Content+Technology ANZ Nov-Dec 2012

PP: 255003/06831

VOLUME 9 ISSUE 6 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2012

MEDIA + PRODUCTION + MANAGEMENT + DELIVERY

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DIGITAL CINEMATOGRAPHY PUTTING THE BYTE ON FILM

POSTING Storm Surfers 3D ISSN 1448-9554

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VOLUME 9 ISSUE 6 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2012

Also see C+T in PDF at www.content-technology.com

Cover Story – Digital Cinematography Special

22 REGULARS

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EDITOR’S WELCOME NEWS Vale Bruce Robertson, Fuel’s Short Form Team, Kacevsi to Engine, Knox at Cutting Edge, Magna Adds Offices

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TAKING STOCK Harmonic Moves Into

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CLASSIFIEDS AND EVENTS OFF-AIR What Happened on Tour, Gets Printed Right Here!

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TIME SHIFTER Mark Colvin Looks Back at his Early Days in Journalism

Australia, End of an Era for CASBAA

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FEATURES

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3D – THE THIRD DIMENSION Storm

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Surfers’ Storage and Post-Production

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SPORTSCASTING Communicating with STRATOS, Touring Down Under, Elliot Leaves Gearhouse, OB Group’s New Expansion, EVS Goes to Bathurst

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NEWS OPERATIONS SBS ‘Packs It In’, Training Lab in Singapore, Seven Upgrades with Quantel, The Integration of Social Media with Broadcast

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Cloud with Microsoft, Dalet Xtend for CS6, Aspera in Singapore, Modifying MAM with Cantemo

ACQUISITION Sony Dead-Set Choice for Horror Remake, ARRI at AFTRS, Fujinon at Opera House, Digital Cinematography Special

POST-PRODUCTION Voodoo Creates

MEDIA IN THE CLOUD PPTV in the

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RADIO Australia’s DAB+ Rollout, Audience Measurement Going Digital, Streaming Across the World

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AUDIO Audio Description Trial Finishes, 3D Audio on the Way, Capturing the Plight of the Great Apes, Murdoch University’s New Studio

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TRANSMISSION Broadcast Australia Managing Restack, UK DTV Switch Complete, The Future Direction of Channel Playout

File-Based Workflow, Cutting Edge Sparkles, Ted Comes to Life with V-Ray, Fusion Reaction

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CONTENT+TECHNOLOGY: ISSN 1448-9554 PP:255003/06831 Broadcastpapers Pty Ltd (ABN: 34 095 653 277) PO Box 259, Darlinghurst, NSW 1300 Australia www.broadcastpapers.com PUBLISHER: Phil Sandberg Tel: +61-(0)2-9211 8205 Fax: +61-(0)2-9211 8208 Mob: +61-(0)414-671-811 papers@broadcastpapers.com

SUB-EDITOR: Keith Ford PRODUCTION MANAGER: Lucy Salmon Tel: +61-(0)29211 8205 production@broadcastpapers.com DESIGN & LAYOUT: Wide Open Media Tel: +61-2-9690 2835 info@wideopenmedia.com.au PRINTING: Pegasus COPYRIGHT NOTICE: All material in Broadcastpapers’ Content+Technology Magazine is protected under

Australian Commonwealth Copyright Laws.

No material may be reproduced in part or whole in any manner without prior consent of the Publisher and/or copyright holder.

DISCLAIMER: Broadcastpapers Pty Ltd accepts no responsibility for omissions or mistakes made within, claims made or information provided by advertisers.

EDITOR’S WELCOME

Film Becoming a Residue

By Phil Sandberg

AS DENOTED ON OUR COVER, we are “focusing” this issue on digital cinematography. A tipping point has been reached in terms of the adaption of the technology which gained much of its impetus through the efforts of the wilfully enigmatic and “oh so cool” RED company. With RED technology finally catching up to the promises of its makers, traditional camera manufacturers have asserted their competencies in the digital space, as exemplified by ARRI, Canon and Sony in our Acquisition section.

However, what has really driven the nail through the sprocket hole and into the coffin of traditional film is economics. With the barriers to entry significantly lowered by digital cinematography, the global demand for film stock has slumped to the point where one major manufacturer is pulling out of the market.

Fujifilm Corporation of Japan has announced that it has made a decision to withdraw from the Motion Picture Film market. Production of most negative, positive and intermediate film stocks will be discontinued from March 2013. The exception is that Fujifilm will continue to supply Eterna-RDS archival film.

According to a Fujifilm statement, “Fujifilm has strived to reduce the costs of the production process for its existing negative films and positive films and has continued to supply such films. However, the dramatic decrease of demand in the last few years has become far too great a burden to be covered by corporate efforts.”

Paradoxically, professional and amateur photographic stills film will continue to be manufactured by Fujifilm.

Kodak, the other major manufacturer, is still in the game with a new President and General Manager of its Entertainment Imaging Division, Andrew Evenski.

Evenski, who comes from Kodak’s Corporate Finance Group, said recently “We certainly see a future for film, and are dedicated to shaping it. The landscape for image capture and display has changed in recent years, but Kodak is committed to giving artists a choice when deciding which tools will best illuminate their stories.”

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Non-U.S. subsidiaries are not part of the filings, are not subject to the Court proceedings, and are operating as usual. It remains to be seen what long term impact the restructure will have on film manufacturing and R&D.

MANY, MANY THANKS Next year will see C+T celebrate its 10th birthday. We have already started the “festivities” by launching the first issue of Content+Technology Asia, a dedicated new edition of the magazine.

In 2013, we will produce C+T ANZ and C+T Asia - two bi-monthly magazines published in alternate months which will give us the scope to drill down and present a greater degree of local focus in each edition.

Our first issue of C+T Asia has been well received and we’d like to thank both the interviewees and advertisers for supporting us.

Of course, the same goes for all our publishing efforts this year and I’d like to emphasise that C+T is a publication that relies entirely on advertising support. So, with that in mind, please support those who support us. In our experience, it’s those who invest in the big picture are those in whom our readers can find stability and reliability.

All the best to you and yours for 2013.

Thanks for reading Phil Sandberg Editor/Publisher papers@broadcastpapers.com T: +61-(0)2-9211 8205

Prior to Evenski’s appointment, on January 19, 2012, Eastman Kodak Company and its U.S. subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11

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business reorganisation (voluntary administration) in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

According to the company, the business reorganisation will enable Kodak to “bolster liquidity in the U.S. and abroad, monetize non-strategic intellectual property, fairly resolve legacy liabilities, and enable the Company to focus on its most valuable business lines.”

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NEWS + PEOPLE For the latest news visit www.content-technology.com

Vale Bruce Robertson BRUCE ROBERTSON, television technology pioneer and stalwart of the Kerry Packer-era Nine Network, has passed away leaving a legacy of technological innovations and engineering successes, as well as an indelible mark on the development of Television in Australia.

‘Robbo’, as he was affectionately known, enjoyed a long and successful career spanning over 50 years, culminating in his appointment as Executive Vice President of Engineering for the Nine Network.

He will be particularly remembered for his numerous contributions to the television industry in Australia, particularly his contribution to development and roll out of Digital Television and High Definition Television.

Bruce pioneered many firsts during his 42 years with the Nine Network.

During this time Australians witnessed the introduction of the first colour TV services, stereo sound, international transponder services, and digital television services. Many current technology platforms can be traced back to Bruce’s work.

Among Bruce’s other numerous achievements were the design of the standards converter used to provide coverage for Australian audiences for the man-on-the-moon project, writing spectrum planning, and television studio design in the Asian Region. He also wrote the lighting specification for the Sydney Cricket Ground, leading to an approach which has become a world standard.

As detailed in the Gerald Stone book Compulsive Viewing – The Inside Story of Packer’s Nine Network, “The problem for Bruce Robertson and his staff was to come up with specifications for a lighting system untried anywhere in the world. It needed to be bright enough for batsmen to be able to sight the balls bombarding them at more than 140 kilometres an hour. Meanwhile, the TV colour cameras imposed their own requirements for virtual daylight.

Yet the intensity of the luminance obviously could not be allowed to blind a fielder looking up for a catch or a spectator sitting anywhere around the 360-degree sweep of play.

“Robertson’s team went to the SCG at night to test various lighting schemes.

They took along a handful of bemused cricketers to hit around a ball and allow them to judge troublesome heights and angles. By 1 March, 1978, Robertson had come up with enough information to seek tenders on a design that called for six giant towers, two of them at 90-degree angles to

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the pitch and four located at 30-degree angles to either end. The required illumination won’t mean much to the layperson – 1500 lux – but high noon on a cloud-less day wouldn’t be much brighter.

“The six towers crowned with their shimmering jewels of light were to rise some 71 metres, the height of a twenty-storey building. Even with the State government’s blessing, getting construction clearances from the various planning and environmental authorities proved a nightmare. The final approvals to start putting them up came through only a month away from the deadline. There were more anxious times ahead when Robertson learned that the only two cranes in Australia capable of lifting the towers into position were both tied up in industrial disputes, one in Queensland and the other in Victoria.

“The name Packer was hardly a password through union picket lines. Sir Frank’s antics had left many bitter memories. Luckily, the union bosses in control of the crane in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley agreed to Robertson’s plea to cut through the industrial red tape on behalf of all cricket-loving battlers. The bulky apparatus was rushed to Sydney under police escort.

“The six artificial suns blazing around the ground on Tuesday, 28 November, burned up more than 200 kilowatts of power – which required a whole new substation to help carry the load.”

“I’ll never forget the experience, the experience was just spectacular,” Bruce Robertson told Stone. “I’m sitting there with Kerry in a private area just off the members’ stand, with some of his friends around him. And he turned to me and said, ‘Well done, Robbo.’ It was just a very emotional moment.”

As Stone commented in his book, “For an engineer to admit to having a tear in his eye, it must have been.”

Bruce retired from the Nine Network in 2003, but retained his commitment to the industry as an advisor to Nine, and through direct involvement in special industry-related groups.

In 1990 Bruce was honoured with the Paul Marlan Award by Free TV Australia for his work toward the advancement of television broadcasting. He was the chairman of the FACTS specialist group DTTB, and led the development and introduction of digital television in Australia. He was a member of the IBC council and a member of the College of Electrical Engineers, the Institute of Engineers Australia and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Bruce was a great supporter of SMPTE and was instrumental in the development of the SMPTE Conference and Exhibition concept, and was one of the organisers of the first such event in 1984. In recognition of his contribution Bruce was appointed a Fellow of the SMPTE in 1999.

Bruce always made time to talk to C+T at conferences and exhibitions, or after hours in the bar. Our thoughts are with his wife, Barbara, his family, friends and colleagues. He will be missed.

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ASIA PACIFIC NEWS

CHINA THE ZHEJIANG SATELLITE TV and STAR TV coproduced Chinese version of ‘The Voice’ talent show aired its finale in late September using Ross Video’s Furio Robotic Camera System.

Capturing the contestants’ dulcet tones was DPA Microphones’ new hand held d:facto Vocal Microphone. DPA d:facto Vocal Microphones, cardioid headset microphones, d:vote 4099 Instrument Microphones, and a DPA 5100 Mobile Surround microphone were also used.

Visit www.rossvideo.com and www.dpamicrophones.com

INDIA SNELL HAS ANNOUNCED that Shemaroo Entertainment Ltd., a content owner and distributor of Indian cinema and Bollywood titles, is using Snell’s Archangel Ph.C-HD real-time SD and HD video restoration system to deliver restoration projects for use across multiple formats, including HD and Blu-ray.

“With Archangel, we have a powerful yet costeffective means of repairing damaged films and presenting a new, pristine sequence of images that can be delivered in any medium,” said Hemant Karani, vice president, Shemaroo Studio.

Visit www.snellgroup.com

THAILAND PROJECTING OVER 2,200 million Baht (approximately US $71 million) in revenue for 2012 from foreign production shoots in Thailand – passing the record of 2,023 million Baht set in 2008, the Thailand Film Office has hosted an Inbound Roadshow (familiarisation tour) for leading international location managers and select Asian producers, which ran November 5 – 13 2012.

Visit www.thailandfilmoffice.org

MALAYSIA ELEMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES has announced that Media Prima in Malaysia has deployed Elemental Live to ramp its live multiscreen offerings to Internet and mobile users.

With this deployment, live events and traditional TV content can now be viewed via Media Prima’s TonTon digital portals. The TonTon multiscreen video portal is a flagship product of Alt Media, which presents content in a cinematic environment on personal computers and connected devices.

Visit www.elementaltechnologies.com

SINGAPORE STARHUB HAS OPTIMISED the infrastructure for its digital cable TV platform with new technology from Thomson Video Networks.

NEWS + PEOPLE

By installing systems based around Thomson’s latest-generation ViBE EM4000 encoders, StarHub has been able to reallocate bandwidth to accommodate extra channels, while simultaneously improving video quality.

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Visit www.thomson-networks.com

JAPAN ESPIAL'S TV BROWSER has been integrated with Hisense TVs. The Espial TV Browser will initially be deployed on a variety of Hisense TV models in Japan to provide support for the country’s Broadcast Markup Language (BML) standard, which enables a rich set of interactive applications and services bundled together with digital TV broadcasts over satellite, terrestrial, or cable networks.

Visit www.espial.com

HONG KONG THE OFFICE OF THE COMMUNICATIONS AUTHORITY (OFCA) says it has reached a decision on DAB+ broadcaster Digital Broadcasting Corporation Hong Kong Limited contravening its licence conditions, finding that a sanction should be imposed on DBC on the breach in accordance with the law.

KOREA U.S. SENATOR CHRIS DODD, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), said that both the U.S. and South Korean screen industries will benefit from the new “KORUS” Free Trade Agreement between the two countries.

In mid-October, DBC digital radio services went off the air following a shareholder battle, which resulted in a withdrawal of funding.

In 2011, the film and television industry in South Korea directly contributed USD6.77 billion (7,549 billion Won) to the country’s economy and directly supported 67,627 jobs.

Visit www.ofca.gov.hk

Visit http://eng.kcc.co.kr

INDONESIA IN DECEMBER 2012, Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology will hold Phase II of a selection process for digital TV multiplex operators for North Sumatra and East Kalimantan provinces.

With the country’s planned DTV coverage broken up into zones, the Ministry has already completed the selection process in five zones, Service Zone 4 (DKI Jakarta and Banten), Service Zone 5 (Java West), Service Zone 6 (Central Java and Yogyakarta), Service Zone 7 (East Java) and Service Zone 15 (Kepulayan Riau).

Visit http://kominfo.go.id

NEW ZEALAND

GLOBECAST AUSTRALIA has announced a major upgrade that will allow the company to deliver its customers the first high-quality MPEG-4 services on the Optus D2 DTH satellite platform.

TVNZ HAS FINALISED the sale of its Avalon Studio facility in Lower Hutt. The change of ownership to a Wellington consortium, Avalon Holdings Ltd, will take place on March 31, 2013.

GlobeCast Australia’s enhancement of its Optus D2 DTH platform includes upgrading four carriers to Thomson Video Networks MPEG-4/ MPEG-2 encoders. The Optus D2 DTH platform covers Australia and New Zealand.

The consortium is made up of local business interests including Wellington businessman John Feast, and two Avalon staff members who each hold a minority shareholding. The consortium intends to retain the facility as a production base for the film and television industry.

Visit www.globecast.com

Visit http://tvnz.co.nz

NEWS + PEOPLE

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NEWS + PEOPLE

Fuel VFX Confirms Ad/Short Form Team FUEL VFX HAS ANNOUNCED its front line of producers leading the combined Fuel and Animal Logic advertising post production team out of Fuel’s HQ in Newtown – Samantha Daley, Sarah Hiddlestone and Alastair Stephen.

The trio boasts a wide range of senior production roles in Australia and internationally. Samantha Daley and Sarah Hiddlestone will provide well-respected continuity of service for the clients of Fuel and Animal Logic respectively, while new team member Alastair Stephen joins the producing team with over 20 years of industry experience in advertising, design & VFX.

Alastair commenced his career working with Sydney agencies GP Bates, DDB and Attik, transitioning to the VFX industry to lead facilities Engine, Digital Pictures and Iloura as Executive Producer. His experience covers network identity design, most recently working on the ABC1 and ABC2 rebrands.

The consolidation of the Fuel and Animal Logic teams is off to a busy start with VFX Supervisor Simon Maddison travelling to LA to supervise Director, David Scott’s US Nike commercial and VFX Supervisor/Senior Flame artist, Jonathan Hairman in Budapest for Director, Steve Roger’s Pure Blonde spot.

Visit www.fuelvfx.com

Magna Expands Singapore, HK Offices FURTHER TO THE IMMINENT OPENING

training and support.

of its new Jakarta office, Magna Systems and Engineering has again expanded its training, service and support teams with Eugene Fung joining its Hong Kong office and Jony Felipe its Singapore office.

Experienced IT industry professional Jony Felipe joins Magna Systems and Engineering’s Singapore office as a Senior Systems Engineer for pre- and post-sales support. A technical specialist in design, installation and project management, Felipe brings with him more than eight years of solid, hands-on industry experience. His most recent position was with SeaChange where he held the position of Senior Technical Support Engineer.

Most recently with Turner Broadcasting System Asia Pacific where he supervised and coordinated the operational logistics of on-air transmission, Fung joins Magna’s Hong Kong office as an Engineer with a broad remit to support client

Visit www.magnasys.tv

Digistor Expands with Smith, Nemeno DIGITAL MEDIA integration specialist, Digistor Pty Ltd, has appointed Nic Smith as Workflow & Application Specialist and Andrew Nemeno as the company’s latest Support Engineer.

Nic Smith (right) brings to Digistor a wealth of experience from his most recent role as Technical Director at Digital Pictures.

With over six years of experience in large broadcast and post-production environments, Nemeno will specialise in providing digital media support services – typically in multi-seat post-production environments.

Visit www.digistor.com.au.

Kacevski Joins Engine

ENGINE HAS ANNOUNCED that Nik Kacevski has joined their team. Kacevski, who has worked on movies including Australia, The Spirit, Happy Feet 2 and Mad Max: Fury Road, has also written and directed a number award-winning music videos and short films.

Nik Kacevski said, “Engine has it all. Design, 2D, 3D, in-house studio, illustrators, VFX, cinematographers, you name it. There’s also a really positive energy as the people here are truly passionate about what they do. My job and what I love to do is to push boundaries, work with clients to figure out the most innovative way to realise their vision, and make the creative come alive.”

Visit www.engine.net.au

Knox GM for Cutting Edge Sydney CUTTING EDGE has appointed Andrew Knox as Sydney General Manager. The former GM of Euro RSCG Australia, Knox brings a wealth of experience operating in creative businesses.

Michael Burton, Cutting Edge CEO, said that Knox was a natural fit for the business and brought with him a broad and real understanding of what makes the communications industry tick.

During his tenure at Euro RSCG Australia, Andrew was responsible for clients such Novartis, Sydney IVF, Sanofi-Aventis, Reckitt Benckiser, Volvo, Schering Plough and Sydney Water.

NEWS + PEOPLE

Visit www.cuttingedge.com.au

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TAKING STOCK Moves in the business of content + technology

www.content-technology.com/mediabusiness

Harmonic in Australia In what is being described as a “joint venture in principle” between Techtel Pty. Ltd. and Harmonic Inc., Harmonic in Australia has launched in, well, Australia. Harmonic in Australia is a wholly owned division of Techtel, but operating with support from Harmonic Inc., providing a much more comprehensive presence in the country for the brand and a new way of operating for Techtel.

this space,” added Lattie.

