations. This gave us a challenging opportunity to look at an alternative way of allowing them to still take further registrations. So we used our streaming service to stream the event out to delegates in other spaces within the centre who were still paying the full registration to attend. It was quite successful.” Live streaming might be the best, most immediate way, to market an event but there’s still plenty of mileage in recording it for those not hovering by their device. As Paul Rumble found out with the aforementioned oversubscribed event: “We used the Pearl to record the session, edit it, and get a package up online within 24 hours, which was again a really interesting way of repurposing the same product and delivering something that, with other solutions, can be more time-consuming.”

Indeed, working with the Pearl files has proven to be very straightforward. Paul Rumble explains: “The format we’re capturing means we’re able just drop it straight into Final Cut or Premiere Pro and edit it in that natural form. So we’re not having to encode or decode — we’re just grabbing it off the network. We’re also able to monitor the recordings as they’re happening through that same system and control the recorder. So we can have a dozen rooms running concurrently and monitor them all from a central location. We’ve set them up so that as soon as the recording stops, it transfers the file into a folder, so the editor can grab it, do what they need to as far as topping and tailing or inserting lower thirds, and then be able to output them to a hard drive or upload them through a portal as required. “The Pearl system is reliable and robust. Plus we’re also able to brand them internally. So the customer experience is really quite refined, and that’s coming from just a single unit which means we can keep our prices down. And at the end we’re not only providing them with a stream, we’re providing them with a recorded package as well.”  MCEC: www.mcec.com.au Epiphan: www.epiphan.com Australian Distribution: www.aptech.com.au

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FEATURE

Vivid 2016 Bigger and better, Vivid 2016 — ‘world’s biggest festival of light, music and ideas’ — attracted 2.3 million people. This is AV Asia Pacific’s special Vivid Wrap, with exclusive content and access.

ANTHONY BASTIC, DIRECTOR OF LIGHT, VIVID SYDNEY:

Initially, audiences were intrigued by the coloured lights that ‘washed’ the city’s buildings and the early iterations of mapped building projections and light sculptures. Fast forward eight years and we are now talking about serious technology being used by artists to create new works that transcend Sydney. Due to the popularity of the Vivid Light Walk, Vivid is now Australia’s largest and most popular event attracting an audience of over 2.3 million people [2016], we are able to showcase the very latest in technology for suppliers. I’ve noticed that the artists installations are becoming more sophisticated with the ‘buyin’ from technology companies and lighting suppliers. This combination makes for a technologically advanced, creative light festival.

FEATURE

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IGNATIUS JONES, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, VIVID SYDNEY:

Vivid was originally created to drive traffic to Sydney at its lowest season. Some of our stakeholders such as hotels describe Vivid as being 23 nights of NYE, but without the drunks! We bring in an enormous amount of tourist expenditure. The influx of people into Sydney is just enormous. We wanted to establish Sydney as the creative hub of the Asia Pacific region and we are doing that in no uncertain terms. The proportion of creative industries has grown to 43 percent of the local economy. In NSW, the creative industry creates more wealth than agriculture and mining combined. We’re known as the clever country with an innovation economy, but no one is doing anything about it as much as Vivid. We are out there to promote the creative industry, to get the wider public interested in the industry.

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CUSTOMS HOUSE

A new Reality Viewing Platform uses Huawei’s latest smartphones and tablets in an augmented reality experience at Custom House with visuals created by Spinifex Group. After conducting a site survey of Customs House at Sydney Harbour, TDC created a 3D model of the building to plan a giant projection area of 32m by 18m. Spinifex Group delivered a six-minute action packed animation that maps to the building, using its intricate architecture, as well as additional content only visible through the Huawei devices positioned on a podium in front of the projection tower, creating a Augmented Reality experience. Cyril De Baecque, Managing Director at Spinifex Group said: “The app allowed the phones to display an overlay of content on top of the camera viewfinder. TDC worked with our interactive department to synchronise the content using the world clock so that the projection on the building aligns with the content on the Huawei devices.” TDC: tdc.com.au Spinifex Group: spinifexgroup.com