While Harmonic has certainly had a presence in Australia, up to now it has been relatively small.

Their growing line-up of products has meant that customers are able to obtain a complete solution and justifies the cost of moving into a new territory, as potential revenue is increased.

“We have almost zero penetration in the Australian market and we think there we have a best of breed product, but what we really lacked is providing customers in Australia the confidence that if they buy from Harmonic, they are not the only person buying from Harmonic and they are left kind of one off and they are not going to get support,” explained Lattie.

With the marked increase in video being watched over the Internet, often taking eyeballs away from traditionally broadcast television, it is no surprise that broadcasters are looking for ways to capitalise on the emerging market and maintain or grow their slice of the pie.

As a provider of the technologies that make all this possible, it makes sense that Harmonic would see reason to expand into new markets and offer their expertise. However, the growth in appetite for video does not necessarily mean a growth in revenue for the providers.

Harmonic’s VP of Product Management, Tom Lattie [left], and Techtel Managing Director, David Elsmore [right], flank Foxtel’s Scott Favelle at the launch of Harmonic in Australia.

HARMONIC IN AUSTRALIA provides two business development professionals, each with a strong background in production, playout and delivery. Another two dedicated personnel come from Harmonic. Techtel, in their recently refurbished Sydney offices in Artarmon, will provide back office, logistics and customer support activities.

TAKING STOCK

Andrew Hogg joined Harmonic in Australia as Director of Business Development, while Jo Bickerton joins as Business Development Manager – Production, Playout and Storage.

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“I have long wanted to take manufacturers direct to the market. Not just as an entry on the Techtel line card but each with its own dedicated team and product focus. I wanted to bring the manufacturer closer to the customer. Even if they were already there in practice, I wanted to emphasise that and bring the manufacturer just that much closer,” explained Techtel Managing Director, David Elsmore.

“So when I was approached by Harmonic to help establish a focused operation in Australia and New Zealand I jumped at the chance.”

Techtel is a systems integrator and distributor of equipment to the broadcast television, radio and telco markets and has been operating since 1985.

They represent a number of companies in the Australian and New Zealand market, though none in the way it is for Harmonic.

Headquartered in San Jose, California, Harmonic Inc. is a company focused on video infrastructure, spanning production to delivery. The company has over 1,100 employees around the globe and invests over $100M a year in R&D. “We’ve spent the last 20 years of the life of Harmonic really building what we think is a product portfolio that addresses all aspects of how we think about the video economy or how a piece of content goes from creation all the way to delivery,” said Tom Lattie, Vice President of Product Management with Harmonic Inc. “We are a pure play video manufacturer. What we mean by this is we wake up every morning and we go to bed every night, all we think about at Harmonic is video infrastructure. We are not part of a larger company that builds IP switches or cell towers or anything else, we are 100% focused on video infrastructure, making us very unique in

“I think where the challenge for us comes is that at the end of the day, if you are a broadcaster or a pay TV operator and you enable your content on an Xbox or you enable your content on an Android phone your incremental revenue as a service provider or a pay TV operator or a broadcaster is not linear with the amount of devices you are now supporting,” said Lattie.

The partnership with Techtel is an interesting one, and both organisations have reasons for pursuing a joint venture in this manner. From Techtel’s perspective, the joint venture is very much about bringing the customer closer to the manufacturer, while still providing the services that the company was built on. It is also a way of reducing the costs for the manufacturer by utilising the back end that Techtel already has in place.

“It does cost a lot of money to gear up. We’ve got a back office, we’ve got logistics, we’ve got accounts, we’ve got frontline support, just three things that the supplier first of all has to think about before he even puts people on the ground if he wants to do commercial dealings direct,” explained Elsmore.

“They [Hogg & Bickerton] know a huge amount about the market, what people are doing, what they are trying to do and we ourselves, if we came here, it would be very difficult for us to do that.

However, what that leaves us to do is to be able to focus on what we are good at,” concluded Lattie.

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What Will Influence us in 2013?

Media staff & strategy by Karl Jansson In the last edition of C&T, I raised concern that the social media was one of the most addictive sites you could login. If you weren’t careful it had the ability to consume not only your time but also your company’s resources, particularly if it were used for commercial purposes rather than personal.

In the last 12 months another thirty to forty new social media vendors have registered and are now attempting to take a slice of this lucrative network.

AS A RESULT, WE’VE REGRESSED to standing on a mobile platform with shiny new devices and whether it’s Apple or Android, we find it necessary to let the world know we just finished a turkey and rye sandwich and to prove it, we’ve uploaded a picture, just for the hell of it!

Where Is This Technology and Infused Mindset Taking Us?

The Top 5 Culture Changes To Improve Business + LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Whilst we all value our positions of influence, there should be a consciousness of how can we can develop future leaders. Identify those around you with potential and explore their strengths simply by giving them a series of small projects, with each addressing a different strength capability. Assess and decide!

+ COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS Most companies will review competitors with a blinkered approach through their products. Ideal as this may seem, products are not the backbone of a company, they are simply the revenue on which to grow the business. People drive the business and set the standard by which products are showcased in the market, so it’s reasonable to assume that there should be some review of how your competitors treat their staff. It’s difficult to really know their HR policies, however, there are a few ways to feel out their culture.

For example, interacting with staff at trade shows, functions, direct contact, market analysis, speaking with ex-staff members, and to some minute extent, social networking.

For the corporate user like me, it will be data driven.

I’m un-ashamedly a network junkie, but I need to be, because that’s my profession. I have a need to monitor business professionals as well any market shifts in order to establish a potential business opportunity.

I’m one of the lucky ones because although my profile is listed on a lot of social networks, my updates and comments are not at a social level, more business. There are exceptions of course but in the main I’m not trolling for friends 24/7.

However for some, it appears that a trend is developing from their over use of social networking, and it seems that some companies are having problems with employee retention, because of it.

The impact of social networking allows the information super highway to deliver far more enticing career opportunities in greater number, so it has the potential to create a roll on effect by leveraging staff from their current employ.

Poor staff retention is costly to the business, so how you approach it, will influence it in either a positive or negative way.

TAKING STOCK

For agility, flexibility and the support of existing staff, consider part-time, contract or freelance options for additional labour. When you can’t justify bringing on a permanent employee, consider this as a try before you buy option, and integrate them under someone you’re considering within the “Leadership Development” program. Contingent employment will also take them off the market and stop them from being hired by a competitor, so hire before they do.

+ INTEGRATION It may seem that at a glance all departments are communicating well, because they are all meeting targets, but unfortunately it may be an unintended smoke screen of the truth.

Seamless integration is what all departments should experience, like the gears in a lubricated machine, so if there is a culture difference, or a status of privilege highlighted, then it needs to be addressed.

If social networks are affecting your retention rate or creating time poor employees in your organisation, the answer may not be as obvious as restricting logins over company terminals.

It can be as simple as a meeting of department heads to analyse any potential obstructions in a forum of equal standing. A brief to all department managers on how to identify at floor level, items of interest, would of course be addressed first.

COMBATING LOW RETENTION RATES

In Summary

A growing number of companies are now conscious of these threats to their business, and are implementing measures such as succession plans, creative accounting with company incentives such as travel inclusions for partners, extended benefits to motor vehicles, entertainment add-ons etc to strengthen a business focus. Also, depending upon the position, if it has an R&D function or a position of authority then there is nothing better than a stimulated mind drafting up a future something! As a result, the employee is committed and focussed.

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+ CONTINGENT WORKERS

Any incentive that is different to any competitor has the potential to drive new staff to you, but creating a restricted environment around existing staff may stifle not only longevity but also creativity.

Review your company culture and seriously address staff retention as this will be one threat that shouldn’t be ignored for the remainder of 2012 leading into 2013. It will be, and currently is, a real concern.

The bottom line is to work with the flow of change, not against it.

Use the mobile platform to your advantage whether from a social networking perspective or using it as a virtual classroom for your customers and staff. Hook into its popularity and use the pathways to showcase not just your company, but your initiatives. Review your culture and make changes.

As a result your business will be seen as a stand-out leader for not only your company’s retention rate but also by being recognised for your early-adoption of best-practice as you move into 2013.

Karl Jansson owned and managed “J-Curve Broadcast Recruitment”.

He has since merged his business within “Interlogic Placements” at North Sydney.

Contact: karl@interlogic.com.au or 9922 2711 or 0408 274 413

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TAKING STOCK

End of an Era for CASBAA C+T caught up with Simon Twiston-Davies on the eve of his departure as CEO of the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia.

Simon Twiston-Davies, CEO, CASBAA

C+T: How would you summarise the Association’s evolution since you came on-board in March 2000?

STD: I think the highlight has been the extraordinary growth in the market place. Back in 2000, we were in very much an early investment phase, both in terms of the number of cable systems, satellite systems, and the capacity to deliver programming to the consumer. The number of subscribers that were being counted would have been hovering around 50 million for a while as the first roll out of pay TV occurred.

We’ve now got 450 million homes which are receiving pay TV services across the region.

New countries are even coming in to play within the market at the moment, places where pay TV didn’t touch in those days and even now in recent times we’ve seen the emergence of a new pay TV market in Myanmar. We’ve seen a new pay TV market emerging in Mongolia. We’ve got Cambodia as a regulated environment for pay TV, multi-channel TV. Back in 2000, the availability of content which was quite often – it was still little more in international terms than The Bold and the Beautiful.

But now, the multiplicity, the sheer choice that the consumer has is absolutely stunning if you stand back from the year 2000. You’ve got – not only in terms of the range of channels, just if you think in terms of factual television how much there is. How much the development of news services since the year 2000, that’s domestic news services in every single market pretty well – almost every market there is a domestic 24-hour news service. It was a rarity, especially domestic ones, we had something from the BBC we had something from CNN, but those are now local focused feeds and, of course, in Australia you’ve seen the development of domestic news, a huge driver for the growth of the market.

C+T: On the subject of preventing piracy, have we moved away from the smart card model to more software based solutions?

TAKING STOCK

STD: I think we’re definitely moving away from that. The next generation is going to be a cardless world. That doesn’t mean that cardbased solutions are going to vanish because they’re not - but things that were exceptional three or four years ago are becoming the norm.

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So, in technology terms, within any solution that is provided by a company which is looking at OTT or a digital Telco based solution, it will not be probably having a card based solution for it. That doesn’t mean that piracy is going away, because it’s not, but what we are able to do for instance when we’re looking at the Indian market, they’re digitising slowly, although it must be remembered that 30% of India’s

market which is DTH is all digital already, and that actually does help in many ways in regards to piracy. While pirating by individuals is a problem, piracy by operators in a digital environment is really rather difficult. And so, some of the problems that are rampant in India are beginning to go away thanks to the digital DTH environment but, of course, digitisation of the cable network will also make it much harder.

Technically, it’s going to be more difficult to be an out-and-out pirate, an out-and-out thief.

C+T: There’s a CASBAA-authored whitepaper that refers to the ‘tilted playing field’ with regard to pay TV and OTT. Can you elaborate on that?

STD: This is one of the current conundrums and debates that is going on within the industry.

At the moment in the OTT world, the providers of these services are unlicensed largely, untaxed largely, there is no control over the content largely, the cost of delivery is next to nothing and the revenue is next to nothing and these services that may or may not be semilegitimate do not have to go through all of the hoops that the traditional pay TV multi-channel TV must go through.

The likes of Foxtel and its peers all around Asia have to go through a very rigorous set of hurdles in order to initially be licenced, they must pay taxes, they must ensure that the content is acceptable to Governments and to communities, and that technical specs are fulfilled.

Now, this makes for a very uneven world, the ‘tilted playing field’ which shows up in that document. It will give you chapter and verse on how the business compares. So how the pay TV is rated, how OTT is structured, how the regulatory regime imposes controls on pay TV but what does it do about regulations on languages? On Subtitling? What does it do on foreign direct investment? If you are an OTT provider you probably don’t have to worry about it at all. Restrictions on exclusivity and there’s this model on which footy rights are based goes out the window with OTT. Now we’re not suggesting that the OTT services should be heavily controlled, what we should say, and are saying quite clearly is that the old service providers should have a much more liberal approach to them because the world has changed.

Let us get on and get out there and compete as much as possible within a reasoned environment with the new players. We’re not asking shut down all the OTT providers or all the Telco’s that are providing these streaming services, that is just not practical to tell you the truth, but what we are saying is given the regulatory frameworks that we have in Australia

and running all the way up to – over to India and up to China give us a fair crack guys because we have spent fifteen or twenty years of investment and working within controls. Now is the time for a bit of liberalisation and let the industry keep up with what is happening in terms of technical and technological change.

C+T: What issues are there around threats to spectrum availability that CASBAA is facing?

STD: There are serious issues surrounding spectrum allocation which will be coming up and we’ve been talking about internally.

With regards to WRC 2015, the whole issue of spectrum allocation to broadcasting is being put back on the table and this is especially relevant to C-band which is so important in Asia. C-band transmission probably is the biggest back haul service that is used across the whole of the Asia Pacific. At the moment there are some very elegant and very disturbing plans to reallocate most of C-band to additional new services entering the market. So it’s a big worry that we are looking at through our satellite industry group and the wireless action group (WAG). And those guys are, in particular, are helping us to formulate a position to be taken at WRC 2015 in Geneva and how best to impact national participants in that particular negotiation which come under the auspices of the ITU. It could have a profound influence on the development of the overall broadcast market in Asia.

C+T: Lastly, what will Mr Simon Twiston-Davies be doing after CASBAA? STD: The first thing he has been advised by his most senior and long term advisor – my wife – is that we are going to take two months out and do things that we want to do, which is the usual stuff, a bit of travel, vegetate for a while. But after that I will be back in the industry, I will be well within sight, I will be doing many of the things that I am doing at the moment, but I how less frenetically and I hope with picking and choosing on a couple of things – the projects that I’m working on already.

Christopher Slaughter has succeeded Simon Twiston-Davies as CASBAA CEO. CASBAA’s recent Annual General Meeting also saw the election of Alexandre Muller, Managing Director, TV5MONDE Asia Pacific, to its Board of Directors (BoD) while new Corporate Members elected to the Council of Governors (CoG) included Ted McFarland, VP, Business Development, Global Communications Group, Orbital Sciences Corporation and Frank Rittman, Deputy Managing Director, Regional Policy Officer, Asia-Pacific, Motion Picture Association.

Visit www.casbaa.com

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TECHNICAL STANDARDS www.content-technology.com/standards

IBC 2012 Gathering Yields Collaboration AS THE USE OF Internet Protocol (IP)-based networks for real-time workflows accelerates, the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE), the European Broadcast Union (EBU) and the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) are intensifying their collaboration with other industry organisations to coordinate efforts and to simplify an increasingly complex – and interconnected – digital landscape.

The effort has already accelerated two key initiatives with cross-industry application: the Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS) and the Materials eXchange Format (MXF).

That acceleration was the outcome of a meeting held at IBC 2012 between executives representing the SMPTE, EBU, AMWA, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Broadcast Technology Society (IEEE BTS), North American Broadcasters Association (NABA), Video Services Forum (VSF), and World Broadcasting Unions (WBU).

“This is a who’s who of leading broadcast organisations focused on one thing: coordinating our standardisation efforts as critical shifts and evolutions emerge across all sectors of the motion-imaging industry,” said Brad Gilmer, AMWA executive director. “I’m pleased to say that we’re already making advances on two key efforts – FIMS and MXF.”

IEEE Expands Standard for Ethernet THE IEEE ORGANISATION has announced the approval of IEEE 802.32012 “Standard for Ethernet.” IEEE 802.3 defines wired connectivity for Ethernet local area, access and metropolitan area networks around the world.

IEEE 802.3 defines the physical (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers of Ethernet transmission across wired connections of multiple media. The standard’s global deployment is pervasive, and the span of stakeholders in its ongoing development is sweeping, including network component and system manufacturers (optical transceivers, cabling, integrated circuit, powering devices, switches and network interface cards, for example) and network, software and bandwidth providers, as well as LAN and Internet users worldwide.

TECHNICAL STANDARDS

Furthermore, IEEE 802.3’s relevance continues to grow multi-dimensionally in order to address additional media types, bandwidth speeds and protocols.

The new IEEE 802.3 revision, approved by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), incorporates various technical updates and enhancements and consolidates a host of amendments to the base standard that were approved since IEEE 802.3’s last full revision in 2008.

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“Just as important as working together, these groups are also committed to creating educational opportunities for the next generation of talent who will provide leadership across the digital media ecosystem,” said Hans Hoffmann, SMPTE vice president of standards.

The concept of FIMS is straightforward: as digital tools become more widely used in broadcast, production, post production and archiving, broadcasters need to ensure that they can communicate easily while avoiding unnecessary tasks and redundant operations. The FIMS specification was initiated as a joint project between the AMWA and the EBU and supports content stored as files transmitted around IP networks.

MXF, like FIMS, takes aim at interoperability but from the content side.

Often described as a wrapper, it allows, among other things, a file to be passed among multiple video editors without an operator having to worry about the format in which the file was originally created. It is the result of a collaborative effort between manufacturers and industry, standards organisations, including the Pro-MPEG Forum, the EBU, and the AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) Association (now the AMWA).

Visit www.smpte.org

SMPTE 2012 Honours & Awards Recipients CELEBRATING industry-changing achievements in acquisition, audio, digital cinema and television, file-based workflows, image archival, special effects, standards development, and more, SMPTE has announced the 2012 winners of its annual honours and awards, which were presented during the Society’s Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition in October.

“Whether it’s broadcast, cinema, or IT, the work of those honoured at SMPTE 2012 is foundational to the future success of motion-imaging professionals,” said SMPTE Executive Director Barbara Lange. “We are thrilled to celebrate the remarkable individuals receiving this year’s awards and their achievements.”

SMPTE 2012 took place from 23 – 25 October in Hollywood with a special pre-conference symposium – High Frame Rates for Digital Cinema – taking place on 22 October.

Amendments addressing 10 Gbit/s Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs), energy efficiency, extension to 40 Gbit/s and 100 Gbit/s speeds while maintaining compatibility with previously installed IEEE 802.3 interfaces, enhanced support for loss-sensitive applications and time synchronisation are among those that have been incorporated.

SMPTE also celebrated contributions to its Motion Imaging Journal as well as those members who have given outstanding service to the Society; added to its Honor Roll of the late Charles E. Anderson, who made key contributions to the invention of the first practical, broadcast-grade videotape recorder; presented the Louis F. Wolf Jr. Memorial Scholarship; and welcomed a new class of Society Fellows.

Visit http://standards.ieee.org

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Storm Surfers 3D - Powermedia a Lifesaver for Surfin’ SAN

By Keith Ford

The idea behind Storm Surfers 3D, following two of the most well-renowned big wave surfers in the world, Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Carroll, across the 2011 big wave season, is an incredibly easy concept to understand. This is part of the reason that Storm Surfers has become a globally recognised brand among its niche market. 3D just makes it better.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR the producers, 3D adds in a number of issues for a documentary-style shoot (Detailed in C+T April), one of which is the ever-increasing need for a reliable, expandable storage solution. When their rental solution was not performing the way they had hoped, producer Marcus Gillezeau contacted Olivier Jean, Video Specialist at Powermedia Systems.