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TARONGA ZOO

For the first time, Vivid Sydney incorporates Taronga Zoo Centenary Celebrations. Visitors were welcomed by a grand projection onto the façade of Taronga’s heritage listed main entrance building. Ample Projects’ eight-minute long projection show and 3D mapping has been created by its award winning artists and the projection technology and mapping provided by TDC. Steve Cain added: “We’re projecting onto the ground to add depth using bugs and critters. Due to the nature of sculptures and trees, we’re using ultra-short-throw lenses on our projectors. It was technically challenging from that point of view. We used Ample Projects’ 3D modelling for the entire site prior to the project using the d3 4by4pro Media Server and the results speak for themselves.” Mandylights lit almost a mile-long pathway throughout the zoo using nearly a thousand lighting fixtures — everything from custom-made laser arrays through to Clay Paky Sharpies and over a hundred big outdoor LED units. Mandylights also assisted in creating some of the amazing installations in addition to themed pathway lighting. Naturally the biggest concern with the project was how the animals would react and Mandylights had to submit all its ideas to the individual zookeepers for comment. During the install the keepers were onsite to ensure that no animals were offended. Rather than switch all the lights on at 6pm as is the norm for all the other Vivid works, the Taronga lights were switched on at 4pm so the animals could adjust to the lighting. The giraffe pen is the only animal enclosure lit, with Mandylights trying a multitude of ideas to ensure the giraffes were comfortable with their illuminated habitat. “The first night we turned four different lights on and the giraffes got a bit spooked by having multiple shadows,” said Richard Neville of Mandylights. “We had to dial that back and we now have fewer lights on the enclosure.” Crucial to the lighting design were 130 x ShowPro Hex 18 LED PARs and 24 x ShowPro EX36 LED Floods, both of which have an IP65 rating. “The ShowPro Hex 18s and EX36s are our go-to products for outdoor fixtures,” Richard remarked. “The colours are really good and they’re doing everything at the zoo from site light to lighting trees to being buried in bushes. It’s comforting to know that we can throw one of these fixtures into a bush for a month and it will keep chugging along.” There are four MA Lighting systems running on site — it wasn’t possible to control the entire area from one MA position. An MA programming wing controls one area, an MA2 light console runs the moving lights and the three main areas whilst a couple of nodes run replay in a couple of other areas. “We put an MA2 in the back of a golf buggy so we could drive around to program everything, flash the shows into the various replay systems and move on to the next one,” said Richard. Ample Projects: www.ampleprojects.com TDC: tdc.com.au Mandlights: www.mandylights.com Show Technology (Clay Paky, ShowPro, MA Lighting): www.showtech.com.au

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FEATURE

SONGLINES

All eyes were once again on the Opera House sails. This year the projections were based on the works of six indigenous artists from across the country who have interpreted the songlines through distinctive symbols, patterning and imagery representative of the stories of their clans and groups. The music accompanying Songlines is composed and designed by Rhoda Roberts and Damien Robinson, the creative force behind Sydney’s Wicked Beat Sound System and features songmen Djakapurra Munyarryun and Cecil McLeod. Songlines was animated for the Opera House sails by Artists In Motion. A tapestry of moving images tracing the songlines from the east, across the centre, to the north and to the west of the country will be projected in a breathtaking display. Photo: Destination NSW Artists in Motion: artistsinmotion.co

TRUE LIFE

Artist Joe Crossley’s Vivid 2016 installation ‘True Life’ mapped the life of an object as viewed under a lens. Picture the cross-section of a microscope slide showing sea larvae or coral cells interacting in real time, with cells dividing and forming unique patterns. Footage of these natural processes was projected onto a 3D sculpture taken from the shape of a sodium chloride (salt) crystal. Crossley used Epson EB-Z10000U WUXGA, HD, 10,000 lumen and EB-Z11000W WXGA, 11,000 lumen projectors to realise his vision with the True Life installation. Crossley continued, “The colour from the Epson projectors give really great contrast for the images and they are bright and vibrant — a noticeable difference and something sadly lacking from other projectors in their class. Their control options, corner correction and calibration functions are the best I have ever used. The stability and durability of these projectors is another big plus and the controls are well thought out and simple. Finally the multi-angle orientation also allowed us to project in different ways.” Epson: www.epson.com.au

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FEATURE

GONDWANA LIGHT LAB

The dramatic metallic blades of The Concourse, Chatswood’s cultural hub, acted as the backdrop to The Electric Canvas’s Gondwana Light Lab, an exploration of creatures from the Triassic southern supercontinent. Dinosaurs evolve from their origins in the depths of the ocean, move onto land, and ultimately climbing trees and escarpments from which they launch themselves into the air. The animals are studied through a magnifying glasses and microscopes, zooming in to see their amazing skin, scales and cells up close; and X-rayed to analyse their skeletons and use computed tomography to slice right though them. Photo: Keith McInnes. The Electric Canvas: theelectriccanvas.com.au