“Due to the nature of the storage they were using, which was a volume locking SAN (Storage Area Network), the workflow in place was very restrictive, the editors had access to all those pools of storage but no two editors could write to the same pool at the same time,” explained Olivier. “It was a very cumbersome way to work and caused hair pulling situations during the transcoding process of the rushes, basically the Cineform Studio workflow wasn’t suited for this environment.”

The rental solution was set up the Sydney headquarters of the Deluxe entertainment services group and the production had already begun, meaning there was little time to test the solution and no way to do so in the production environment. The system Olivier decided on was a NAS (Network Attached Storage) file sharing system, based on an “Out of the box OS X server”, well kind of.

“We hadn’t done it at that scale before, but if it worked on a small scale, it would work larger scale,” said Olivier. “The problem was we had to a test within their environment, I couldn’t put something forward to them if we hadn’t run a trial. With production already in shooting mode and work piling up, we had to be pretty much spot on straight away.”

Olivier set up a small scale trial of the proposed solution to test if it could work within the Storm Surfers 3D environment, where the lack of a dedicated IT support on the project meant that post-production supervisor, Jeremy Martens, looked after the storage. This made relative simplicity another key factor. The trial carried out by Sebastien Le Corre worked out well, in fact much better than the previous solution, and led to the next stage in the process.

THE 3RD DIMENSION

Utilising 72TB non-proprietary rights storage from Infortrend, Olivier designed a system that stripped away the most of the fibre connections, replacing them with 10GbE (Gigabit Ethernet). They connected a 4-port 10GbE card in the server, then ran three edit stations directly to the machine, leaving one port open for future expansion (which would be used by the grading computer running Mistika).

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In a documentary style shoot, the uncertainty over the amount of footage that will be shot, and the subsequent need to store the footage, meant that an expandable storage solution was paramount.

The addition of 3D only amplifies this, essentially creating double the amount of footage. Coupling this with a limited budget led to the decision to use Infortrend’s non-proprietary solution.

“If you look at all the network cable solutions that are proprietary and you buy maybe 50 terabytes, then you want another 50, it’s going to cost you a lot of money,” said Olivier. “We started with 72TB, if they wanted to upgrade it’s not a problem… We ended up with 48TB extra.”

There was a need for long-term storage as well, with the film requiring reprocessing for different formats across its lengthy rollout.

The solution also needed to fit the way that the editors worked which meant incorporating Avid Media Composer 5.5 into the workflow.

While this may not seem to be much of an issue, neither 5.5 nor the transcoding software were compatible for 64-bit computing which was required for 10Gbe card to achieve fastest speed available.

“Avid 5.5 doesn’t work in 64-bit nor did the transcoding software either, so we had to rework everything down to 32-bit, so it was one big thing we learned when we actually rolled out the system and deployed everything, boom, all of a sudden the only component we couldn’t test was clashing with Avid and the transcoding software,” explains Olivier.

“That was an interesting Saturday morning,” Olivier recalls, “but I knew I could count on the Small-Tree support team back in the US to work out their driver’s issue which they did in a matter of minutes. Chris Duffy’s support was amazing.”

Due to the somewhat unique situation of replacing a system in the middle of production, all the data needed to be transferred between the old and new systems. The set up and transfer process spanned the course of a weekend.

“Friday we basically installed everything. Saturday we had the issue with the 64-bit, which we resolved. We also had a small problem with the fibre link from the server to the storage,” said Olivier. “So within the weekend we had all the new system put in place, fine-tuned and transferred everything. I think it was Tuesday morning when Luke Buckley finished all the data transfer and checked it’s integrity, which took a little longer than anticipated, but the production resumed straight away.”

Despite the custom set up and the quick implementation without full scale testing, there were almost no issues that arose.

“We had never tested it before with that much footage, so it was a little daunting experience, but I was confident it would perform as expected and even better,” said Olivier. “The OS X server never had a problem apart from the odd permissions errors, that was it.”

The set up also worked out much cheaper than the alternative, even though they switched from rental to purchase, and was an important consideration for the production.

“I mean there is not many systems that could have been done the same at that price point and offer the same scalability,” concluded Olivier.

Visit www.powermedia.com.au

THE 3RD DIMENSION

Storm Surfers 3D Puts Viewers in the Tube with Mistika

By Peter White

Surviving the rigours of filming big wave surfers in 3D was just one half of the battle in the production of Storm Surfers 3D, a multi-platform feature film and television series.

The challenge facing Sydney-based post-production partner, Deluxe, was pulling together 1,500 hours of stereo footage to complete the feature and 4x1 hour series. A serious complication was the use of six different camera systems to capture the surfing action.

“I initially became involved eight weeks prior to shooting and the production had already decided they were going to shoot using a range of formats and then have everything transcoded into the Cineform codec,” explained Deluxe’s Efilm colourist, Luke Buckley. “The Cineform codec would act as a common container to hold all the different media from 10 cameras regardless of what format they were shot on.”

Buckley started out processing daily rushes by providing basic first pass colour correction and stereo alignment using Cineform’s Neo 3D software.

The original intention was to transcode edited material from Cineform to DPX files to conform the final programmes and feature.

However, Buckley and post-production supervisor, Matt North, soon realised they needed more powerful tools when they received technical specifications for the delivery of the television series to 3net, a USbased 3D channel joint venture formed by Sony Corporation, Discovery Communications and IMAX Corporation.

MISTIKA ENTERS THE PICTURE The initial issue was the generation of DPX files to enable conforming and Quality Control (QC). The massive amount of material in the Cineform codec that had to be synchronised and processed meant it was taking several weeks to provide feedback to the camera crews. It also became evident that the production had further technical issues to deal with in the form of colour correction, geometric distortions, retinal rivalries and stereoscopic optimisation.

Intense research revealed that the recent enhancements to Mistika, a combined Digital Intermediate and stereo 3D system from Spanish company SGO, would provide a solution to enable the post-production of Storm Surfers 3D. Some of the latest stereo tools in Mistika, such as Equalize automated stereoscopic image-matching, were still in alpha development, but the Deluxe team was convinced of its abilities over any other product they had seen on the market and secured a system in November 2011 through SGO’s Australasian reseller partner, Mojo Media Solutions.

“Mistika was more capable in terms of its ability to correct colour and geometric distortions between left and right eye than any other product we had seen,” said Buckley. “Especially in terms of speed - we have various high end post-production suites but they would take six hours just to do one shot while Mistika would take two minutes.”

Mistika’s open SAN connectivity allowed it to be networked to Storm Surfer’s production storage allowing Buckley to easily access the Cineform media.

“There was no moving or re-transcoding of files - we simply took EDLs from the editorial offline edit and conformed the Cineform media in its native format,” said Buckley.

“Editorial provided a Quicktime reference and we would sync check with their offline. If they had speed changes we could complete them on the Mistika, as it was very flexible and able to do time warps and speed ramps. These were very

fluid effects using optical flow algorithms. This helped a lot as we were dealing with water in the picture and gave a nice result in the end,” said North.

The complexities of correcting stereographic images were also handled using Mistika.

“We were required to match both eyes for each camera format,” said Buckley.

“Some of the cameras were shooting side by side, some were two separate cameras, like a pair of GoPro HEROs, and the beam splitter was shooting with mirrors so colour correction was often an issue.”

Deluxe also had to deal with the issues of geometric corrections and stereo stabilising where slight differentiations between left and right cameras would make a scene unwatchable. Minute differences in lenses and imaging chips as well as vibrating cameras, rolling shutters or camera timing could make a shot unusable.

MULTIPLE SUPPORT 3D productions need to be able to optically align and stabilise each frame to lock both images together and Deluxe worked closely with SGO technicians to improve images and the software features as development continued.

“SGO was very receptive to us telling them what we needed,” said North.

“Naturally there were teething issues as we moved through several betas and ended the project on a full release. Some things they fixed overnight, others would appear in a later version. SGO’s local representative Stuart Monksfield was very supportive and was always on hand to ensure we had the kit working and there was no down time as a result.

“We also made multiple calls to Don Bland, 3net’s Director of Development and Production - he was very supportive the whole way because he understood the magnitude of the wave in front of us.”

TELEVISION COMPLETION - FILM NEXT March 2012 saw 3net technically approve the first master of the television series and, with the television series completed soon after, attention moved to the post-production of the feature film.

“By that stage our Mistika workflow meant we were able to apply corrections from one timeline to another and have them ripple through where the same shots were used in the series and feature,” said Buckley. “That then became the starting point - obviously the convergence point for sitting in front of a television was going to be completely different for theatrical projection but it meant we were not starting from scratch with each and every shot.”

Final post work involved rendering from Mistika before grading and QC checks using Deluxe’s Lustre suite to screen television material on a Sony monitor or the feature with a Barco projector.

BRIGHT FUTURE FOR 3D Buckley, North and Deluxe General Manager Andrew Robinson are looking forward to discussing their next stereoscopic project with future clients having learnt the intricacies of producing 3D for film and television.

“Storm Surfers 3D was a challenging but rewarding project to work on as our first full stereoscopic experience,” said Robinson. “Editorial production worked in-house with us here in Sydney to produce unique and exciting 3D content and I am very proud of our team and their results which will be seen around the world.“ Visit www.sgo.es

THE 3RD DIMENSION

CREATED BY the Firelight Productions team of Marcus Gillezeau (EP) and Ellenor Cox (Producer), the project documents the exploits of renowned surfers Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Carroll as they search out and ride giant waves.

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ACQUISITION www.content-technology.com/acquisition

Sony Dead-Set Choice for Horror Remake For New Zealand cinematographer Aaron Morton the specifications of the new Sony CineAlta F65 digital motion picture camera were impressive, but heading into a feature shoot like Evil Dead, he was not about to stake his reputation on numbers alone.

DIRECTED BY FEDE ALVAREZ, the feature film is a Ghost House Pictures reimagining of Sam Raimi’s 1981 cult-hit horror film Evil Dead.

With the Auckland shoot of Evil Dead due to start in May 2012, Morton knew of only one other feature film (After Earth) using the new Sony F65 and they were in shooting in Costa Rica.

“I had seen some demonstration footage from the Sony F65 and the thing that struck me straight away was that it didn’t have a sterile digital feeling to it,” says Morton. “It had all the resolution and other features that the numbers promised, but it did not have all of those high specs at the expense of a good looking picture.”

Once he was on set with the Sony F65 camera, Morton found that it gave him more creative options.

“You can be quite delicate with some of the decisions you make. It might be only a small component of the overall image, but when you get the final result, you know you got value from making that little tweak,” he says.

Aaron Morton with the Sony F65.

Morton believes the look of the image starts at the newly developed CMOS sensor. Unlike a conventional Bayer pattern sensor the F65 CMOS sensor uses a unique offset pattern of photosites to pack 8K capture into a Super 35mm size frame.

“There was something about fine detail that felt really natural and more like a film’s random grain, rather than a grid of horizontal lines and vertical lines,” he says. “Because of the massive over-sampling the level of detail is amazing and it looks sharp and rich, without looking over-sharpened.”

The Sony F65 rotary shutter is another factor contributing to the quality of the look, says Morton.

“I knew there would be a lot of handheld shots in the movie, with a lot of motion and quick pans, and this camera gives that same 24 frame per second motion blur that we are used to without the rolling shutter effect.

“During our tests the colour separation was fantastic, and in post we were able to push the images around so much. The colour depth means that you retain all the subtleties that are being captured.”

Thanks to smooth roll off in the image highlights Morton wasn’t afraid to push the contrast ratio.

“I had shots with bare bulbs in the frame, and one with an actor lit by a lamp that has fallen over as well as a completely black shadow in the back corner of the room,” he says. “Everything is done with a purpose, but you can give a scene some real strength in terms of the amount of contrast in the picture and I exploited that a lot in the film.”

He attributes this ability partly to the camera’s F65RAW mode, a 16-bit Raw recording codec within the new Sony SRMASTER recording format.

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The F65RAW data was captured on the camera with Sony SR-SR4 dockable memory recorders capable of recording up to almost 60 minutes of 16-bit F65RAW to one terabyte (TB) SRMemory cards.

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The digital imaging technician (DIT) who commissioned the DIT system and configured the workflow, Hugh Calveley, says working with 16-bit F65RAW was like opening a new frontier, yet it was only a week or two before he was able to completely hand over to DIT operator, Sam Mathews.

“In the Sony SR-PC4 Memory Data Transfer Units we installed optional 10Gb Ethernet PCIe cards to go straight through to very fast RAID hard drives for

Shooting the Dead.

the DIT system and separate RAID drives for cycling to the post house.

“In the DIT system we gave the footage a quick grade using reference stills, creating dailies at 720p H.264 on hard drives for the producers and director. And when we had time I would play around with the grade and give Aaron some nice reference options,” he says.

“There is an amazing amount of information in the 16-bit Raw SRMASTER codec. I am used to pushing images and they usually start to fall to bits but this format is like an iceberg. When you start to play around with it you find out there is so much beneath the surface.”

Calveley says good team work with the camera crew saw them handling 1.5 to 3 terabytes of data a day from the two cameras during the day, with all equipment, including computer and LTO 5 backup tape drives, fitted on to one DIT trolley.

“It was all very solid. We went in prepared for all sorts of eventualities but we never lost any data, and I didn’t have to use any of my backup systems.”

The observation is echoed by Aaron Morton.

“Every day was a challenge; we had the cameras on everything from a steadicam through to a remote crane with blood flying everywhere. They took a battering and never stopped,” he says.

Visit http://pro.sony.com.au

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8K in a 4K Zone At the dawn of time, digital cinematography involved expensive, bulky camera systems with limited recording capacity and restricted movement. Then came upstart developers like RED offering film-camera flexibility at a below film-camera price. Now, experienced manufacturers have consolidated their digital footprint with systems that offer both flexibility and stability.

ONE SUCH SYSTEM is Sony’s F65. Featuring an 8K sensor, it currently delivers HD, 2K, and 4K resolution with future updates promising to go beyond 4K. The 8K image sensor also offers 14 stops of total latitude, ISO800 sensitivity and wide colour reproduction to fit the Academy Colour Encoding System-Image Interchange Framework (IIF-ACES) workflow. With 16-bit linear RAW output, the F65 also provides a gateway to an end-to-end 4K mastering workflow.

Since it was announced at NAB 2011, the F65 has been enlisted for a range of international features, TVCs and television dramas.

In the U.S., these have included M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth (DOP: Peter Suschitzky, ASC), The Smurfs 2 (DOP: Phil Meheux), Motel (DoP: Steve Mason ASC, ACS) and the CBS TV series Made in Jersey (DoP: Daryn Okada, ASC).

Throughout AsiaPac productions have included India’s Queen (DOP: Bobby Singh) and Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns (DPs: Himman Dhamija, Yogesh Jani), The After Dinner Mysteries from Japan (DOP: Kurisu Naoki) and Taiwan/China production Pink Lady (DOP: Wu,Zong-De).

Local productions have included the New Zealand-based Evil Dead (DOP: Aaron Morton – see story page 20), RNZAF Step Up - a TVC for the Royal New Zealand Air Force (DOP: Callan Green), and upcoming Seven Network drama series, A Place to Call Home (DOP: John Stokes).

According to Nick Buchner, Senior Product Manager, Content Creation with Sony Australia and New Zealand, “In Australia, we have been pleased that a number of rental operators have committed to the F65 and there have also been some independent DOPs. They have bought their own cameras. “There has been a fair bit of commercial work shot and again, with very good feedback on the low light capability of the camera, the dynamic range, the ability to pull extremely good pictures out of quite low light situations.”

On the back of shooting a commercial on the F65, John Stokes, ACS, chose to use the camera to shoot the Seven Network drama, A Place to Call Home, due to make its debut in 2013.

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According to Buchner, “John is shooting that on three F65s and occasionally four when they have got complex scenes and stunts. The feedback from not only the camera crew, but also the post-production people at Digital Pictures Sydney, has been the pictures are absolutely stunning.”

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The F65 uses a standard PL lens mount, so any type of PL glass can be used on the camera.

Both Cook Optics’ /i Technology and ARRI Lens Data System (LDS) metadata can be recorded along with standard metadata such

On set with Sony F65s, the crew of the new Seven Network drama, A Place to Call Home (DoP John Stokes, ACS, by drainpipe at rear).

as timecode. In addition, individual camera IDs can be created and tracked via metadata through post production.

The F65 employs a dockable, on-board recorder using Sony’s SR Memory format. Redundancy is catered for an internal design equivalent to RAID 5. Capable of handling a sustained data rate of around 5.5Gbps, the cards are designed for shooting in full 4:4:4 16-bit raw and now, with a recent software upgrade, up to 120 frames per second.

Footage from the on-board recorder can then be transferred via SR-PC4, an SRMemory data transfer unit that can be integrated into a PCbased production environment. Material shot by the F65 can be instantly reviewed via SR-PC4’s web-based GUI, output as HD-SDI, just after shooting. Footage can also be transferred via a USB or an eSATA interface to external mass storage. Third-party on-set dailies support is also available through systems such as Colorfront and YoYotta.

While the camera is capable of shooting 4K 16 raw, it also offers a high definition recording mode, SSTP or Simple Studio Profile, which is essentially HD Cam SR – now available in 10-bit or 12-bit.

According to Sony’s Nick Buchner, there are definite advantages to shooting HD with an 8K sensor-equipped camera.

“From an HD point of view, it’s a little like if we jump back in time to when we had the SD to HD transition. Even though a lot of content was still being viewed or distributed in SD, the general

consensus was, due to the oversampling in an HD camera, the picture from an HD camera looked quite superior to the picture from an SD camera, even when compared side by side in SD. “So, jumping ahead, it’s really the same sort of theory. Even if you are outputting for recording and using HD, because of the extreme oversampling that the camera is doing due to that very high resolution sensor, I think the general consensus is, yes, the camera will definitely produce very superior pictures to a conventional HD-only camera.”

Buchner says there is also the advantage of recording in 4K to “futureproof” your footage.

“I am aware of one cameraman who is heading to the subantarctic shortly with his F65 to capture stock footage in 4K just as he did in HD some years before HD became the norm. So, he is future proofing – for at least the near future – his stock footage library and gathering 4K content.

“The other big thing, I suppose, is being able to reframe. If your output is indeed only going to be 2K or HD, you have a lot of information there that you can crop and you can still basically pull out a very good HD image out of a quarter of a 4K frame. Whether it’s the need to zoom in significantly on an element of the frame or whether just to crop a small area off the frame to something that was mis-framed – edge of set or boom mike or something that has come into frame – the ability to zoom in a little bit and reframe, 4K gives you that ability even if HD is the target output.”

Visit http://pro.sony.com.au

Meet your new Best Mate: With 1/2" sensors, 50mbs & 4:2:2 – it’s got it all!

The start of a new Bromance.

The PMW-200 has been designed to be your perfect camera for fast and efficient broadcast quality production.

Three ½” sensors together with 4:2:2 50Mbps recording deliver the low light performance, image quality and flexibility in post that you have been wishing for. Compatible with all major editing systems, the PMW-200 fits straight into the well-established XDCAM ecosystem.

Make the PMW-200 your new work partner for your next documentary, corporate spot or TV production. Call your Sony dealer or visit our website to find out more.

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pro.sony.com.au

“SONY” and “make.believe” are trademarks of Sony Corporation.

“XDCAM” and are trademarks of Sony Corporation.