THE MATTER OF PAINTING

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) was transformed into a huge canvas with a collection of artists creating an illusion that the façade was actually being carved, painted, cut and brushed. The installation is a collaboration between Western Sydney artist Huseyin Sami and the Paris-based artistic collective Danny Rose. Each night the audience experienced a constantly morphing contemporary art installation-performance that gave a sculptural dimension to the museum architecture and utterly changed perceptions of the volume and depth of the building’s mass. The Museum of Contemporary Art at The Rocks once again served as a canvas for one of Vivid Sydney’s illuminated artwork. Western Sydney artist, Huseyin Sami, joined forces with Paris-based artistic collective, Danny Rose, to create the illusion that the facade was actually being carved, painted, cut and brushed during the presentation. TDC took care of the projection mapping and hardware. TDC’s Steve Cain said: “The challenges for this site are multiple angles, trees, and returns, which we’ve managed to map accurately. This is a stunning building to project onto which is a lightcoloured sandstone. The shape is really interesting for projection too. “We used high-powered projectors and media serving. However, not every project uses bells and whistles. Sometimes a simpler approach gives great results,” Cain added: “We love the old buildings so we broke all records in terms of set up, having projection mapping completed in just 1.5 hours. New buildings and objects challenge us which is the best way to learn things.” Photo: Anna Kučera.  TDC: tdc.com.au

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FEATURE

State Of The Art House  The Art House Wyong shows the way for regional theatres.

he Art House Wyong is a new, much needed fly-tower-equipped performing arts venue in the heart of the NSW Central Coast. The theatre boasts a 500-seat proscenium arch Theatre and a flexible 130-seat ‘Studio’ space, suitable for emerging artists or digitally linked to the Theatre as an orchestra room. Amazingly, this beautiful venue was 100% council funded, and brought in at a relatively modest construction cost of $12.7m. The investment is already reaping dividends for the area, hosting local theatre companies and events along with attracting highquality touring acts. Julie Vaughan, Project Manager, The Art House Wyong reflects on the process: “We worked with The P.A. People’s Brett Steele and Chris Dodds on the project. They walked the council through the process and, as a result, the council got amazing value for a regional theatre, and the community is now enjoying a very professional space,” she continued. “We didn’t have to sacrifice on the technical aspects, and we installed industry standard equipment. The lighting and sound equipment we use every day isn’t where the cost savings were made. The equipment that makes the venue run is where the quality is, so the shows don’t suffer.” GEARED UP & READY FOR USE

Theatre consultant Schuler Shook, with Simon Austin taking the lead, prepared the spec, while The P.A. People installed the heart of The Art House’s technical systems. The Theatre’s PA comprises a JBL VRX 900 Series system, with four elements each of VRX932LA-1 at left, centre and right. Two VRX918S subwoofers are flown above centre. Front fill is provided by seven JBL AC18/26s. The rig is powered and processed by a combination of Crown DCi4 and DCi8 amplifiers. Further processing for the back of house system comes courtesy of a BSS BLU-100, also connected to the Dante network. The Studio’s PA is a more modest yet flexible system of JBL EON615s and 610s that can be flown or tripod-mounted as required. The house mic kit is a mixture of wired and wireless models from Shure. Yamaha digital mixing desks sit on a Dante backbone, with a QL5 for large shows in the theatre, and a smaller TF1 digital console for the Studio, or smaller, single operator shows. A Yamaha Rio3224-D sits at the Theatre’s prompt side, a Rio1608-D at opposite prompt. A second Rio1608-D is sleeved and can be deployed

anywhere on the Dante network as needed. An eight-in Ri8-D and an eight-out Ro8-D are mounted in the bio box for local I/O. Dante sits on a separate switch from the building’s IT network, with the primary and redundant connections run on separate V-LANs. There are 24 dedicated Dante patch points throughout the building. STAGE & LIGHTS: RIGHT TRACK

The stage management console is a custom build by The P.A. People, and houses a Jands Ezicom 401 master station, a Leon Audio QLM16 MK4 cue light master station, Shure mic and a dual eight-inch LCD video monitors. Comms headsets are from Beyerdynamic, and back-of-house area paging is through a combination of JBL and TOA ceiling and surfacemount loudspeakers. An ETC Gio takes care of the Theatre’s lighting control, while the Studio is run from a smaller ETC Element 40. The system is built around 20 Jands HPC12 digital dimmers, which control a predominantly LED rig built around ETC Source 4 LED models and Selecon Rama LED Fresnels, flown from Jands JLX-Pro lighting bars. Cyclorama wash is provided from seven Chroma-Q Color Force CF72 LED battens. The P.A. People also installed Jands curtain tracks in the Studio, 11 LED displays and three cameras for digital signage and performance relay throughout the building and the video infrastructure to support it, including HD-SDI links between the Studio to the Theatre to enable the Studio to be used as an orchestra room. LEAN BUT CLEAN

“It’s great to see local councils building theatres,” said architect Tim Greer of Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects. “They’re very difficult buildings to deliver, with their multiple stakeholders. Wyong, with its limited resources, now have a great asset. It’s terrific they’ve delivered this. There’s a strong culture of theatre and performance groups within the local government area of Wyong who have agitated for this venue for a very long time, and it’s good they’ve got such a great facility.” 