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ARRI Makes the Grade with AFTRS THE AUSTRALIAN FILM, TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOl (AFTRS)

through its paces themselves and really see what the camera could do.”

recently made a major foray into the digital camera market with its purchase of two ARRI ALEXA cameras. AFTRS also purchased an ARRIFLEX 416 Plus HS film camera, compact prime lenses, super speed lenses and an Alura zoom lens and accessories as part of the package deal.

The AFTRS team consulted with their students and reviewed every aspect of the ALEXA from functionality to post production workflows before coming back to ARRI Australia.

ARRI Australia MD, Stefan Sedlmeier and ARRI Australia have a long history of supporting AFTRS, often providing the school with cameras and lenses for use in their Diploma in Cinematography courses and other student projects.

According to Sedlmeier, “We ran through a wide range of demos, accessories, licenses, upgrades, anamorphic and high-speed shooting options with the team and had several discussions with AFTRS’ Tim Sadler, Erika Addis and Kim Batterham to make sure we could offer exactly what the school required. We then loaned AFTRS an ALEXA so they could put it

Sydney Opera House in Focus with Fujinon ARGUABLY AUSTRALIA’S most recognisable icon, the Sydney Opera House (SOH) has purchased four high-end Fujinon lenses in a major upgrade of its comprehensive audio recording facility that will now also include video capture and recording capabilities.

The SOH purchased two XA88x8.8BESM telephoto field lenses that combine the industry’s widest angle in its class with an 88X zoom range. The XA88x8.8BESM also boasts Fujinon’s exclusive Aspheric Technology and newly developed EBC coating which reduces ghost and flare and increases light transmission. Uniquely the XA88x8.8BESM’s proprietary anti-fogging design also minimises lens fogging and reduces downtime due to moisture.

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In addition the Sydney Opera House also purchased two Fujinon HA42x9.7BERD premier series stabilised telephoto ENG-style lenses in part due to their suitability and success in large venues around the world.

The HA42x9.7BERD comes with a digital servo zoom and focus for full servo studio control, robotics, jibs and tower cams amongst many other applications at the SOH where remote control of zoom, focus and iris via RS232 serial data or traditional analogue control is required.

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AFTRS Head of Cinematography, Kim Batterham, said, “As a result of ARRI Australia’s excellent service and educational incentives we were able to purchase an ALEXA A-EV, an ALEXA Plus 4:3, two compact prime lenses, three super speed lenses, an Alura zoom lens and lots of accessories. In addition and I must say a very special thank you to ARRI Munich’s Head of Business Unit Camera and DIS Stephan Schenk for this, we were able to get a new ARRIFLEX 416 Plus HS film camera as part of the package. To say we’re delighted is an understatement. Our students are very excited by the creative possibilities these cameras and lenses bring.”

Visit www.aftrs.edu.au and www.arri.com.au

Blackmagic Camera with MFT BLACKMAGIC DESIGN has announced a second model of its Blackmagic Cinema Camera that features passive Micro Four Thirds lens (MFT) mount.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera MFT model supports any Micro Four Thirds with manual iris and focus, and is also easily adapted to other lens mounts such as PL via third party adapters.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera MFT is identical to the original Blackmagic Cinema Camera model, but does not include lens communication, so manual lenses are used. The current model of Blackmagic Cinema Camera will be renamed Blackmagic Cinema Camera EF to allow to customers differentiate between the models.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera includes a super wide 13 stops of dynamic range, large 2.5K sensor, a built in SSD recorder that has the bandwidth to capture open standard CinemaDNG RAW, Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD files, a built in capacitive touch screen for direct metadata entry, standard jack audio connections, built in high speed Thunderbolt connection, 3 Gb/s SDI output, a refrigerated sensor for low noise, and is fully compatible with an even wider range of extremely high quality Micro Four Thirds mount lenses, plus other lenses such as PL mount lenses via common third party adapters.

The Sydney Opera House’s upgrade of its comprehensive audio and video recording facility is underway and is scheduled to be completed early next year.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera MFT also includes a full copy of DaVinci Resolve for colour correction and Blackmagic UltraScope software for waveform monitoring.

Visit www.fujifilm.com.au

Visit www.blackmagicdesign.com

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ARRI Roar!

The emergence of flexible and inexpensive digital cinematography systems seemed to threaten traditional film camera manufacturers with extinction. ARRI, however, has proved it is nothing if not adaptable. right in with the ALEXA range, including: + The original Alexa with ProRes, DNxHD, ARRIRAW and HD-SDI output; Log C, Rec 709 or DCI P3; ARRI Look Files for custom looks; audio recording; and integrated rich metadata. + The Alexa Plus with the above features as well as Built-in Remote Control Features; Built-in Lens Data System (LDS); a Second MON OUT Output (1.5G HD-SDI); a Third RS Accessory Power Output; Lens Synchronization for 3D; Built-in Position and Motion Sensors; and Quick Switch BNC Connectors. + The ALEXA Plus 4:3, with similar functionality to the ALEXA Plus, but featuring a 4:3 Super 35 sensor, the ability to switch from 16:9 sensor mode to 4:3 sensor mode, and built-in licenses for high speed shooting, DNxHD recording and anamorphic de-squeeze. + The ALEXA M, featuring all the original Alexa capabilities, but consisting of a separate camera head and body tailored for action and aerial photography, tight corner shots and 3D productions. + The ALEXA Studio, featuring a quiet, adjustable mirror shutter and an optical viewfinder that provides a real-time, high contrast image with true colours. The ALEXA Studio’s 4:3 sensor makes it the only digital camera (aside from the ARRIFLEX D-21) to boast true anamorphic capability.

According to ARRI Australia MD, Stefan Sedlmeier, it was the D-21 that laid the groundwork for the introduction of the Alexa range, especially in terms of post-production workflow.

“When we introduced the D21, we worked a lot with the post houses to educate them about workflow with Arriraw post production, Log C versus REC 709 shooting and the entire image analysis and also the quality you achieve on the final deliverable, whether it is film, broadcast or Blu-ray. On this basis we had quite a good relationship with all the post houses once we introduced the Alexa because the workflow is very similar and even simpler because the Alexa also records onto SxS cards in either ProRes or DNxHD. We just launched one new feature where you can record native 2K and 4:3 also in ProRes on the SxS cards.

“Last year was really the best year we ever had. We moved 50 cameras.

So, this was basically one camera a week last year. If you compare, usually we represent 1.5 to 2% of ARRI worldwide. In terms of Alexa sales, we represent 3 to 3 ½ % of Alexa sales worldwide. So, also, if you put it in relation with the population of Australia and New Zealand we have quite a big density of Alexa cameras. It’s obviously the right camera for this territory and, today, we have an installed base about 100 cameras.

Not all of them are sold through us. I would say we have probably sold 65 cameras in Australia, about 10-15 in New Zealand and about 2025 bought by Panavision through our Burbank office, but they also are supported through us.”

the Nine Network. It was fully shot on Alexa with Panavision. We are now shooting Wolverine Two. They are equipped with nine Alexas - six Alexa studios, two Ms, and one Plus 4:3.

“The Mad Max movie was shot in Namibia. One of the technicians, one of the engineers from Panavision, has told us about the harsh shooting conditions and the cameras stand up well. They are shooting in the tunnels with saltwater dripping from the ceiling and the cameras are dirty, full of sand and the cameras work. So the cameras really do their bit and run.

“My biggest client is Video Australasia with 10 Alexas and we have also many owner-operators which have one or two cameras.”

According to Sedlmeier, part of the success ARRI Australia enjoys is due to cooperative relationship it has with its neighbours in the Sydney suburb of Lane Cove. These include Deluxe and Panavision.

“Since we are in the same premises it’s even better because you can rent it downstairs, you can buy it upstairs,” he says. “Deluxe is now running eFilm, Post-Modern, Method Studios and Digital Pictures. If I need a screening room, I call them next door, I get a screening room. If they need a camera or they need to capture ARRIRAW we put up the camera here on the tripod. They bring their own on-board record and capture whatever test frames they need to evaluate their workflow.”

Another area of cooperation is with other lens manufacturers, including Fujinon with whom the company has developed the Alura range of zoom lenses.

“We have a good cooperation with Zeiss and we have a very good cooperation with Fujinon,” says Sedlmeier. “We had a very good start with the Alura zoom ranges. They have four lenses now, the Aluras. There are the studio zooms, 18 to 80 and 45 to 250ml and now there are the lightweight zooms which come with lens data system, LDS, the 15.5 to 45 and 30 to 80ml. So far, I would say we have sold about 35 of the studio lenses and some of the lightweight lenses.

“Fujinon, they built great zoom lenses and the studio lenses, the speed 2.6 and the lightweight lenses speed 2.8. The Alexa is 800 ASA and this is just a perfect combination for handheld, for tripod use. We also tested the Cabrio lenses which are the motorised 19 to 90 and also from the ergonomics when you have the shoulder pad on the Alexa, use the handgrip of the lens and have the camera on your shoulder like an ENG camera, the clients like it.

“One part of Sony loves us because they have heaps of sales of the SxS cards and other parts, of course, in camera, we are a competitor but with technology sometimes you are ahead and sometimes you are behind. You have clients and they have always shot Sony and you have to accept this.

And, those cameras have been put to work across a range of drama and feature film projects.

“So, on set, all the manufacturers meet. Sometimes it’s customer choice or preference or sometimes it’s not even an objective decision because it’s not about cheaper or more expensive or better or worse. At the end it all has to work together and be compatible.”

“Our cameras are on Puberty Blues, for example,” says Sedlmeier. “That is

Visit www.arri.com.au

The ARRI Alexa family [L-R]: the Alexa M, original Alexa, Alexa Plus, Alexa Plus 4:3, and Alexa Studio.

ACQUISITION

AFTER DIPPING ITS TOE in the digital pool with the D-21, ARRI Inc. dived

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ACQUISITION

Sony’s 4K Ecosystem A 4K image carries four times more information than 2K, delivering an astonishing improvement in image quality. An accompanying challenge, however, is that it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to generate images from this huge quantity of information. In response to this, Sony has announced a broadening and deepening lineup of 4K-capable equipment aiming to simplify the creation of a wide variety of 4K productions.

FOR ALMOST ITS ENTIRE HISTORY, cinema has used film as its recording medium, however recently this has changed. In 1999 Sony released its first Digital Camera System, an important step in the shift toward digital production. In 2006, Sony launched the world’s first 4K digital cinema projector, leading the way toward the digitalisation of movie theatres. In January this year, following the introduction of Sony’s F65 CineAlta camera featuring the 8K CMOS sensor, the entire 4K workflow, from shooting and editing, through to viewing, was achieved with a full lineup of 4K products.

At the 2012 IFA show in Berlin in August/September, Sony announced the launch of the 84” BRAVIA 4K LED TV for consumers, complementing its 4K VPL-VVW1000ES home cinema projector. At the 2012 IBC in September, Sony successfully trialled 4K live distribution, through the ASTRA satellite system owned by the Luxembourg-based SES S.A. As another step toward greater 4K accessibility, Sony is also developing an open platform for 4K production. This will enable a full range of 4K products and solutions to be developed with partners.

In parallel Sony is also launching new products for its 4K toolset. Two new CineAlta cameras, the PMW-F5 and the PMW-F55, are equipped with newly developed Super 35mm 4K CMOS image sensors. Sony’s new 4K 30-inch LCD monitor, the PVM-X300, enables 4K monitoring in the field or for post-production.

Sony’s XAVC open format will make 4K/60P production accessible for consumers, while also serving the needs of professionals. The format is appropriate for a variety of content such as movies, commercials, TV dramas, documentaries, and more. XAVC uses the MPEG4 AVC/H.264 compression codec, and supports HD as well as 4K. Fourteen companies in the industry have already indicated an intention to license this technology.

The growing popularity of 4K production creates new demand for onsite production monitoring solutions. The new PVM-X300, 4K 30-inch LCD monitor will bring 4K monitoring into the field. This monitor is significantly smaller and lighter than conventional models. The PVM-X300 will incorporate an optional 4K player, which enables easy playback of 4K content in the XAVC format through the use of new SxS cards, “SxS PRO+” (Plus), allowing immediate image viewing on set.

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Not only is it possible to connect a PMW-F55 camera to the monitor through the four 3G SDI interfaces, it is also possible to make the connection with a single HDMI cable. This proprietary connection supports resolutions up to 4096×2160:60P. Similarly, the PMW-F55 can connect directly to the 84” BRAVIA 4K LED TV for large-screen monitoring of the camera’s 4K 60P

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images (at resized horizontal resolution of 3860 pixels).

Sony’s newest version of its SxS memory card – the SxS PRO+ series – is designed for stable and reliable capture of high frame rate 4K video content.

Achieving ultra-fast read and write speeds, the new cards give content creators more flexibility and creative options for 4K, 2K or HD acquisition and production.

The new cards (models SBP-64B and SBP-128B) have a maximum read speed of 1.6 Gbps and a write speed of 1.5 Gbps, ideal for reliable capture of high frame rate 4K video, for example using the newly announced XAVC Intra 4:2:2 60p (600Mbps) format. The 128GB capacity card enables users to capture up to 240 minutes of MPEG 4:2:2 30p (50Mbps) content, or 20 minutes of XAVC Intra 4:2:2 60p (600Mbps) content.

Sony first launched the CineAlta series in 2000 and its current flagship camera model, the F65, has already been used to shoot more than 30 movies, commercials and TV programs. In August 2012, robust shooting support for 4K/120P was added. In Autumn 2013, a further software upgrade will deliver greater freedom in image processing with 6K de-mosaicing.

Sony is further broadening the CineAlta series with the launch of the PMW-F5 and PMW-F55 cameras, both featuring newly developed Super 35mm 4K CMOS image sensors. The sensor on the PMW-F55 delivers highquality images, with true colour reproduction and distortion-free capture of moving subjects. Both models are compact and lightweight, allowing greater freedom of movement. Customers can select from a wide range of lenses and viewfinders for these two cameras, building a system to match their particular requirements. One of the viewfinders, DVF-EL100, offers a 0.7” high-visibility OLED panel.

These cameras support a variety of recording methods, to accommodate a wide range of needs and budgets. In addition to supporting 4K and HD XAVC formats, these cameras also support the F65’s RAW data workflows, compatible with industry-standard post-production systems. There is also support for MPEG4 SStP HD and MPEG2 HD workflows, ensuring that the cameras deliver top performance even for conventional HD shooting.

The cameras can also be connected to third-party manufacturers’ recorders, which further widens the choice of recording formats. For instance, by connecting the cameras over 3G-SDI with AJA Ki-Pro recorders, the user can record in ProRes and DNxHD formats. In the same way, uncompressed or DNxHD recording are possible by connecting the cameras with a Convergent Design Gemini 444. Sony intends to make further additions to the CineAlta product line and 4K production environments in the future.

Visit http://pro.sony.com.au

RAI Amsterdam Conference 12-17 September : Exhibition 13-17 September

Celebrate Your Great Achievements with IBC Has your company accomplished a groundbreaking achievement or implemented an advance in technology in the last year? If so, then IBC want to hear about it. The IBC2013 Innovation Awards are open and we invite you to submit your entries now.

The IBC Innovation Awards are unique because they go not to a manufacturer for a new product, but to the end user that has taken the best of today’s technology to create an innovative solution to a real creative, technical or commercial challenge.

These Awards encapsulate everything that is positive about electronic media and entertainment, highlighting collaboration and celebrating those who push the boundaries.

We are looking for standout applications of technological collaboration in three categories – most innovative projects in: Content Creation Content Management Content Delivery In addition to the hotly contested Innovation categories, the IBC Awards Ceremony also honours those who have made an outstanding contribution to the industry, including the International Honour for Excellence, Best Conference Paper for original thinking, a special Judges’ Prize and the Exhibition Stand Design Awards. ;V ÄUK V\[ TVYL PUMVYTH[PVU HIV\[ [OL 0)* 0UUV]H[PVU (^HYKZ and how to submit your entry visit www.ibc.org/awardsentry Previous IBC Award winners include: Apple, Atlantic Productions, BBC, BskyB, Channel 4, CNBC, CNN, DNA, Dreamworks Animation SKG, ESPN, FIFA, Freeview, FX UK, HBS, Manolo Romero, Olympic Broadcasting Services, NASCAR, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), Red Bull Air Race, Sir David Attenborough, Sony, Walt Disney Pictures

IBC Third Floor 10 Fetter Lane London EC4A 1BR UK t. +44 (0) 20 7832 4100 f. +44 (0) 20 7832 4130 e. info@ibc.org

www.ibc.org/awards

SPORTSCASTING Sport coverage worldwide

www.content-technology.com/sportscasting

World Record Technology from Riedel THE RED BULL STRATOS, the 120,000 feet skydive from the edge of space, was a mission that transcended human limits. Riedel Communications provided the entire communications solution for this project, integrating both wireless and wired digital intercom systems. Additionally, Riedel furnished the fibre-based video and signal distribution as well as the wireless video links from the capsule’s onboard cameras – enabling the pictures delivered from the Red Bull Stratos capsule.

Felix Baumgartner, renowned extreme base jumper and sky diver, ascended to 39 kilometres (24 miles) in a stratospheric balloon and made a freefall jump rushing toward earth at supersonic speeds before parachuting to the ground breaking three world records with one jump: the highest skydive, the longest free fall, the first to reach supersonic speeds in free fall and the highest manned balloon ride.

For the capsule that transported Baumgartner into the stratosphere, Riedel Communications provided the on-board video control system for nine HD video cameras with especially developed telemetry control. This system was responsible for the control of the video recording and also works as a comprehensive digital video router – not unlike a mini OB truck inside the capsule.

The communications infrastructure on-site included the entire compound, the mission control, the production offices, the media/press centre and the OB truck. All these facilities and positions were integrated into one single communications infrastructure via a Riedel Artist Digital Matrix system.

Furthermore, Riedel furnished the on-site digital radio network with more than 100 radio receivers and ten channels, which were integrated into the wired matrix intercom system. This means radio users were able to directly talk to intercom users and vice versa.

All video signals on ground were distributed and routed with Riedel’s MediorNet technology. MediorNet is a fibre-based real-time network for HD video, audio, communications and data signals that also provides integrated

signal processing saving time. For Red Bull Stratos project, 24 Riedel MediorNet nodes were installed in a redundant ring topology to provide maximum reliability The connection to the launchpad of the capsule was also realised with the MediorNet system – this time with two MediorNet Compact frames that were connected to the main system. All links in the MediorNet system were realised with Riedel PURE, a robust, tactical fibre cable for demanding mobile applications that is equipped with ruggedised Neutrik OpticalCON Quad connectors.

The MediorNet backbone transported all video signals of the Red Bull Stratos mission as well as all signals from the OB truck and from the tracking truck. It also distributed the audio between Mission Control and recording facility.

Visit www.riedel.net

Videocraft Produces Highlights Show for Tour Down Under FURTHERING ITS EXPANSION into full editing and production solutions, Videocraft recently produced a one-hour daily highlights show for Beyond Productions, Channel 9 and the Tour Down Under cycle race.

was no exception. The production was based around 18 hour days every one of which saw producers and editors sitting alongside James Taylor in Videocraft’s edit truck so there would be no interruptions to the workflow.