The Art House: www.thearthousewyong.com.au The P.A. People: (02) 8755 8700 or installedsystems@papeople.com.au Shuler Shook: 0438 382 408 or www.schulershook.com Jands (JBL, Crown, Shure, ETC): (02) 9582 0909 or info@jands.com.au

FEATURE

049

All the Right Regions: The $12.7m, 500-seat Theatre. A JBL VRX PA in LCR configuration has been neatly integrated into the architecture. The stage management console (bottom left) comprises Jands comms, Leon Audio cue light master station, a Shure mic and and dual 8-inch LCD. The lighting is predominantly ETC Source 4 LED flown from Jands JLX-Pro lighting bars.

050

NEWS

Industry Update AETM Audiovisual and Educational Technology Management Inc.

FREE PD CONSULTATIONS AT INTEGRATE InfoComm International will provide professional development consultations for individuals and companies during Integrate 2016 from 23 to 25 August in Sydney. These free consultations will assist individuals and companies in developing a tailored plan of training opportunities to advance their career and businesses. InfoComm’s Oceania team will be on-site to conduct the one-on-one consultations. “InfoComm is pleased to offer this valuable service to our members and other attendees at Integrate. We are aware that many AV professionals are eager to improve professional service to their clients and grow their business by bringing their skills up-to-date,” said Jonathan Seller, Senior Director of Development Asia-Pacific, InfoComm International. “However, it is not always easy to navigate through the jungle of education offerings and identify training opportunities that give them the necessary return on investment. InfoComm is committed to helping members and other AV professionals determine which path to take to achieve their professional goals.” Professional development consultations will last approximately 20 minutes, with participants receiving a tailored plan of training opportunities at the end of the session. The plan will not only consider InfoComm’s education and certification offering, but also include education sources taught by providers outside of the AV industry, such as courses on information technology and business management. Interested Integrate 2016 attendees can register to set up a professional development consultation in two ways: They can make an appointment before the show by emailing oceania@infocomm.org or sign up in person during Integrate at InfoComm booth H101. The consultations will be held at the InfoComm booth. It is recommended to sign up prior to the show to secure your session. Professional development consultations are part of a comprehensive InfoComm education and training programme at Integrate 2016. Show attendees will also be offered the opportunity to attend InfoComm MasterClass sessions, seminars and free-of-charge InfoComm FlashTracks. These three training formats allow attendees to pick from quick 20-minute presentations to 90-minute courses on a wide range of industry topics. All sessions provide renewal units (RU) toward the Certified Technology Specialist (CTS) certification. For more information on InfoComm’s programme at Integrate 2016, visit: infocomm.org/integrate16

Knox Grammar, AETM & InfoComm, AV Innovators Day: In early July, AETM along with our close friends at InfoComm supported a fantastic new initiative, ‘AV Innovators Day’ for NSW Independent Schools. Held at Knox Grammar, over 50 AV Innovators attended the day and were rewarded with a wonderful tour of the new Senior Secondary Academy Building, presentations from Epson & Crestron and an open forum with a panel of experts put together by Xcite AV, Annitel and WSP. With wide ranging questions from the attendees, intimate yet robust discussions amongst the panel emerged and overall throughout the day we saw developing relationships amongst peers for sharing ideas. Along with InfoComm, we look forward to many of the attendees becoming members of our associations, strengthening the AV industry as a whole by the ever growing AV community within AETM and education benefits through InfoComm. A big congratulations to Ben Caswell from Knox Grammar and Daniel Flack from Xcite AV for organising and hosting such a wonderful event. Thanks for being great hosts! Members Forum Success: In late 2015, AETM released our new members-only forum. This new membership benefit has assisted in bringing our community closer throughout the year and acts as a repository for standards, ideas and information sharing. Please login and share your knowledge with your peers — go: www.aetm.org COMING UP AETM at Integrate: Again, in 2016, AETM in partnership with Integrate will run the Integrate Education Programme (IEP). This is the 7th year AETM have been able to assist our members by awarding scholarships to attend the Integrate exhibition when organisations’ training budgets do not allow for it. With free and discounted access to seminars and exclusive tours of sponsors stands, the IEP affords each scholarship holder the flexibility for scheduling meetings and attending other professional development activities. The IEP has raised the bar again. AETM graciously thank the 2016 sponsors: avt, Epson, Hills, Jands, Ricoh, Panasonic, Kramer and Integrate in aiding our members to attend this year. Webinars: new webinars are being scheduled leading up to the Annual AETM Conference. Hosted by InfoComm, we will be bringing you some fantastic new topics. Stay tuned for more announcements. 2016 Conference, November 7-10: This year’s AETM Conference will be hosted by UWA, registrations are opening very soon. Please check our website www.aetm. org to learn more about AETM, we are always welcoming new members from organisations that provide educational technology facilities and support audiovisual systems in a training environment.