Videocraft sales director, James Taylor, explained, “In order to achieve 48 minutes of daily content on the move we had to use Videocraft’s mobile edit facility. This production was not like the Tour de France, which is one continuous live broadcast. The Tour Down Under footage is created from scratch while the race is on. This is no mean feat and relies completely on the equipment you use and editors and producers who really know their jobs.”

“It was a no frills set up, that’s for sure,” added Taylor. “The camera guys on motorbikes would drop their discs at agreed points and we would ingest the material into our edit system. The editors would then pick content from logs that the producer had created and we would add in graphics from within our system. The story was then put together and cleaned up with the final voice over added using Avid Media Composer’s audio punching tool. Once complete the finished edit was stored in the EVS server for playout later via satellite.”

SPORTSCASTING

Videocraft’s mobile edit truck moved with the race as the cyclists powered their way across South Australia. Moving with them were multiple Sony PDW-700 XDCAM 4:2:2 cameras acquiring and storing footage on optical discs.

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Videocraft also created and encoded news highlight packages for the Internet within their mobile editing facility for the entire duration of the Tour Down Under.

Videocraft also provided all the technical management for the production and put together the workflow that included multiple XDCAM cameras feeding material into their edit truck. Inside the truck was an EVS XS server and IP Director which were used for all live stages, ingest from OB trucks and all playout of finished shows.

Taylor concluded, “A production like the Tour Down Under is fast, furious and often hectic but at Videocraft it’s what we do best. In this case we used an Avid Media Composer, Nitris DX and Isis 5000 shared storage solution as this setup is perfect for the fast turnaround, high-pressure environment and critically, it delivers time and time again.”

A cycle race involves long hours for all involved and the Tour Down Under

Visit www.videocraft.com.au

WHEN IT REALLY MATTERS ...

Real-Time Networks for Video, Audio, Data and Communications

www.riedel.net

SPORTSCASTING

ABC Radio Brings Home the Gold with Stagetec Mediagroup LONDON 2012 saw a new era for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio coverage of the games in a multitude of areas, the highlight being full stereo production and broadcast from every venue. To achieve this, the ABC used a NEXUS router, AURATUS console, and a DELEC Intercom/Commentary system, all provided by Stagetec Mediagroup Australia.

SPORTSCASTING

To connect with the Olympic International Broadcasting Centre (IBC), the NEXUS router was

30

populated with two 64-channel MADI cards.

This carried the commentary from each venue, along with it the stereo effects provided by the host broadcast and all the return lines back to the venues. The NEXUS was also populated with an additional MADI card which linked the main router to the DELEC Intercom/Commentary router, and I/O cards for a range of ABC outboard equipment, including control for integration with DAWs and IP codecs.

The DELEC system was utilised as a multipurpose router, harnessing the power of a summing matrix and was able to provide up to nine OffTube commentary positions, complete with intercom. Utilising broadcast quality 48KHz, 24-bit audio, the system was also able to create a 12-channel stereo mixer. This gave an editor the ability to create an individual mix without any impact to the main operator directly from their 1RU Talkback panel.

SPORTSCASTING

All signals were fed via the AURATUS console where audio processing including Dynamics and EQ were made before being sent to the DELEC matrix.

The AURATUS 48-Channel, 32-bus console was large enough to provide individual mix minuses with IFB (from DELEC) to each of the venues as well as the OffTube positions while being compact enough to fit inside a 3RU engine (including I/O).

According to Treva Head, Engineering Manager with STAGETEC Mediagroup Australia, “Learning from our experiences with our flagship consoles, AURUS and Crescendo, we were able to offer a cut-down surface whilst maintaining Stagetecs’ advanced functionality.

“Having an Australian-based office, we were able to work closely with the ABC in designing the workflow for their entire system. The system was built and tested in our facility in Alexandria (Sydney), allowing the ABC time to test and make any changes required before shipment to London. “Once the system was installed in the IBC, remote support was available for any minor changes in the weeks leading up to the opening ceremony. The proven reliability of Stagetec ensured seamless operation for the entirety of the broadcast.”

For more information, contact Stagetec Mediagroup Australia on +61-2-8011 0500, or via email australia@stagetec.com.

Elliot Departing Gearhouse Broadcast Australia AFTER MORE THAN 15 YEARS in the outside broadcast industry in Australia Graham Elliot, CEO of Gearhouse Broadcast Australia, has decided to explore new challenges and has announced his intention to step down from Gearhouse Broadcast at the end of the year.

Gearhouse will use this period to identify a new leader for the business and in the interim John Newton, CEO of parent company Gravity Media Group, will support the local management team.

According to Newton, “Graham has been an integral part of the company and has led the successful growth of Gearhouse Broadcast into a leader in the provision of OB services to sport, entertainment and production houses during his years with the company.

“From its infancy as a hire company in the late 90s to now providing full services to Seven, Ten, Nine, Fox Sports, Fremantle Media, Freehand, World Sports Group and many others, Graham has developed a successful team to ensure the continued service delivery for all Gearhouse Broadcast customers into the future.”

“When I started with the company,” said Elliot, “we were one of many players grappling for survival in an oversubscribed market, a soft economic climate, radical change with SD on the way out and HD on the way in fast. Yet, due to solid strategy by great staff, a visionary board of directors and many meaningful partnerships, Gearhouse Broadcast stands today as one of the

most quality focused, technically advanced and economical providers in the world.”

Meanwhile, the company has announced the appointment of Manny Papas as Sales Director.

Papas joined Gravity Media in April 2011 as Business Development Manager and his new role is effective immediately. Prior to joining Gravity Media, Papas was formerly Global Sales Director at Charter/Charter Presteigne where he worked for over 10 years.

In his new role, Papas joins Gearhouse Broadcast’s Australian Executive Management Team. Regarded by Gearhouse Broadcast as a key strategic appointment aimed at further strengthening its market position in Australia, Manny Papas brings a wealth of broadcast industry experience gained in a career that spans three decades.

During this time he has been involved in many major broadcast projects from Olympic and Winter Olympic Games to FIFA World Cup finals, Rugby World Cups and numerous Australian Open Tennis tournaments.

“We are delighted to announce the appointment of Manny Papas within this high profile role,” commented Elliot. “Manny joins a strong management team and brings a wealth of experience gained in Australia and also in many international markets.”

Visit www.gearhousebroadcast.com

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SPORTSCASTING

OB Group Expands Into New Truck IN THE COMPANY’S TWENTIETH YEAR of operation, and after nearly twelve months of turning plans into reality, the OB Group recently unveiled their brand new HD OB truck, which is now on the road and operational.

The new truck is replacing the an older iteration that had been upgraded on multiple occasions, including to HD in 2009, but the company was in need of a brand new set up.

“The previous truck was 13 or 14 years old and so we brought a new chassis, new body, new everything and then took out the other truck, the cameras, the vision mixer, we brought a new Lawo mc2 56,” explained Managing Director of the OB Group, Colin Rothenberg. “It’s been a great acquisition and once again we are sort of keeping in the same market, the 6 to 10 camera market. There are enough trucks out there for the big jobs.”

The main audio router of the truck is a LAWO NOVA73 HD core with various DALLIS I/O boxes, the audio routing system is connected to the mc2 56 32 fader mixing console. Dual power supplies on all Dallis and HD Core systems as well as a redundant controller card.

“This truck is designed totally differently. I think it’s the first truck in the country that’s been fully designed with embedded audio and that’s made it a lot more flexible,” Rothenberg said. “The other major acquisition was the Harris platinum router.

That’s the core of the vision in the multi view.”

VTR’s and solid state recorders.

The truck is equipped with a Sony MVS-6000

Outside the embedded audio, the most important feature of the new truck is the greatly increased production space provided by its single expander.

Utilising the expander also allows the OB Group to fit into all the tight spots that the old truck could and the big trucks can’t manage.

HD vision mixer and Harris Platinum router with multiviewer, an EVS XT2Plus and X-File system, Chyron Hyper X3 HD, Sony HSC 300HD cameras, Link Research wireless camera and various Sony

For Sale: Custom-Built Truck Perfect for Production or Broadcast The custom built chassis, by Rambler Concept Vehicles from Melbourne, has unique features such as an expanding side section which almost doubles the internal space; two sets of stairs, front and rear access to an equipment rack and numerous places to mount lights and cameras. We are also able to offer additional fit-out to meet your requirements.

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We had used this truck as a mobile showroom for our command and control room products, however our business has moved into other areas and this is no longer required. We are including FREE transport to any capital city in Australia (currently located in SA).

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We believe that due to the design and features, its ideal for production, outside broadcast or other media-related uses. We welcome all enquiries and inspections.

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CAB

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Make Model Year KMs

SPORTSCASTING

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Mercedes Benz Atego 2005 15,500km

Rambler Concept Vehicles (Melbourne) Year 2008 Length 7.4m Width 2.45m Height 4.3m (at driving height)

+ Expanding side section dramatically increases internal space + Air-ride seats in cab (heated) + Separate air conditioning for cab and chassis + Air-bag suspension (height adjustable rear end) + Electronic side and rear fabric awnings + Access stairs at front and side + Numerous storage locations + Cut-outs for cameras, lights etc + Two separate 15amp circuits in chassis

See video of the truck at:

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“The main feature over the other truck was the lack of production space. This truck has got a significant production space, obviously, because of the expander. It was about a metre shorter than the new one. So this has got about 60% more floor area than the other truck,” said Rothenberg.

“The other truck would fit in anywhere and this truck still fits in. This truck goes virtually anywhere.”

“The install was pretty quick. The wiring took nine days, and because we’d gone embedded audio there isn’t cabling everywhere. It’s all really short runs. All the equipment is just vision cables and the changeover from the other truck was two days. Literally within a two week period we had this thing rewired and up and running,” Rothenberg added.

The new truck has already been used on a number of jobs ranging from the Nickelodeon ‘Slime Fest’ to Australian rugby’s night of nights, the John Eales Medal.

Visit www.obgroup.com.au

SPORTSCASTING

V8 Supercar Television Serves Up Bathurst 1000 with EVS EVS, A LEADING PROVIDER of broadcast and media production systems for sports, news and TV entertainment, has announced that V8 Supercar Television relied on EVS systems for the Bathurst 1000 50th anniversary race which took place on Sunday 7 October, 2012.

Known as ‘The Great Race’, the annual 1000km endurance race at Mount Panorama Circuit in Bathurst, New South Wales, is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Australian motorsport.

As part of the International V8 Supercars Championship, production company V8 Supercar Television produced live coverage and highlights of the race with help from Global Television, a leading provider of outsourced television production services. The race was broadcast in 117 countries, with Seven Network holding the rights for live TV coverage in Australia.

V8 Supercar Television deployed 16 EVS XT series HD servers in three OB vans for multicam recording, live and slow-motion replays, and highlights.

According to Dan Flett, broadcast engineer, Global Television, “Large-scale productions such as the Bathurst 1000 are simply a large version of our smaller events. EVS systems scale very well with our production requirements so we don’t have to learn new software or workflows when we ‘go large’. We add more devices and it

just works. In the live production realm there’s an expectation these days that any signal or recording can be transferred to anywhere in the facility, almost instantly. EVS makes this a reality.”

The video replay operators used EVS Multicam LSM controllers to control the XT series servers.

“The latest version of Multicam LSM is a godsend, enabling us to adjust a lot more parameters live so the server doesn’t need to be rebooted as often,” said Flett. “All job-related settings are saved in separate files, so there’s a lot less reconfiguring of servers between jobs - you just pull up the file for the job and load it. The ability to transfer configuration files between servers and choose which parts of those files you want to transfer saves a lot of time. And with more central management of EVS servers, a lot of the setup can be done without even having to leave your chair.”

The editors received footage from events as they happened, enabling them to quickly produce polished highlights packages and show closers with up-to-the-second footage.

To speed up the time to air, the editors simply pushed their highlights packages back to the on-air replay operators to be played to air via EVS servers.

V8 Supercars also used three EVS IPDirector suites of video production management

applications to manage and exchange media with Avid Media Composer editing workstations, and for backing up content to EVS XF2 removable archives. At a large racetrack like Bathurst, IPDirector also played an important role in giving operators an overview of all the footage on a single console, helping them make sense of the incoming material.

With EVS’ new XFly portable SATA-based storage case, the production team was able to immediately stream live feeds to the portable storage platform. The footage was then edited offline overnight using Avid Media Composer on a laptop plugged into the XFly case. The EVS live production servers and workflow were configured in Avid DNxHD codec at 100Mbps for a fast, seamless workflow between production and post without the need for transcoding.

“The level of support we received from EVS was outstanding,” added Flett. “Even with more intricate setups and integrations the EVS guys stayed with us until we were satisfied, no matter how long it took. They also visited us at the OB to see how we’re using the system and gave us helpful ideas on new ways of doing things and how to get the most out of new features. At one point they even stepped in and replaced an operator when we were short of replay crew!”

Visit www.evs.tv

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NEWS OPERATIONS www.content-technology.com/newsoperations

SBS News “Packs It In” with TVU SBS TELEVISION has recently purchased several TVUPack TM8100 3G/4G mobile broadcasting backpacks and TVUPack TR3100 receivers from Magna Systems to cover national and overseas news stories. SBS Television’s news output is significant, with the broadcaster giving access to over a hundred hours of international news bulletins on SBS ONE and SBS TWO in 21 languages, originating from 22 countries each week.

Magna Systems product specialist David Clemesha said, “We’ve been working closely with the team at SBS TV for some time to see how we could meet their mobile broadcasting requirements. As SBS has such a diverse audience many of their stories originate in overseas or remote areas so a reliable and flexible mobile broadcasting solution was the best option. We did several live demonstrations of the TVUPack TM8100 3G/4G mobile broadcasting backpacks and TVUPack TR3100 receivers which they then took away for their own intensive testing.”

Due to the remote nature of SBS Television’s broadcasting requirements the TVUPacks and receivers were also used in conjunction with a Hughes Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) 9201 portable satellite terminal.

Clemesha continued, “The value in linking a TVUPack with a Hughes BGAN terminal is that, unlike other satellite Internet services which require bulky and heavy satellite dishes to connect, a BGAN terminal is the size of a

laptop and thus can be carried easily. The network is provided by Inmarsat and uses three geostationary satellites to provide almost global coverage.

This setup also provided SBS with a high quality, low latency system that allows the operators in the studio remote access and control of the packs, leaving the camera operators to focus solely on shooting footage.”

As part of their TVUPack uplink and receiving terminal solution SBS also incorporated TVU Anywhere into the system. TVU Anywhere enables the broadcaster to transmit high quality live footage when a TVUPack isn’t available by turning one of their standard, internet-connected laptops or portable Windows or iOS devices into a transmitter. As TVU Anywhere is fully compatible with SBS’ TVUPack receiver units, it also gives them the ability to expand their live newsgathering capabilities.

“There’s redundancy built into the SBS system too with any one TVUPack immediately taking over in the event of another pack’s failure. I’m delighted to say that the system has been working well for SBS both nationally and internationally where, amongst other high profile events, they’ve also taken their TVUPacks to the 2012 London Olympics and the 2012 US Presidential Election utilising them to do daily live crosses with great success,” Clemesha concluded.

Visit www.magnasys.tv

Cross-Platform News Training Lab Opens in Singapore A NEW FACILITY designed to revolutionise the training and operations of newsrooms has officially opened at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. Jointly set up by NTU and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), Newsplex Asia will be an inter-disciplinary news laboratory to train news professionals and journalists to work with emerging technologies.

Newsplex Asia is the third WAN-IFRA Newsplex facility and the first in Asia.

Located in NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, the 160m2 centre aims to provide digital media and journalism skills and techniques for integrating the complete news flow across print and digital media. It features advanced facilities including workstations for print, online, tablet, radio and TV production, overhead screens for teaching and monitoring news channels, and a multi-purpose studio for digital broadcasts.

“The Wee Kim Wee School is proud to establish Newsplex Asia here at NTU. Having such premier teaching facilities will provide an unparalleled educational experience for our students – the reporters and editors of

tomorrow – and continue to attract the best students, faculty and staff from all over the world to the School,” said Associate Professor Benjamin Detenber, Chair of NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School.

Through its collaboration with WAN-IFRA, the Wee Kim Wee School’s faculty and researchers will also gain access to WAN-IFRA’s wide array of newspaper and news publishing conferences, training, seminars and research reports.

Among Newsplex Asia’s first industry partners is Apple, which has made the Wee Kim Wee School its first tertiary-level education partner in Singapore with Apple Learning Environment status. Thomson Reuters has also come on board with its news wires, raw video footage and broadcast-ready packages from their Media Express service that is usually only available to clients.

Singapore Press Holdings, the largest single employer of the School’s graduates, has provided the news ticker panels at the entrance and along the glass frontage of the Newsplex training centre.

Visit www.wan-ifra.org and www.wkwsci.ntu.edu

NEWS OPERATIONS

Seven Network Brisbane Upgrades with Quantel

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SEVEN NETWORK has purchased a major upgrade to its Quantel

content from anywhere using just standard internet connectivity.

Enterprise sQ fast-turnaround production system for its Brisbane operation, adding V5 software and Quantel’s global media workflow solution, QTube. The system-wide upgrade prepares Seven Brisbane for a future in HD broadcasting, supporting simultaneous HD and SD working and advanced file-based workflows.

Technical Services Manager at Seven Brisbane, Troy Smith, said, “We have been using Quantel systems in house for many years now and have always been impressed with Enterprise sQ’s speed and user-friendliness. Enterprise sQ still offers us the fastest time to air for news, great file handling and ease of use for our journalists. Quantel’s systems are at the cutting edge of technology and we are excited to welcome its QTube technology to our Brisbane and Gold Coast News Operations, which will make collaborative working between our major News centres much more efficient.”

Seven Brisbane has purchased two Quantel QTube systems. One system will be based on the Gold Coast for Seven’s regional bureaus, and the second to provide for inter-site media workflows for the wider Seven Network. QTube will allow media professionals in Seven’s various offices to access and edit

Visit www.quantel.com

NEWS OPERATIONS

Autoscript Innovations

IMT Nucomm Skymaster Soars at IBC THE SKYMASTERTX from Integrated Microwave Technologies is a lightweight, full-featured digital COFDM video downlink transmitter designed to address the requirements of airborne downlink operations in news helicopters. With a built-in H.264 (MPEG-4) encoder and optional MPEG-2 encoder, it caters to users with legacy receive systems.

The airborne downlink transmitter has secure BCRYPT AES 128/256 encryption, ensuring integration and interoperability with any standard-compliant equipment that customers may already have in their inventory. The chassis design features ARINC mounting, with all of the connections and controls located on one side of the unit. This allows users to remove SkymasterTX from one aircraft and install it in another with ease.

SkymasterTX can operate in a wide variety of bands, delivering high definition and standard definition video resolutions. It can output up to 8W of RF power, extending and improving link reliability. SkymasterTX also features COFDM digital modulation which, unlike single-carrier modulation formats such as FM, CDL or QAM, is unaffected by multipath.

The front-panel LCD and remote-control user interface allow for quick control of preset selection, standby mode and encryption mode.

For such advanced functions as changing frequency plans, AES encryption keys or unit naming, an easy-to-use administration software package is supplied. Configuration is flexible, with 16 or more different pre-sets available.

Visit www.imt-broadcast.com

AUTOSCRIPT HAS LAUNCHED two new accessories for its prompters.