AV CALENDAR Integrate Sydney, August 23-25 www.integrate-expo.com Infocomm India Mumbai, September 12-14 www.infocomm-india.com PLASA London, September 18-20 www.plasashow.com AES Los Angeles, September 29–Oct 2 www.aes.org/events Melbourne InfoComm Networking Event Melbourne, 4 October Sydney InfoComm Business Forum + Networking Event Sydney, 18 October LDI Las Vegas, October 17-23 www.ldishow.com SMPTE Hollywood, October 24-28 www.smpte.org InfoComm Middle East & Africa Dubai, December 6-8 www.infocomm-mea.com ISE 2017 Amsterdam, February 7-10 www.iseurope.org

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052

TUTORIAL

Sound Pressure Decibels & Sound Systems

The following is an excerpt from CTS Prep Online. This is just one of the courses available free to InfoComm members. To enrol go to www.infocomm.org/cps/rde/xchg/infocomm/ hs.xsl/35298.htm, or contact Rod Brown at oceania@infocomm.org if you have a membership or other enquiry.

oudness is not a scientific term. It is a perception of the sound’s level, and is very subjective. As an AV professional you use scientific methods of measuring the actual pressure of air to quantify how much sound you have and need. Whenever you are listening to a sound the sound pressure level (SPL) should be greater than any noise which may prevent you from detecting all the details. If the background noise is too intense it will mask the sound you are trying to hear. The SI unit for pressure is the pascal (Pa). Have you ever heard someone describe how loud sound is in pascals? Probably not. Why don’t we use this standard unit to measure sound pressure? For one thing it’s inconvenient. Expressed in pascals the quietest sound humans can hear is about 2x10-5 Pa, or 0.00002 Pa. Continuous exposure to 0.356 Pa sounds can cause hearing damage. Pain and hearing damage can occur at 20 Pa and above. More importantly though, pascals don’t really reflect how people hear sound. You might expect a 0.05 Pa sound to seem half as loud as a 0.1 Pa sound. In fact they don’t sound very different. A person talking to you from half a metre away might be 0.1 Pa. The same person a metre away would be 0.05 Pa. Also, nearly all voice reinforcement systems produce less than one pascal of sound pressure at the listening position. No one wants to use lots of zeros to describe the volume of a sound system. DECIBELS

So the SI unit can’t really help you talk about sound in a useful way. Fortunately there is a meaningful way for AV professionals to discuss sound the way people experience it: the decibel.

Decibel (dB) describes the base-10 logarithmic relationship of the power ratio of two values. It is used to describe ratios over a very large range of values, which can vary by several orders of magnitude. The decibel is also used for quantifying differences in voltage, distance and sound pressure as they relate to power.

The decibel doesn’t measure pressure. It quantifies the ratio between two pressure values. In other words, it’s a measurement of how much change a person actually perceives as a linear value (eg. pascals of pressure) changes. This makes the decibel a much more useful way to measure sound than the pascal.

decibel is dimensionless and cannot be properly called a unit. But why use decibels for distance, power, and voltage? What’s wrong with metres, watts and volts? Nothing. Most of the time when we talk about distance or electrical systems we use these familiar units. When discussing audio systems though, it is useful to be able to measure these values in decibels. A decibel change in distance, voltage, or power will result in the same decibel change in sound pressure. If you want to increase the loudness of a sound system by 5dB you can simply increase the power or voltage by 5dB. CALCULATING DECIBEL CHANGES

Sound

Measurement in Pascals

Measurement in Decibels

Threshold of human hearing (sound of silence)

0.00002Pa

0dB

Very quiet room

0.00063Pa

30dB

Office cubicle

0.01125Pa

55dB

Normal conversation

0.06325Pa

70dB

Yelling

0.35566Pa

85dB

Rock concert

11.2468Pa

115dB

Pain/hearing damage

63.2456Pa

130dB

These are some accepted generalities in relation to human hearing: • A one decibel change is the smallest perceptible change noticeable. Unless listening very carefully most people will not discern a one decibel change. • A ‘just noticeable’ change, either louder or softer, requires a three decibel change. • A 10 decibel change is required for you to subjectively perceive either a change as twice as loud or half as loud as before. OTHER DECIBELS

Did you know you can also use decibels to measure distance, power, or voltage? Because a decibel measures perceived change, not pressure or sound, you can use it to quantify many different types of change. For this reason the

By itself a decibel doesn’t measure anything. It’s a ratio; a comparison of two values. Those values will be measurements in linear units such as pascals, volts, watts, or metres. They must be the same units — you can only compare volts to volts, watts to watts, metres to metres, etc. Once you’ve converted the values to decibels you can compare them to each other. Calculating the decibel change between one distance, voltage, or power measurement and another will tell you how much louder or quieter the output of a sound system will seem after that change. How do you convert the linear measurements to decibels? You use a

053

TUTORIAL

logarithmic equation. In order to calculate the change in decibels between two power measurements use the 10 Log equation.

DECIBEL FORMULA FOR POWER The formula for calculating a decibel change for power is:

dB = 10 * log (P1 / Pr) Where: dB = The change in decibels P1 = The new or measured power measurement Pr = The original or reference power measurement In order to calculate the change in decibels between two voltage or distance measurements use the 20 Log equation.

DECIBEL FORMULA FOR DISTANCE The formula for calculating decibel

changes in sound pressure level over distance is:

dB = 20 * log (D1 / D2) Where: dB = The change in decibels D1 = The original or reference distance D2 = The new or measured distance DECIBEL FORMULA FOR VOLTAGE The formula for calculating decibel changes in voltage is:

dB = 20 * log (V1 / Vr) Where: dB = The change in decibels V1 = The new or measured voltage Vr = The original or reference voltage

three formulae may be either positive or negative. If it is positive, the result is an increase, or gain. If it is negative, the result is a decrease, or loss. Use this QR code if you would like to watch a short video about using the decibel formulae. ď&#x192;

The result of a calculation using any of these

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054

REVIEW

Casio XJ-A257 Portable Hybrid Laser Projector Text:/ Brad Watts

asio has always been surprising in its product lineage. Since its inception in 1946 and the world’s first all-electronic calculator in 1957, the company has turned its collective might to an expanse of electronic goods; from musical instruments, cameras, cash registers and point-of-sale systems, digital watches, calculators, watches with built-in calculators, printers (the world’s first inkjet in fact), and since late 2003, projectors. Compact digital projection units have progressed wildly in the last 20 years. Initially heavy and large three-colour CRT devices hung from ceilings, the market really didn’t move out of the enterprise field until the advent of Texas Instruments’ DLP technology. Ever since, there’s been a reduction in size and price – to the point where projectors are easily integrated into domestic settings. A primary issue prevailed during this development; namely lamp heat output and the short life cycle of said, somewhat expensive, replacement lamps. With an average life cycle of around 2000-3000 hours, this ongoing expense obviously adds continual running costs and maintenance. SIX YEARS OF LAMP FREE

Being the adventurous innovator, since 2010 Casio has pioneered the use of laser-based light

sources. While the competition was attempting to extend lamp life, Casio was developing a light source that didn’t require cooling fans, didn’t use eco-unfriendly and difficult to dispose of mercury vapour lamps, took up far less space within a projector, all while offering an appreciably longer lifespan. Hence the light source is under warranty for five years, with a 10,000 hour/fiveyear warranty on the rest of the unit. Casio is confident in the technology. Let’s have a look. Casio’s recent lineage of projectors includes six ‘Slim/Green’ units. The half dozen units begin with XGA 1024 x 768 resolution, 2500 lumens and no wireless connectivity, through to WXGA 1280 x 800 resolution, 3000 lumens and wireless network connectivity. Sitting in my entertainment room is the top-of-the-line slim model, the XJA257, which retails for A$2049. To be frank, this model is undoubtedly your best choice in the range, with a mere $200 difference compared to the mid-shelf XJ-A242 (2500 lumen/WXGA 1280 x 800/no wireless). SLIM & GREEN

Slim? These are indeed the catwalk waifs of Casio’s projectors. Measuring a mere 29.7 x 21 x 4.3cm and weighing 2.3kg, the XJ-A242 model feels and carries much like a laptop. Casio spent years miniaturising calculators – now it’s shrunk

the projector (‘sorry Honey’). Adding to the laptop vibe is the inclusion of a padded carry-bag, which offers an extra pocket for the included power, AV and RGB cables, and remote control. Quite tidy and ideal for travel. As for the ‘Green’ part of the ‘Slim/Green’ range, the units use as little as 165W in bright mode, and 120W in ‘Eco’ mode. Adding to the eco credentials is the lack of warmup time you require with mercury vapour lamps — full brightness, immediately from power-up. Additionally, The power system is international, accepting 100 to 240V, so there’s no need for additional power supplies while travelling. IMAGE IS EVERYTHING

Image-wise, the 3000 lumen projector sets a splendid image, with a contrast of 1800:1 and bounced via 0.65-inch Texas Instruments DLP chip. Image size ranges from 18 to 300-inch (diagonal) from a projection distance of 0.85m to 4.8m. It’s a crisp display with 16.7 million colours. Operationally, the menu-driven operating is simple to navigate. You’ll find everything you need without resorting to the manual. All operation, including zoom and focus, is via membrane buttons. Fortunately focus and zoom have dedicated call-up buttons, with adjustment via the four navigation/parameter buttons – quick to access and adjust.