An improved version of its wireless handheld scroll controller, known as the RAT (Receive and Transmit), the RAT 3 has a new RF module, enabling it to use more channels, and features a power saving option that enables a 9V battery to last up to three months. The enclosure has been redesigned to make it more comfortable for the presenter/talent, while the physical size of the RAT3 has been reduced to accommodate smaller hands.

The HC/1 five button deskpad control panel has also undergone a redesign, employing a Hall effect sensor to give greater longevity and absolute prompt control. Autoscript has also improved the aesthetic look and feel of the HC/1 in response to the growing numbers of these units being used by presenters on the studio floor; the new design fits better with modern studio design.

Visit www.autoscript.tv

Ka-Band for Advent Mantis Terminal VISLINK’S Advent Mantis MSAT Portable Data Terminal is designed to address the emerging Ka-Band satellite newsgathering requirements of broadcasters.

The MSAT is a 12.5Kg go-anywhere satellite terminal that can be set-up and providing data and video transmission in as little as five minutes from unzipping its ballistic nylon carry-case. It supports X-Band, Ku and now KaBand configurations. Bands can be swapped in the field in under a minute.

Visit www.vislink.com

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Australian LiveU users have streamed live, high quality video from places like Indonesia, Rome, Madrid, Hawaii, Canada and Israel directly into their existing servers.

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NEWS OPERATIONS

The Integration of Social Media with Broadcast

By James Gilbert, Joint MD, Pixel Power.

If ever the fever surrounding social media was doubted, the 2012 flotation of Facebook will have put paid to that. It showed in equal measure the susceptibility of some market players to undue hype while at the same time still illustrated the powerful position of pioneering social media companies.

THE GROWTH IN SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE – at least in countries where internet usage is well developed – has taken many by surprise: the speed of change has been immense. Now we frequently hear news reports quoting Twitter feeds as their source. Even just a few years ago that would have been unheard of.

What may surprise many casual observers is that the “social web”, as some commentators refer to it, is not dominated by teenagers. According to figures published on Zubeta.com, the biggest user group of Facebook, Twitter etc. is actually 35-44-year-olds, at 25 per cent of the total. The average age of a user is 37 years old. However, going forwards the site highlights the “Millennials” - people born between 1978 and 1994. It was the first generation to be “raised” on the internet and represent what Zubeta describes as a “…substantial portion of internet users. The Millennial age cohort is expected to be as large, if not larger than the baby boomer generation.” This generation and the generations to follow are social media naturals.

Social media is here to stay is the overriding point, though whether Twitter and Facebook continue to dominate is a different matter. But if it isn’t them it will simply be in another form. So how does the social web fit in with broadcast television?

“What’s clear is that viewers like to watch together.”

With some effort is the short answer. This not from a technical perspective – a point to which we will return – but in terms of onscreen integration and business model. But the essential point is that broadcasters ignore social media at their peril and many have recognised that.

NEWS OPERATIONS

There’s now a demand from broadcasters to be able to incorporate this activity into their output, particularly for live programming – and we have seen many examples of this, not least with reality TV shows. This demand simply echoes that of their audience. In March 2012 market research firm Penn Schoen Berland surveyed 750 social network users ages 13 to 49 finding that half of the respondents use social networking sites while watching TV. The same poll also revealed that nine out of 10 people see social networking as a form of entertainment, with more than 50 per cent also saying that the medium influenced both what they watch and what they buy.

36

What’s clear is that viewers like to “watch together”, particularly via Twitter, with tweets – following collation and an editorial selection process – broadcast onscreen. Ratings increase as a result of the messages that surround the shows – Britain’s Got Talent and The Voice are prime examples of this where the chatter about the relative merits of contestants reached fever pitch.

However, the question does remain as to how best to integrate this into the live show. Simply having a presenter reading out social media messages – however gushing or controversial – is not necessarily going to be welcomed by the viewing audience. But an appropriate, elegantly designed position onscreen is. This provides a level of interaction that many now not only want but expect.

There are other clear examples with sports broadcasting. Taking Sky’s new dedicated Formula One channel in the UK: the interactive “red button” service, as well as including multiple viewer-selected camera angle and additional information, also includes a popular revolving Twitter feed. In the UK, Channel 4’s coverage of international athletics also features a prominent Twitter feed with the studio host often referring to it. What this allows is relatives of the competitors to Tweet the show sharing their views about the family member’s performance.

Ad Age’s Social Engagement/Social TV conference in 2012 threw up some interesting figures as thoughts, as reported on its associated website. CEO and Founder of Wiredset and Trendrr (social TV analytics company) explains that social activity during TV’s prime time has increased 193 per cent since even last year. “That kind of growth means programmers are looking at social-media chatter not just as an amplifier of TV programming but as content in its own right,” says the site.

Lisa Hsia, Exec VP of Digital Media, Bravo Media explained at the same event that “social interactions are now being planned in the initial stages of conception and production,” adding that “her network has actually seen a ratings lift on reruns by creating social editions of shows.”

Given the figures, it’s easy to see the drivers for broadcasters to engage with social media. There are caveats, however: the integration of social media with broadcast TV on a primary screen must compliment, not dominate the viewing experience; there needs to be the minimum of delay between text input and it appearing onscreen; editorial moderation has to be factored in; social media platforms also come and go and technology and services suppliers must be alive to this. But broadcasters do need to be able to include messaging activity that’s occurring on second screens – tablets and smartphones particularly – with their programming to enhance viewer loyalty via this user-generated content.

Social media feeds also add value to interactive services that accompany the main programme, as evidenced by Sky’s F1 channel, encouraging the viewer to be both that and a user, bridging the gap between on-air and on-line experience to create a cohesive, interactive experience for audiences.

It does have to be taken into account that social media inclusion has yet to deliver a direct monetisation model. Therefore, equipment and playout costs must be kept to a minimum with a streamlined workflow inherent in the technology deployed. But, at the risk of repetition, broadcasters have to be a part of the conversation. As far as playout is concerned, social media feeds are simply another graphical asset and provided broadcasters choose the correct partner a fast, elegant onscreen result is entirely achievable.

Broadcasters need to look for several key attributes: + Data integration that makes it easy for third-party social media aggregators to work and with partner with suppliers – this should be close to effortless + Graphics devices should be able to expose their full feature set via an XML interface as this provides tremendous data presentation flexibility + The technology must be able to very precisely and intelligently communicate its activities when being driven by an operator, allowing very accurate data synchronisation with live broadcast + Graphics technology vendors should be able to work with any and all of the companies in this space allowing broadcasters to take advantage of ongoing social media technology developments + A long history in SMS integration provides the clue that the supplier will be adept in the social media field too.

Visit www.pixelpower.com

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POST PRODUCTION

Sponsored by

www.content-technology.com/postproduction

Voodoo Digital Creates File-Based Workflow VOODOO DIGITAL has created and implemented a complete file-based HD workflow solution for its major US-based studio clients, including Sony Pictures Releasing and 20th Century Fox, and Australian distributors including Hoyts Distribution.

Voodoo founder and managing partner – production, Simon Cranch, explained, “Until fairly recently when a US studio wanted to release a trailer or TVC in Australia they would courier us a tape, or boxes of tapes, which we would ingest and then take care of all the production requirements. Aside from the very obvious potential piracy issues, this was costly and clearly not the most effective way of carrying out the process, so we developed and implemented a totally tape free and completely file-based solution instead.”

With Voodoo’s file-based solution the US studios can now distribute their trailers and TVCs to the region using various online portals.

Cranch continued, “We log on to the Australian portal and download the trailers and TVCs in HD. We then move the files into our in-house edit suites and take care of all localisation and CAD regulatory issues. We also add in release dates, recut and create a final edit, based on the clients’ direction, so the spot is properly skewed to suit an Australian audience.”

Voodoo works with in-house Producer, Stephen Robinson of creative agency SRP, to ensure all the trailers and TVCs meet the studios’ requirements. Until recently the process was all in SD, but Voodoo’s latest technology upgrade means the entire workflow is now in full HD. Cranch added, “We can now receive, edit and dispatch all in 1920×1080 full HD with the client approving the final cut via a simple MPEG4 proof which we e-mail to them for ultimate convenience. For distribution we use the amazingly efficient MediaPro from Dubsat which sends all our assets seamlessly to stations across Australia and New Zealand with a simple click

Voodoo Founder Simon Cranch.

of the mouse. There is no degradation of quality in this process and from the clients’ point of view it is safe, secure and cost effective.”

With trailers and TVCs in HD each of the files handles by Voodoo range from 2Gb to 8Gb each, so a fast connection and efficient workflow is critical in order to meet ever-tightening turnaround times.

Kathy Giam, National Advertising Manager for Sony Pictures Releasing, said, “Installing a dedicated server for our business needs, with Voodoo’s filebased workflow, is both seamless and time-saving. The system allows us to turn around work quickly with faster delivery and spend more quality time on the creative aspect of our AV materials.”

Visit www.voodoo.com.au

First Alchemist Ph.C-HD Standards Converter for Australia SYDNEY-BASED BUFF DUBS, an authoring, encoding, transcoding, media duplication and mastering services facility, has taken delivery of the first 3Gbps capable Snell Alchemist Ph.C-HD standards converter in Australia. The new Alchemist is available to all clients of Buff Dubs and Silver Trak Digital – Buff Dubs’ technology partner.

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Buff Dubs co-founder Tim Creswell, said, “We ingest content of any description and transform, reproduce and aggregate that content to the specific media requirements of our clients. These requirements include everything from broadcast to Blu-ray delivery and working in both 2D and 3D. So, in order to meet growing demand from our clients for the highest possible quality conversions between different video standards and frame rates, we purchased the latest Snell Group Alchemist Ph.C-HD

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standards converter from Quinto Communications in Sydney.”

Creswell continued, “We recently became Silver Trak Digital’s technology partner and the new Alchemist Ph.C-HD standards converter is very much a part of that ongoing relationship.”

Quinto Technical Sales Manager Mike Ellis said, “Like its predecessors the sixth generation Snell Alchemist Ph.C–HD is the product of extensive research by Snell into the exacting demands of video frame-rate standards conversion. Snell’s Emmy Award-winning Ph.C motion measurement technology produces converted outputs of unparalleled quality that are virtually indistinguishable from the original input.”

Visit www.quinto.com.au, www.buffdubs.com and www.silvertrak.com.au

More than just your

reseller

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V-Ray Brings Ted to Life

Paws on the set – Mark Wahlberg in Ted.

ILOURA HAS SHOWCASED their creative talents for the recent feature film Ted, directed by Family Guy-creator, Seth MacFarlane, using the full capabilities of V-Ray to bring the comically crude teddy bear to life.

For the film Ted, Iloura required a physically accurate renderer to capture lighting measurements (HDRI) to recreate the same lighting environment in 3D. This was crucial in helping light Ted convincingly.

Glenn Melenhorst, Visual Effects Supervisor at Iloura, says, “We have new lighters arriving all the time and the common sense workflow in V-Ray yields good results from the get go as well as providing a not too steep learning curve for people new to the software.”

V-Ray is the core development product of Chaos Group, which allows users to quickly create realistic images while giving them full control over the 3D production process. V-Ray and V-Ray RT were used in the movie Ted to create initial lighting setups quickly and easily, and also used to generate baked indirect lighting and GI that matched what was shot.

“In V-Ray, lighting and materials are easy to set up and it has become our go-to tool for our lighting pipe,” says Glenn. “Being able to create separated render elements out of V-Ray means a lot of the image can be easily tweaked in compositing without having to re-render.”

On a shot by shot basis, quality vs speed is very easy to adjust so render times can be controlled while keeping quality high.

Visit www.stormfx.com.au and www.chaosgroup.com

Bundaberg Sparkles with Cutting Edge CUTTING EDGE HAS CREATED a new spot for Publicis Mojo and Bundaberg Sparkling Selection. The ad features an imaginary world where everything is created from sparkling crystal.

With little to work with in terms of reference or precedence, the Cutting Edge VFX team embarked on weeks of intensive R&D to create the look they were after. The team then designed and created the entirely CG crystal world.

The stylised look was achieved by replicating reflection and refraction physics of real crystals. The design of the characters and environment was approached on a shot by shot basis, as the scale of the facets was determined by their distance from the virtual camera.

“Our resident RealFlow expert PJ stepped up to the challenge and produced a brilliant result”, said Kohler.

Visit cuttingedge.com.au

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Zenon Kohler, Cutting Edge VFX Director, said that since no ‘real’ product was featured in this animation, one of the biggest challenges was to create a CG version of the drink that poured like real liquid but looked like crystal.

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POST PRODUCTION

Sponsored by

Cutting Edge Reanimates Louie the Fly LOUIE THE FLY continues his reign on the screen in three new animated spots – Crime Scene, Don’t Fear the Spray and Locked Out. Last year, Louie amassed over 250,000 votes in a campaign to save the icon, proving he is here to stay. As one of Australia’s most recognised mascots, Louie has been the face of Mortein pest control for over half a century.

The creative team at Havas Worldwide, led by ECD Steve Coll, developed new scenarios which were a brief for long-term collaborators, director Phil Meatchem and Cutting Edge VFX Supervisor Ron Roberts.

“Louie is the loveable rogue we can’t help but feel affection for,” said Roberts. “Over the years we’ve developed and honed Louie, Cockie, Mozzie and this time, introduced a new bug, Spider. As Louie’s adventures get more intricate, the visual style keeps moving us forward. The essence of Louie’s cheeky verve has remained unchanged since his inception in 1962.”

“It’s always fun animating Louie and the gang,” said Andrew Kimberley, Chief Louie The Fly Animator. “They brim with character, and it brings a smile to your face just posing them. It’s a treat to bring this vibrant Aussie icon to life.”

“After 50 years, Louie continues to move with the times. We’ve built a community of over 270,000 fans since introducing Louie to Facebook via last year’s ‘Kill or Save Louie’ campaign. And on TV, Phil and Cutting Edge

have done a fantastic job of updating Louie’s look using the very latest animation techniques. As this latest campaign shows, there’s plenty of life left in Louie,” said Steve Coll, ECD Havas Worldwide.

Visit http://cuttingedge.com.au

DaVinci Resolve 9.0.3 Adds Timecode Syncing BLACKMAGIC DESIGN has announced the release of DaVinci Resolve

and instantly update the video timecode for those clips.

9.0.3, a new update to the company’s advanced colour correction tool. The update includes a new timecode feature to add timecode to non timecode cameras, improved CinemaDNG control palette, AAF and XML clip management, enhanced stereoscopic 3D grading and support for XML round tripping in the new release of Final Cut Pro X version 10.0.6. Resolve 9.0.3 is available immediately for free for existing DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Resolve Lite users.

Blackmagic Design feels that this timecode reader feature will allow dozens of cameras to be used in high end production workflows where previously their lack of timecode support would have limited their ability to sync audio and be used in the post production process.

This new DaVinci Resolve software allows, for the first time, cameras that do not support timecode to be used for professional shoots and still offer accurate and synced timecode for editing and conforming. By recording timecode from a timecode generator onto one of the cameras audio tracks, combined with the new Resolve Media Pool timecode reader feature, any camera can become integrated into professional workflows. Through the feature, Resolve is able to read the linear timecode from the audio tracks

The new DaVinci Resolve software update also includes the ability to display camera metadata related colour temperature and tint on the CinemaDNG colour palette, giving colourists more precise colour correction capabilities when working with CinemaDNG files. Additionally, Resolve users now have the ability to specify clips that are located in multiple folders in the Resolve storage library when importing AAF/XML, as well as the ability to reset automatic image transform alignments while adjusting stereoscopic 3D convergence.

Visit www.blackmagicdesign.com

Sony Upgrades Vegas Pro Software SONY CREATIVE SOFTWARE has announced the latest upgrade to

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its Vegas editing technology. Combining a familiar track-based editing interface with a fluid, interactive approach to media production, workflow improvements in Vegas Pro 12 include Project Interchange with popular editing platforms including Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, Avid Pro Tools 10 and Apple Final Cut Pro 7; Expanded Edit Mode, for fine-tuning the timing of a project using an interactive “A-B roll” paradigm; Colour Match, for quickly matching the colour characteristics of different video clips; and Smart Proxy editing, which automatically and dynamically replaces clips on the timeline with high-quality, edit-friendly HD proxies.

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On the format front, Vegas Pro 12 can now ingest Panasonic P2 DVCPRO and AVC-Intra content, and encode to all flavours of the HDCAM SR mastering format including the 220 Mb/s SR Lite and the 880 Mb/s SR 444.

There are new Masking Tools in Vegas Pro 12, including Effects Masking for quickly obscuring a face or logo. Updates to the Project Media and Explorer windows improve the ability to find and organize content, thanks to a redesigned Thumbnail View along with optimized Media Tagging capabilities and automated Smart Bin search tools.

Vegas Pro 12 is available in two configurations. The Vegas Pro 12 collection follows previous versions by including the Vegas Pro 12 editing application along with DVD Architect Pro 5.2 and Dolby Digital Professional Encoder, for DVD and Blu-ray Disc authoring. Vegas Pro 12 Edit is a new, lower cost package featuring all of the editing capabilities of Vegas Pro 12, without DVD Architect and the Dolby Encoder software.

For Sony PMW-F3, F23, F35 and F65 shooters looking to maintain the full dynamic range of their images in post, Vegas Pro 12 uses OpenColourIO technology from Sony Pictures Imageworks and the Academy Colour Encoding System (ACES) colour space standard to build a comprehensive S-log workflow solution.

Vegas Pro 12 editors can apply the appropriate LUT (Look-up Table) to the S-log source material from a list of built-in templates during the postproduction process. The finished project can be encoded to a wide range of formats using the ACES colour space standard as well as other popular non-ACES standards.

Visit www.sonycreativesoftware.com and www.newmagic.com.au/where2buy

POST PRODUCTION

Sponsored by

Colorfront Pioneers 4K High Frame Rate Workflow

Gefen Extending DVI GEFEN IS PROVIDING three solutions that extend single or dual link DVI throughout the studio. All products use a sender and receiver system with built-in EDID management to guarantee long distance signal integrity, and are designed for post-production studios working with high resolution computer systems.

The 2x Dual Link DVI Extender over CAT-6 extends two dual link DVI displays up to 196 feet (60m) from their source using four CAT-6 cables.

Video resolutions up to 4k (3840x2400) are supported, equalising adjustments on the receiver unit eliminate potential skews when using CAT-6 cables, and locking power supplies stabilise performance.

The DVI FM-1000 extends one DVI display up to 3280 feet (1km) from its source using a single fibre optic cable. It uses modular-type sender and receiver units that install in seconds. High resolutions up to 1920x1200 are delivered using one fibre optic cable, replacing a previous model that used two cables to reach the same distance.

The DVI-3600 extends one DVI display along with USB 2.0 peripherals, RS-232 and analogue audio up to 6600 feet (2km) using a single mode fibre optic cable. USB peripherals can be operated in either local or remote locations using a front panel switch on the sender unit.

“All of these new extenders for DVI offer some options for studios with a need to distribute high resolution video to different locations for remote work stations or monitoring,” explained Hagai Gefen, president and CEO, Gefen. “Audio pros can now reach both long and shorter distances with either CAT-6 or fibre optic cabling and still maintain 100% signal integrity.”

Visit www.gefen.com and www.buffdubs.com

COLORFRONT ON-SET DAILIES delivers an all-embracing approach to digital dailies workflow. It integrates production-proven tools for dailies work – including playback and sync, QC, colour grading, audio and metadata management, plus checksum-verified copying and LTO-5 archival – with colour and image science, and the delivery of simultaneous faster-thanrealtime deliverables in all common file formats.

On-Set Dailies runs on HP’s Z820 16-core workstation, with CUDA processing running on multiple GPUs using the latest NVidia ‘Kepler’ technology, which raises the performance of on-set imaging to new levels. This includes: rendering performance at over 100FPS; parallel background rendering; faster-than-realtime JPEG2000 encoding for DCP and IMF deliverables; realtime RED R3D playback in HD/2K, with CPU decoding, without the need for RED Rocket cards; 60+FPS ARRIRAW 4K de-Bayer, 4K F65RAW and 4K Canon C500 processing.

IBC 2012 saw Colorfront demonstrating realtime 4K at 60P playback of Sony F65RAW, Canon C500 RAW and Alexa ARRIRAW camera footage from On-Set Dailies, via HD-SDI with AJA’s Corvid Ultra video technology, at AJA’s booth.

The new release of On-Set Dailies comes with On-Set Live!, a grading capability which uses the live HD-SDI feed to enable ACS-CDL or ARRI Look-compliant colour corrections on a broadcast monitor. It also features support for Blackmagic Cinema Camera DNG files, Avid DNxHD 444 support and Sony SRFile (SStP) playback and encoding. On-Set Dailies features endto-end real-time 4K ACES workflow, with IDT, RRT and ODT functions. It also delivers support for On-Set Colour 2K resolution full-latitude (ACES) grading tool on the iPad. Visit www.colorfront.com

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Sponsored by

Fusion Reaction

By Keith Ford Founded in 2006, Fusion-io is a company focused on accelerating data. The Utahbased start-up has utilised what they refer to as data decentralisation to run some huge infrastructures, mainly in the server space. These include: Facebook, Pandora, Polaris, New York Stock Exchange, and Xbox Live. Fusion-io also gained notoriety in 2009 when The Great and Powerful Woz, Steve Wozniak, joined the company as Chief Scientist.

THEIR LATEST PRODUCT, the Fusion ioFX, was launched earlier this year at NAB. Fusion ioFX is a flash-based workstation memory tier that seeks to accelerate the rate at which files can make it to and from the workstation. Based on a NAND flash and connecting through via a PCI Express bus, the ioFX can read files at 1.4 GB/s. One of the key benefits of the high read speed is the ability to work on files as high as 5K in full resolution, as well as working with stereoscopic content in realtime.

“We are the first to market with a native NAND flash device. So by that, what we mean is that this is NAND flash, just like an SSD, but an SSD has a controller chip built into it that basically manages the memory,” explains Vincent Brisebois, Solutions Architect at Fusion-io. “What we do with the hardware is actually very simple. It’s NAND flash in a programmable FPGA. So all we are really doing with this is connecting the NAND flash to the system bus and this is not actually doing most of the logic. The logic and intelligence comes from a big software suite.

“So what’s unique about Fusion IO is we actually developed a memory subsystem extension for the operating system. So we add to the OS the ability to not only address RAM, but also address NAND flash like a memory tier addition. So now you end up with an operating system that has RAM, NAND flash, which we call IO memory, and storage. So it doesn’t actually connect through the storage bus and the benefit of that is, because it’s NAND flash, you get very high bandwidth. An SSD takes about one millisecond to respond with the data you request. This actually takes 0.06 milliseconds to respond. So you can get 20 files off one of these in the time that an SSD gives you one.”

The ioFX can drastically change how large post-production houses, small studios, and freelancers working remotely, operate. High-end post facilities will primarily benefit from the ease of scalability that the ioFX provides.

“For high end users that are using very high quality or high bandwidth, doing stereoscopic 4K, like The Hobbit, stereoscopic 5K at 48 fps, you get to a point where the bandwidth is one thing that’s difficult to get very fast. So this is 1.4 GB/s read, which you can do with SSD’s in a RAID, but if you put two of these you get 3 GB/s, if you put four you get 6 GB/s,” said Brisebois. “The problem with SSD’s is the more you add, the less increase in performance you gain. So two SSD’s double the speed, add two more, you get 60% more; add two more, you get 40%. You get to a point where getting to 3 GB/s and 6 GB/s becomes unreasonable, becomes a big chassis with 32 SSD’s and all this management. It starts bogging down with storage infrastructure before actually giving you performance.”

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Small facilities and freelancers can benefit from the ioFX, as it significantly lowers the entry level for effects work. Freelancers can reasonably work on 4K, IMAX, or stereoscopic shots from a home workstation with the sub-$3,000 device added on.

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“It actually makes the freelancers kind of relevant again. They can now bid on stereoscopic film shots. They can bid on IMAX. They can get up to the requirements of the industry without having to be part of a big studio,” said Brisebois. “Smaller studios as well that don’t have the big infrastructures and the InfiniBand and the SANs and all that stuff can now do things and bid on shots where they would never have

even dreamt of being able to. It does kind of level the playing field in allowing the smaller guys to do more, but also the big guys to be more efficient at what they do.”

One of the most unique features of the ioFX is the combination of software and hardware. The company wanted to stray from the conventional workflow of creating hardware that conforms to the current standards, or software to manage the standard hardware.

Instead they opted to create a hybrid solution in which both hardware and software are equally important.

“For Fusion IO it was sort of this idea of saying well, let’s build new hardware that requires all new software or new software that requires all new hardware,” Brisebois explained. “Basically a hybrid where we have as many software developers as we have hardware developers and the hardware itself is not really the product, the software itself is not just the product, it’s really the combination of the two. It took a company to say no, let’s not just be a storage company and not just be a management software company and build something new and using a medium the right way.”

The addition of Steve Wozniak onto the Fusion-io team has brought a lot more than just the positive PR. The Woz certainly adds to the already strong engineering background of the company, but can also be a draw for other talented individuals, such as Jens Axboe who wrote the memory subsystem for Linux, to join the organisation. Having been a driving force at a company as successful as Apple gives him a unique business insight too.

“On the company side, he does bring this parallel between Fusionio and Apple where he’s also helping our company go through rapid growth in our first year as a public company and on the corporate side of things. A company growing into billions of dollars of valuation within a year of being public is something that Woz has gone through before,” concluded Brisebois.

The iofx is available in Australia and New Zealand through Intraware.

Visit www.fusionio.com and www.intraware.com.au

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Sponsored by

THE FOUNDRY HAS ANNOUNCED its latest version of HIERO, a shot management, conform and review tool, as well as HIEROPLAYER which will give artists the ability to view their VFX shots in the context of a timeline – ideal for collaborating and critiquing shots at a workstation.

Windows OS support in version 1.5 brings HIERO onto all three platforms.

HIERO users will now be able to utilise a broadcast monitor to review footage on compatible Blackmagic and AJA SDI-Out Hardware. The Broadcast Monitor Out functionality will give HIERO operators the ability to accurately check that the colour space and aspect ratio is exactly the same as it would be when the footage is broadcast.

With the addition of Multi-Channel Image Support, users will now also be able to view all the image layers of multi-channel EXRs for CG passes.

Operators will have access to more than just the RGBA pass and view all of the image passes that EXR files can contain, just as they can in NUKE. HIERO 1.5 also adds support for playback of native ARRIRAW camera footage. Users can either edit directly with the raw footage or transcode out to other image formats using HIERO’s export system.

HIEROPLAYER can open HIERO projects, allowing artists to see their shots in context of a conformed, multi-track timeline and seamlessly critique versions of their renders. Artists will be able to playback the same formats that NUKE knows about (including multi-channel EXRs, and audio), organise and tag their comp elements into Clip Bins, and even knock together basic ‘scratch edits’. HIEROPLAYER is a VFX timeline tool built for artists. It works seamlessly with NUKE and HIERO out of the box and via Python scripting, can also be integrated into other apps in the pipeline.

Visit www.thefoundry.co.uk

Cospective Announces Frankie COSPECTIVE PTY LTD (formerly Rising Sun Research) has announced the official public launch of Frankie, its new real-time video review platform.

Frankie enables users to interactively review and discuss videos between multiple locations. Participants can play, pause, make notes and even sketch ideas right onto the video – all in sync with everyone in the review. Built upon the same technology as Cospective's cineSync software, Frankie is tailored for short-form content production workflows.

Being a web-based application, Frankie runs across different browsers and platforms. The host simply uploads the videos they wish to discuss, then brings guests into the review by sending them a link. There's nothing to install, and the host can be sure their guests will be able to play the clips.

Work-in-progress can be reviewed and discussed quickly, using drawing tools to illustrate exactly what's intended, eliminating ambiguity. It's also ideal for discussing storyboards and sketching out ideas to make sure that everyone is on the same page right from the start.

"We're proud to announce the launch of Frankie today," said Rory McGregor, CEO of Cospective. "It's the result of extensive consultation with users who live and breathe TVCs and other short form content. Frankie makes it easy to discuss content with others, no matter where they are. Best of all, our users keep telling us that Frankie actually makes the review process a whole lot more fun."

Visit www.cospective.com

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Shot Management, Conform & Review

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MEDIA IN THE CLOUD Microsoft and PPTV Deliver Cloud-Based, Online TV Service MICROSOFT AND PPTV, China’s leading Internet TV service provider, have signed a strategic partnership memorandum to launch PPTV Asia TV Networks (ATN) platform on Windows Azure. PPTV ATN is the first to deliver a complete video cloud service on Azure. This agreement also marks Microsoft’s first cloudbased collaboration with a local Chinese new media company.

According to the memorandum, PPTV will adopt Windows Azure as the core infrastructure platform for PPTV ATN. PPTV

will also continue to explore the collaboration opportunities with Microsoft on online TV, media service platform and Content Delivery Network (CDN) for its next generation domestic market needs.

According to Chuang Tao, CEO of PPTV, the company provides an ecosystem for global content providers to upload content to the library, and to license to service providers through revenue sharing.

Visit www.pptv.com and www.microsoft.com/china

New DFT Owners Focus on Archive Market INDIA-BASED PRASAD CORPORATION has announced the acquisition of the “Scanity & Flexxity” product manufacturing company Precision Mechatronics GmbH based in Weiterstadt – Germany and its sister Sales & Marketing subsidiary DFT Munich GmbH. PrecisionMechatronics and DFT Munich will be merged into a new company called Digital Film Technologies GmbH which will continue with research and development; new equipment manufacturing, sales and on-going service support for its large installed client base of legacy products and new sales.

The company’s technology origins stem back to Robert Bosch GmbH, Fernseh Div., which later became BTS inc. - Philips Digital Video Systems,

Aspera Opens Singapore Office ASPERA, INC. has announced the opening

MEDIA IN THE CLOUD

of an Asian regional office in Singapore.

The new office will serve Aspera’s rapidly growing base of high-speed file transfer software users across Asia Pacific and further drive business expansion in the region.

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Aspera says it has seen triple-digit revenue growth across media and entertainment, engineering, telecommunications, life sciences and government as more and more industries adopt Aspera’s high-speed file transfer software for high-performance movement of ‘big data’.

Visit www.asperasoft.com

then part of Thomson Grass Valley and, now, DFT Digital Film Technology Prasad Corporation, which has offices in Mumbai, Chennai, Los Angeles and London, says the traditional film scanning market is changing and becoming more about historical ingest; restoration and archive management. DFT’s Scanity product is a real-time 2K and 4K capstan driven ingest scanner designed to meet these evolving Archival Market conditions.

Stefan Kramper will be the operational Managing Director within the new company structure, working closely with the both the existing management team and the new owners, Prasad Corporation.

Visit www.dft-film.com

Kodak Adds Digital Separation Film KODAK HAS ADDED another product to its portfolio of asset protection films. KODAK VISION3 Digital Separation Film 2237 is a blackand-white separation film for preserving images from colour digital masters.

This archival film is optimised for laser, CRT and LED light sources utilised by digital recorders in the marketplace. Providing high image quality including fine detail, tight grain, optimal resolution, and excellent flare characteristics, KODAK VISION3 2237 Film is offered on an ESTAR base for premier physical performance and long-term stability that lasts centuries in recommended conditions.

Visit www.kodak.com

Harris Reselling Spectra SPECTRA LOGIC has announced a worldwide relationship with Harris Broadcast Communications to provide broadcast and media customers with storage archival solutions. The relationship allows Harris to resell Spectra Logic’s T-Series LTO tape libraries as part of its new Invenio Archive solution, and provide its customers with a complete end-toend solution.

Harris will resell Spectra Logic’s complete family of T-Series tape libraries, from its smallest Spectra T50e tape library, which scales to a native capacity of 75TB, to its enterprise-class T-Finity, which supports a native capacity of 600 petabytes or more than 25 million hours of video content.

Visit www.spectralogic.com and www.broadcast.harris.com

Dalet Releases Xtend for CS6 DALET DIGITAL MEDIA SYSTEMS has announced the Dalet Xtend module for Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 software which provides workflow collaboration between the Dalet Media Asset Management (MAM) platform and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 Using the Xtend Panel, Adobe Premiere Pro users can connect directly to the Dalet database to view available content. Dalet users can also push material, such as EDLs and clips created in Dalet, directly to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 editor for finishing. The finished piece can then be exported back to Dalet as a new title or saved against a placeholder.

The Dalet collaboration with Adobe is a long-term relationship, and additional feature enhancements are expected. For instance, when material is opened into the NLE, the different locators (QC information, sports logs, rights metadata, etc.) are visible to the users. The craft editors can also add additional metadata as they work. Essential information, such as descriptive locators and usage rights, flows back and forth and – thanks to the intelligent genealogy – is tracked by the Dalet content catalogue.

The Dalet MAM engine manages all metadata and media processes. Genealogy metadata linking the editor’s material to the original sources can be preserved and content is better referenced throughout, making searches of the content catalogue and archives more efficient.

Visit www.dalet.com

MEDIA IN THE CLOUD

Modifying MAM with Cantemo IN OCTOBER, Digistor added the Cantemo Portal Media Asset Management (MAM) software to its range of solutions. Cantemo Portal is an expandable and customisable workgroup MAM with a focus on the core functionality, while keeping the platform very open for third-party developers.

Though the name changes aren’t terribly simple, the platform itself is designed to be just that.

“They have consciously made it extremely simple so when you actually open up Cantemo and you go to the web portal page, it just looks like Google.

It has just one box in the middle. Basically you start typing in your search and there and then, as you get in deeper, it shows you more and more. So it is quite intuitive to use as well,” explained Andrew Mooney, Managing Director of Digistor.

There has also been an App released by Cantemo that enables Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 users to take advantage of key features in Cantemo Portal, such as searching for source material from the DAM system, drag and drop to the timeline, and posting back the rendered result with the metadata without leaving the main application interface.

The simplicity of the core functionality is then augmented by the openness of the platform for third-party module development. Cantemo provides the tools within the framework for users to modify and add to the software so that new possibilities can be created. It effectively mirrors the PC gaming modder culture, where the users share their work with other users, creating a community around the system and allowing everyone to benefit from the innovations of their peers, though sometimes with a charge.

“What we are seeing is a number of developers internationally are writing specific apps or plug

“It certainly makes Premiere a viable option to a lot of larger organisations where they have multiple seats whereas previously, they may not have considered it because it didn’t have any sophisticated collaborative tools. Cantemo on top of it, it definitely changes the game there,” said Mark Richards, Group Marketing Manager for Digistor.

“This is just a different way of looking at a media asset management system, making it a lot more open and not necessarily having to fit your workflow into how the system works. Its designed in such a way that it is flexible enough that you can grow with it,” concluded Mooney.

Visit www.digistor.com.au and www.cantemo.com

MEDIA IN THE CLOUD

Cantemo Portal is available in two iterations, with Cantemo Portal taking over from the previously named MediaBox DAM as the out-of-the-box solution focusing on workgroups up to 60 users, while Cantemo Portal Enterprise, previously Portal DAM, is a MAM for larger operations with greater needs. While the name changes come without any alteration of the underlying product, it does serve to highlight that both versions are utilising the same basic technology.

ins to address all modules, if you want to call them modules, to address specific requirements,” said Mooney. “So it’s sort of like a collective approach. Sometimes those modules are made free and sometimes there might be a charge.”

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RADIO The original broadcast media

www.content-technology.com/radio

Australia’s Successful DAB+ Digital Radio Rollout With Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) about to begin serious dialogue with the Federal Government and the Federal Opposition about regional rollout, it is time to review the status of the current Australian deployment of DAB+ broadcast technology.

OFFICIAL DATA RELEASED in the 2012 digital radio industry report showed the technology tracking well ahead of forecast. CRA’s most recent release of data, at the end of the 2nd quarter of 2012, revealed 1.3 million people listening to digital radio each week and around 10% of all radio listening being done via a DAB+ device. In addition, at the end of quarter 2, nearly 1 million DAB+ digital radio devices had been sold.

Following the cumulative increase in sales of digital radios over the last 12 months, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) updated their original December 2009 forecast of household penetration of DAB+ from 16% of all households by 2014, to 16% by 2013 and 18% by 2014.

PwC indicated the uptake rate is a higher than average adoption rate outperforming the original forecast and making it one of the fastest take ups of any new technology.

Time Spent Listening (TSL) to radio via a DAB+ digital radio device is more than 12 hours, double that of TSL to radio via streaming over mobile and internet.

DAB+ IN VEHICLES With 34% of radio listening in the car, it is important for the industry to work closely with automotive suppliers to encourage them to line fit DAB+ solutions.

In addition, the success of digital radio in the 5 metropolitan capital cities and the industry’s willingness to invest in regional trials to continue

developing the DAB+ platform has provided the basis for some automotive brands to add DAB+ digital radio to some models:

GREEN & COST EFFECTIVE FUTURE FOR RADIO BROADCASTERS The roll out of DAB+ digital radio will provide new, greener transmission infrastructure in regional Australia. Where currently regional services will own and operate their own infrastructure and transmit on individual frequencies, DAB+ digital radio technology can combine up to 32 radio services in a single ensemble using shared infrastructure, lower power and only one shared frequency.

+ BMW, Audi, Land Rover and Mercedes already offer DAB+ as an option

DAB+ offers drastically reduced infrastructure costs compared to analogue – instead of needing a transmitter per service, a single DAB+ transmitter can be used for a whole ensemble of services saving the same proportion of costs for floor space rental, power, spares and maintenance costs.

+ After market receivers available include: Pure Highway, Philips, Crystal, JVC, Kenwood, Sony and Directed Electronics’ Orion

DAB+ offers approximately 10 times better energy consumption for 15 of the equivalent FM services over a year.

+ Toyota Camry Atara SL, Aurion and Hybrid sedans, Hino trucks and Lexus GS vehicles have all added DAB+ as standard

+ Recent announcements of support for DAB+

by STMicro and Panasonic Industrial Devices Europe GmbH, leading suppliers of automotive chips and modules In June, Commercial Radio Australia and WorldDMB coordinated an automotive workshop in Tokyo for leading car manufacturers and their suppliers, with an attendance of 80 participants.

CRA continues to work with the car industry in Australia and overseas to ensure DAB+ options - as standard and after market - will be made available in the coming years.

On 24 August 2012, a simultaneous outside broadcast (OB) was held from one central place in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

All commercial, ABC, SBS and some digital only stations participated in the Breakfast broadcasts to celebrate 3 years of digital broadcasting in the 5 cities, as well as Toyota’s addition of DAB+ as standard in selected locally built sedans.