REVIEW

055

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056

REVIEW

43mm

297mm CONNECTIVITY

PORTABILITY IS ALSO EVERYTHING

It would appear truly portable projection is a reality, with more than acceptable brightness and without fragile and expensive mercury-based bulbs. Running costs are paltry and connectivity is comprehensive. Whether traipsed between presentations in multiple worldwide locations, or even as a domestic and easy-to-conceal entertainment projector, the XJ-A257 slim green projector deserves attention. 

Connectivity is bountiful in such a compact unit: HDMI input, along with VGA input will allow connection from computers, with the highest resolution being UXGA (1600 x 1200). DTV/HDTV resolution runs from 480i through to 1080p. These resolutions will cover most playback via laptops or similarly spec’ed netbooks, which is likely to be where the projector will be predominately deployed. For those requiring YCbCr/ YPbPr input, this is input to the VGA input via an optional adaptor cable. Perhaps more impressive for road warriors is the projector’s ability to accept vision via a micro USB-B port. Additional free software from Casio must be installed on your OSX or Windows machine, along with freeware third-party software for audio such as a VDD driver for Windows and Syphon

virtual screen for OSX. Audio-wise, Dante’s Via would do a better job, and would perhaps mesh more easily with in-house AV systems. This said, you can avoid presenting from your laptop using the USB-A port — simply save your presentation to USB flash memory (playback files can be AVI, MOV or MP4, along with popular image files, PDFs, and presentation files such as ECA and PtG). Then, if you’re sick of the cable waltz, play all these file types over wireless LAN. Run material wirelessly from your smartphone or wireless camera if you want. You can also save up to 2GB of data to the projector’s built-in RAM for cable-less operation. There’s an RS232 port for serial control but no ethernet input.

WARRANTY Standard: 5-year/10,000-hour parts and labor warranty. 5-year warranty on light source. Shriro Australia: 1300 768 112 Web: www.casioprojector.shriro.com.au PRICING XJ-A257: $2049

CASIO GLOBAL GM INTERVIEW Christopher Holder chatted to the Global General Manager of Casio’s Projector Division, Tetsuro Ono, at InfoComm16. AV Asia Pacific: What’s your strategy to maintain market share now the lamp-free sandpit is getting crowded? Tetsuro Ono: Six years ago, back in 2010, we announced the world’s first lamp-free projector — the Green Slim — based on an LED+laser light source. Around two years ago Panasonic, BenQ and others entered the market. The competitors are entering the higher lumens end of the market and are all-laser. More recently, this year, Hitachi and Optoma, have demonstrated all-LED projectors. Our strategy and how we will differentiate ourselves in the market is to concetrate our fight in the mainstream market — the 2000- to 4000-lumen lamp-free market — which accounts for 70% of the projector market. The other brands are fighting it the higher brightness market and doing so with all-laser designs at higher prices. We’re not fighting those players, our fight is against lamp-based projectors and to work to change the market — from lamp to lamp-free. AV Asia Pacific: You use a hybrid LED + laser light source. Is it the technology to take you there?

Tetsuro Ono: Our hybrid LED + laser technology is something we’ve successfully worked on for six years. The beauty of it is its low power consumption, which means we can package the light source into smaller units. Especially against competitors that are all-LED or all-laser we have the advantage, and especially in the mainstream area. We want to stay ahead in terms of price and size – staying more compact. But we want to lead in more than just these two respects. We are constantly working to improve our lamp-free technology. We will keep adding unique Casio unique features, adding more value. AV Asia Pacific: You didn’t have much of a history in the sale of projectors. Did that make it just that much harder to gain a foothold in the market? Tetsuro Ono: Firstly we developed the AV channels. They’re proactive and can sell the advantages of lampfree projection. After six years we remain the market leader in lamp-free projection — we have a 73% market share. And in that time our total share of the

projector market has grown to 4%. We are not satisfied with our overall share. We have to increase that. Our XJ-V1 projector, which we released mid 2015, has been leading the way with the next phase in our strategy. We want to keep the price difference [between the Casio lamp-free projector and the equivalent competitor] to under US$200 — up until the XJ-V1 it’s been ~US$500. Recently, not only AV but IT channels are handling that model. So the XJ-V1 is a game changer for us. We sold ~40,000 units in 2015 and we expect it will help us gain a high overall market share. AV Asia Pacific: How is the projector division seen within Casio? Are you the crazy guys in the basement? Tetsuro Ono: Casio is built on innovation. We created the first digital camera, the first digital watch and the first digital calculator. So for us to create the first lampfree projector is seen as another Casio innovation. Casio has high expectations of the projector division, and that it will be a key part of the Casio business in the future. Our 2017 roadmap is very impressive and many of these products will also suit ANZ market.

THE

FEATURE

057

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058

COMMENT

Termination Light, Rain, Action Text:/ Graeme Hague

don’t touch lighting as a rule. Not anymore. Back when I was a fledgling theatre technician, I did lots of LX stuff (even though I was a sound guy) to learn as much as I could about everything. Then, later in my career — if one can be so bold as to call it a ‘career’ — I discovered that if you admit to any knowledge of the... ah, dark art of lighting, then so-called lighting ‘designers’ will send you to the very top of perilous ladders and demand you tweak rusting focus knobs and fiddle with barn doors to infinitesimal degrees, even though the rigging bar rope drops 300mm every time someone opened the Green Room fridge door... well, many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. It was even worse if the production was arts funded. No bastard had bought a ticket and we might as well have run it under work-site lights and saved a lot of money. In particular, I don’t touch any lighting in the rain. That might sound silly, but we’ve all done concerts when Mother Nature has been cantankerous. It’s why I’ve witnessed — but thankfully never suffered — the ubiquitous dodgy Par 64 booting a lighting technician off the ladder and onto the wet stage. It needs several tall, cold pints of Guinness afterwards to recover from the shock. Seriously, the drum riser doesn’t need lighting that much. VIVID RECOLLECTIONS

So I’m always intrigued by the Vivid Festival in Sydney being held in winter when... okay, it’s always raining, right? It’s primarily an outdoor event featuring lighting, which needs electricity, and when you add water it’s the same combination used to dispatch serial killers in Alabama. It doesn’t seem sensible. On the other hand, if the festival was held in the middle of summer and daylight saving,

we’d all be tucked up in bed with the fading curtains closed long before it was dark enough to impress any punters with your giant pixelmapped urban canvasses. So I guess we need to consider attracting a decent audience (unless it’s arts funded), over the threat of electrocution. Anyway, rigging lights in inclement weather has prompted me to reminisce about the worst rainrelated technical snafu I’ve known. This may ring some bells with long-time Termination readers (if there is such a thing), but also since we’re about to begin a silly season of athletics where the best drug-administering program should prevail on the podium, this story is doubly appropriate. GAMES OF THE SOGGY OLYMPIAD

It was years ago; a kind of regional ‘games’ event with thin, brightly-attired people expected to run in circles, jump into sandpits and throw hammers (no, hang on... that was the audio dude working on the radio mics. It was the ’90s). Except things hadn’t progressed that far. We were in the final throes of setting up an opening concert rig on an elevated stage in the centre of an oval. A zillion repeater speakers — passive 15-inch wedges back then — were scattered at regular intervals around the perimeter. It was a big setup with lots of long signal lines and powered speaker cable runs. Really, it was the sort of ambitious rig that many of us didn’t really expect to work properly — not at first, anyway. Especially when it started to rain. Not a cold front or forecast storm, just a big, black cloud that wandered in with nothing better to do. Yes, this was Queensland, and it began to rain a lot. Right as the opening ceremony was supposed to begin. Those of you who’ve ever been to the footy know that playing ovals are ever-so-slightly concave to drain water from the centre to the outfield — right where the 15-inch wedges were

located. Within minutes those speakers were sitting in 100mm of water and everybody was madly turning everything off, but still trying to keep the main PA functioning for the MC to make announcements in the downpour. One result was the loudest ground-loop hum in the history of amplified sound. ALWAYS LICKED, NEVER BEATEN

Me, I was doing the same as everyone else: unplugging gear in an attempt to clean up the signal, but because everyone was trying to do the same thing it was a co-ordinated exercise in chaos. A too-many-cooks shamozzle. Then I found my friend underneath the stage licking the scaffolding, before smashing it with a sledge hammer. Poor bastard, the pressure must have got to him. Actually, he was thinking outside the box. His theory was the scaffolding was too rusty and wasn’t earthing properly. So he was licking the metal (like testing a 9V battery, except this was still 240V) and if he got a zap, he’d whack the offending clamp until it went away. That’s seriously above-and-beyond the call of duty in my book. Obviously, nothing like this will happen at a Vivid Festival. Honest. But if you do get stuck in a downpour and see someone holding a sledgehammer, licking a pylon of the Harbour Bridge, don’t assume it’s a drugs or alcohol problem. It’s a technical thing.  Graeme Hague is a writer based in the bucolic idyll of south west WA. A very long way from Vivid.

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Visit us at the LG Business Innovation Centre at 201 Sussex Street for demonstrations and training seminars.

All the sales support you need, is on the LG Partner Portal. Everything you need to grow your business with LG products, are on our LG Partner Portal. You have direct access to cutting edge innovation, as well as support. All you have to do is go on and register, so we can start sharing information, so you can sell more confidently. This includes specs, case studies and high res images.