DAB+ IN REGIONAL AUSTRALIA After a complex channel planning and cost modelling exercise with regional broadcasters, CRA has developed and submitted a Regional Rollout and Funding proposal for the Federal Government.

DAB+ digital radio will result in a significant upgrade to existing towers and site infrastructure in regional Australia. Local technicians and trades will benefit from the build of main transmission infrastructure and repeater sites.

The rollout of digital radio in regional Australia will involve building integrated digital radio multiplexes with new broadcast antennae and transmission equipment in each of the 98 regional licence areas, and smaller infill transmissions to ensure consistent reception across the population centres of licence areas.

Continued page 50 

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RADIO

Radio Audience Measurement to Go Digital AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT methodology for Australian commercial radio is set to change from the current diary system as the contract for provision of measurement systems is up for renewal in 2014.

Speaking at the 2012 National Radio Conference, Cathy O’Connor, Commercial Radio Chair and CEO of DMG Radio Australia, said the diary system has evolved and improved over the years with single household placement of diaries and quota sampling for younger demographics being two recent advancements.

She said, “The results are robust, valid and reliable, and the industry standard is the same in most of the major territories across the world.

“However, looking ahead, we are in the process of conducting a tender for the new contract commencing in 2014, and this provides an opportunity to explore ways of supplementing what we do to ensure we continuously improve our system. I think the advertising industry is certainly looking to us to do that.

“In preparation for the tender, we’ve worked with research companies such as Ipsos, Nielsen and GFK to test online data collection, an electronic collection device known as The Media Watch and a world first, an app for tablets and mobile phones which will allow users to record listening online, or on a mobile or a tablet.”

The outcome of the new tender will be announced in early 2013.

Visit www.commercialradio.com.au

Calls for Faster Rollout Of ‘Euro-Chip’ BBC AND DEUTSCHLANDRADIO have joined forces to support an EBU push to speed the rollout of a universal chip to enable radios to receive multiple broadcasting standards, benefitting consumers, broadcasters and manufacturers across Europe.

EBU Media Director, Annika Nyberg Frankenhaeuser applauded the action by the two EBU Members, which was announced at the EBU’s Digital Radio Conference, in Brussels.

The ‘Euro-Chip’ is an existing set of minimum features and functions, originally created by WorldDMB, for all new digital radio receivers. It is already in production and ensures the interoperability of all new digital radio receivers in European countries where broadcasters are using DAB, DAB+ or DMB, and/or analogue AM and FM. The initiative was announced at a news conference attended by the DirectorGeneral of Deutschlandradio, Willi Steul, and the BBC Director of Audio and Music, Tim Davie.

“Digital radio across Europe has been plagued by uncertainty,” Mr Davie said. “We may be reaching a tipping point, but first we have to bank what is certain about radio’s digital hybrid future and join forces to promote a common vision across Europe.”

Mr Steul added, “Digital radio is a technology invented in Europe and we as broadcasters in Europe can show that we are able to work together to assure the future of radio.”

Ms Nyberg Frankenhaeuser said, “This is of critical importance for broadcasters, manufacturers and the public. We must ensure that European consumers are able to buy future-proofed receivers that will provide them with radio services across Europe.”

Visit www.ebu.ch

RADIO

Streaming Across The World

By Brian Galante The global health of broadcast radio is a topic sure to spark responses as varied as the national New Zealand climate. But the broadcasters who work within the medium will quickly point to a wealth of growth opportunities in the digital domain.

Streaming comfortably rests at the top of that pack.

“WE SEE STREAMING MEDIA as an important platform for radio,” said Carolyn Luey, Group General Manager for Digital at The Radio Network.

“We don’t believe that radio listening is decreasing; it’s just moving to other devices. We’re seeing the leading edge of that now, and streaming will become even more important in the future.”

The Radio Network (TRN) operates 124 radio stations in 25 markets across New Zealand. The private company has gradually built its station group, and today offers nine distinct “brands” that broadcast news, talk, sports and music formats.

TRN also has built its streaming platform in increments, first focusing on the web and now expanding into mobile streaming with smartphone apps.

The mobile arm is taking off as TRN delivers new applications and improves audio quality across their digital platforms.

“Our strategy for digital is to increase the number of touchpoints into our audience through multiple platforms,” said Luey. “We’re looking to deliver listeners the full radio experience through streaming, Podcasts and even video. The mobile smartphone is a critical part of this strategy.”

TRN’s thirst for mobile streaming forced the digital media team to evaluate different service providers. The team had successfully worked with an incountry provider for the Web, but that company’s streaming capabilities were limited. TRN had essentially been locked into the Windows Media streaming format, with no possibility of mobile for the foreseeable future.

“We quickly realised we needed to support more formats as the technology moved forward,” said Luey. “So one of the key drivers for finding a new provider was the desire to launch an iPhone and Android smartphone app.”

The search took TRN to StreamGuys, a content delivery network and streaming media provider with a global streaming footprint – and a tested architecture for mobile delivery.

LOCATION NO PROBLEM StreamGuys has data centres around the world, but the company is headquartered just off the northern California coast in the United States. The distance from here to there — 20 hours in time zone difference — initially raised concern.

“We were at first unsure about moving to an offshore provider to get the service we required,” said Wayne Sleeman, Broadcast Engineering Manager for TRN. “But the flexibility they offered and the ease of setting up streams gave us the confidence to make the switch.”

Common sense prevailed through a gradual transition that started with a single stream. Latency was a concern – “never a great thing from a streaming perspective,” notes Luey – though tests proved signal delays were minimal and reasonable.

For Sleeman it was less about latency than proving that the long-distance relationship would work.

“We had reasonable latency with our previous New Zealand-based provider as well,” said Sleeman. “In the end it was about quality and reliability of the stream – and the ability to support many formats.”

RADIO

MULTI-FORMAT SUPPORT

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Multi-format streaming support is simplified by reducing the workload at the contribution point. Sleeman and his team wanted to avoid the burden of contributing streams in every format they required for their audience.

“StreamGuys essentially transcodes our streams into all the formats we need for delivery to many devices,” he said.

In New Zealand, the TRN architecture encodes audio with Orban cards, which seamlessly hand off the signals to the StreamGuys architecture. Sleeman notes that the Orban product replaces a software-based encoder, and has sharply increased stream quality while keeping the process simple and straightforward.

The Orban cards offer both mp3 and AACplus audio processing, the latter of which gives consumers an even higher-quality listening option.

Live streaming audio is delivered via the open-source Icecast platform to support mp3 and AAC+ audio delivery. Protocols supported include RTMP for delivery to online Flash players; HLS, which handles stream packetisation for the iPhone and iPad; and RTSP, which supports delivery to Android and BlackBerry devices.

Wowza Media servers are built into the StreamGuys architecture to costeffectively support delivery to all targeted devices from a single point.

StreamGuys delivers both live and on-demand content for TRN over its cloud-based streaming platform. The company’s cloud-based service abstracts the hardware layer from services by building clusters of physical nodes on top of the VMWare ESXi platform, which enables server virtualisation. This offers broadcasters a streaming architecture with high availability, strong redundancy and flexibility to scale on short notice.

The scalability aspect is one that especially resonates with Sleeman.

“We can add a stream on short notice and at any time using this architecture,” he said. “I can have a new stream up and configured by StreamGuys within a couple of hours. There is a lot of flexibility in their architecture, to the point where we can light up a new one-off or permanent stream without a lot of aggravation.”

BEYOND AUDIO Jacobs Media provides the mobile applications that are helping to evolve the broadcast radio experience for TRN listeners. The apps integrate within the StreamGuys architecture to ensure that the live stream and other content are delivered seamlessly through a single user interface.

“Jacobs Media has a lot of experience with producing apps for radio,” said Luey. “Our apps are quite dynamic and deliver real-time audio streaming, but also deliver content pages that feed through our websites and are always up to date. We can serve all of our unique content this way, like photo galleries, video, Podcasts, news, weather and traffic. It really supports the multimedia nature of radio.”

TRN has only just begun dipping its toes into the video pool. The broadcaster has launched a live studio camera stream for its NewsTalk ZB format that is gradually building numbers.

“It’s a small following, but there’s a following,” said Luey, who notes that the numbers spike a bit when special guests are on the feed. “But we are looking seriously at video, which is expected to grow quite significantly in New Zealand. Today, service providers are in the process of deploying fibre-tothe-home connections to 75 percent of the country. So it’s expected that online video will grow quite significantly.”

This of course makes advertising over the streaming platform an important consideration. Today, TRN is selling audio pre-rolls with fairly high demand.

RADIO NUMBERS AND ANALYTICS No streaming service is complete without facts and figures. TRN is today using StreamGuys’ monitoring and reporting software to positive results, some of which have helped the company strategise for the future.

The two primary resources are SGMon, a concurrency monitoring service that provides per-stream data; and SGReports, which provides richer details within custom reports.

“SGMon offers data tied to simultaneous listeners per stream, per format and per station,” said Andrew Jones, sales engineer for StreamGuys. “The software polls the server every five minutes to take readings on listener numbers and create an archive.

“The purpose of these services is to assist with business plans and determine if and when service changes are required based on numbers and bandwidth commitments,” said Jones.

Luey notes that TRN wasn’t completely certain of its bandwidth requirements upon migration to StreamGuys. Her team worked closely with Jones and sales representative Matt Marvin to determine capacity needs at the time and into the future, gradually scaling to their current bandwidth needs.

“It quickly became clear that we under-forecasted our bandwidth requirements,” said Luey. “Matt was very good about introducing tiers into our contract that gave us the advantage to increase bandwidth requirements on the fly.”

SPECIAL EVENTS The recent Rugby World Cup is an ideal example of TRN and StreamGuys working together to launch a special service on short notice. TRN served as host broadcast for the Cup, which took place in New Zealand last fall.

“Part of their contract with the International Rugby Board required delivery of a

128 kbps mp3 Flash stream, along with content protection that would prevent audiences from outside the country from accessing the streams,” said Jones.

Sleeman asked StreamGuys to establish a test stream within the existing architecture. The quality was confirmed, and StreamGuys added its GeoBlocking digital rights management technology to an existing Wowza Media server. This fulfilled the legal obligation of preventing access to audiences outside New Zealand.

“It’s a simplistic view, but it just works,” said Sleeman. “They turn it on and we go about our business.”

The importance of communication for both special events and ongoing support of existing services is critical given the distance between the two companies, ensuring that nothing skips a beat.

“The fact that they are 20 hours ahead of us means that our around-theclock technical support is that much more important,” said Marvin. “We have well-established protocols to help them light up new streams and troubleshoot issues. It doesn’t take very detailed requests to get them what they want. It’s a big testament to the quality of their workflow and operation.”

RADIO

SGReports broadens the scope for TRN and other users. This is a log-based analytical service that can create very specific reports on visitors tied to geographic locations, average dwell times, individual IP addresses and other figures.

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RADIO  Continued from page 46

Employment opportunities will be created during the construction phase of the project for rigging, communication links, hardware suppliers and electrical trades.

Univesal Camera Kit Versatile on camera microphone suspension

DAB+ TRIALS IN CANBERRA, DARWIN & OCR IN MELBOURNE ACMA has extended scientific licences in Canberra and Darwin and for the on channel repeater at 101 Collins Street, Melbourne for DAB+ trials.

Trial activities include testing the tradeoff between capacity and signal robustness for different Forward Error Correction (FEC) code rates under a range of geographical conditions.

Other activities include single frequency network (SFN) research which will have implications for regional roll out, and evaluation of DAB+ transmission performance under extreme weather conditions such as tropical storms and cyclones.

On the content side the trial broadcasters are working on multimedia content and with the Emergency Management Agencies to get suitable RSS feeds for broadcast and management of incident escalation.

DAB+ IN MULTIMEDIA DEVICES INCLUDING MOBILE PHONE HANDSETS Kit includes: Windjammer, Hot Shoe Extender & Camera Clamp Adaptor.

Suitable for most camera-mounted shotgun microphones, it provides low profile slip-on wind shielding with excellent wind protection of up to 36 dB. Shock mount and suspension attaches to the hot shoe for high quality external camcorder microphones; enabling the best possible sound production quality.

CRA continues to test adaptors and mobile handsets which offer DAB+ as these further develop the platform and offer listeners and advertisers a hybrid device which uses the push and power of free to air broadcast to provide information whilst supporting interactivity through the pull of the back channel with information able to be sourced on demand.

New applications like categorised slideshow, trigger timed events and broadcast URLs are yet to fully mature, but Australian broadcasters are at the forefront of the international development and standardisation.

RadioDNS and Radio Tag, expected to be deployed in 2014, will further increase radio broadcasters’ ability to connect with listeners and provide state-of-the-art services to listeners.

DAB+ IN THE ASIA PACIFIC REGION Broadcasters and regulators in the Asia Pacific are increasingly aware of, and interested in adopting, the DAB+ platform. Recent study tours from Indonesia, Korea and Thailand have allowed the Australian industry to showcase the successful DAB+ rollout.

The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia (KOMINFO), Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI), WorldDMB and the ABU hosted a DAB+ technology workshop and transmission demonstration in September, comprising a two day technology workshop followed by a two day transmission trial and field measurement exercise in and around the city of Jakarta.

The workshop and demonstration was coordinated by CRA, RRI, ABU and World DMB, with support from equipment suppliers RFS/Megatech, Harris Transmitters, Factum Electronics, Radioscape, ATDI; chipmaker Keystone Semiconductors; and demonstration receivers from Lingo, Pure and Revo.

55 participants from Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore were given first hand information on all aspects of planning for DAB+ digital radio implementation. A 50w EIRP transmission at 50m height provided reasonable coverage of the drive test area and correlated well with coverage predictions by ATDI. Different FEC rates were used to demonstrate the impact on coverage and field strength.

A set of recommendations was developed to help broadcasters and regulators in the region commence planning for the introduction of digital radio services.

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RADIO

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50

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CONCLUSION In short, radio has a bright future. As the current success of DAB+ digital broadcast technology highlights so far after three years, listeners are excited by a new approach to one of the most used electronic media.

They are prepared to try the new technology and buy a new receiver.

However, there is still much work to do and the industry is ready to roll up its sleeves and get on with it. The future is multi faceted but it must include a digital broadcast platform.

Visit www.commercialradio.com.au

AUDIO Digital soundwaves

www.content-technology.com/audio

THE MINISTER FOR BROADBAND, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, announced the conclusion of the technical audio description trial conducted on ABC television.

“This trial was the first test of audio description on Australian television, and I thank the ABC for conducting it for the Government,” Senator Conroy said.

Audio description is intended to assist viewers with a vision impairment by providing an additional verbal commentary that explains what is happening visually during television programs to complement the underlying soundtrack. The 13-week trial was designed to test how broadcasters capture audio description through to its transmission in the broadcast signal and how it is received in the home.

“I would also like to thank those people with a vision impairment who participated in the trial, and those who have provided feedback to me and the ABC. It’s clear that audio description is a service that is strongly desired by the visionimpaired community, and the trial was embraced with real enthusiasm by participants. I share that enthusiasm for what new digital technologies can provide to enable improved access to television and other electronic media for people with a disability,” Senator Conroy said.

“However, there were significant technical concerns raised during the trial, with over 1000 complaints from viewers whose reception of ABC1 was disrupted because of the audio description broadcast.”

The ABC will provide a report to the government before the end of the year.

Visit www.dbcde.gov.au

MPG Helps Define a New Industry Standard THE MUSIC PRODUCERS GUILD’S (MPG) Mastering Group has achieved a significant breakthrough for recording artists and other copyright owners by working with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to create an industry standard for embedding ISRCs within digital music files. This will make accurate file identification and content tracking much easier and could help royalty agencies develop more precise systems for payments.

MPG Mastering Group board member and Alchemy Mastering Engineer, Barry Grint, who led the initiative, says, “ISRC stands for International Standard Recording Code. Every song released – and indeed every version of that song – is allocated a unique ISRC by the record label. In the past the ISRC information was included within sub data streams of a CD, so a track could be identified by its associated ISRC. “However, now that we have entered the digital age and are increasingly using digital WAV files, the ability to securely associate ISRC data with specific tracks has been lost because the only common way to incorporate ISRC into a WAV file is via the file name. If someone renames the file – or if the name is truncated or amended by a software program – the vital ISRC information can easily be lost.”

The MPG Mastering Group recognised that this was a major problem and that the industry needed an approved method for embedding ISRC data within a WAV file. Fortunately, the EBU had developed the Broadcast WAV File (BWF), a variant of the WAV file for use by broadcasters.

Although this variation allows for metadata to be added within the file, no standard had been defined as to how and where the data should be stored. Grint approached the EBU and asked them to adapt the BWF standard so that ISRC’s could once again be included in metadata in a regular way.

“The new system is simple to implement and the MPG is encouraging workstation manufacturers and record companies to use BWF in preference to WAV as the standard specification for file exchange,” Grint says. “Once adopted, this system will allow ISRC to flow through the whole production chain. iTunes and other aggregators will be able to pull the ISRC through during encoding and broadcast playout systems can easily be adapted to recognise the ISRC, making airplay reporting far more accurate.

“This is a major step forward for the music industry as it gives us the opportunity to identify with certainty every digital Master file regardless of how that file is named. We would like to thank the team at the EBU for recognising the importance of this to the MPG and the Music Industry worldwide and the speed with which they were able to bring this about. By making ISRC the cornerstone of asset management and royalty reporting, we should be able to ensure a more accurate system of royalty payments and writer/performer credits, thereby supporting the income of all recording artists and copyright owners well into the future.”

Visit www.mpg.org.uk

MPEG Readies the Stage for 3D Audio AT THE 102ND MPEG MEETING held in Shanghai, China, MPEG has issued a Draft Call for Proposals (CfP) on 3D Audio Coding. MPEG-H 3D Audio is envisaged to complement the highly immersive experience provided by MPEG-H HEVC. Such an immersive listening experience will be realised by the rendering of a realistic and compelling 3D audio scene, either by using a large number of loudspeakers, such as for 22.2 channel audio programs, or by using binauralisation for headphone listening.

Key issues to be addressed are: a compact and bit-efficient representation of multi-channel audio programs with the ability to scale up to transparent quality and the flexible rendering of an audio program to an arbitrary number of loudspeakers for arbitrary configurations. 3D Audio support via headphones is a key capability in order to deliver an immersive experience for users of mobile devices.

A final CfP will be issued at the 103rd meeting in January 2012, with selection of technology from amongst the responses received at the 105th meeting in July 2013. This technology will form the basis for MPEG-H 3D Audio, the Audio part (Part 3) of the MPEG-H (ISO/IEC 23008) suite of technologies.

MPEG has launched a new Ad hoc Group (AhG) activity towards responding to industry needs on the adoption of MPEG Audio technology. This AhG will assess industry needs in the marketplace, respond to inquiries and make available information such as conformance streams, application notes and white papers, that might support adoption of MPEG Audio technology in the various application domains. The information will be disseminated by various means, including websites and user forums and participation in the AhG is open to the public.

At this meeting, MPEG reviewed the responses to the call for proposals on the standardisation of the Multimedia Preservation Archival Format.

Responses showed that MPEG has wide range of technologies to be used for multimedia preservation such as Professional Archival Application Format, MPEG-21 Digital Item Description Language and various MPEG-7 audio-visual descriptors. MPEG will continue to evaluate the submissions and develop standards in its coming meetings including a working draft in April 2013 that will achieve the status of Final Draft International Standard in April 2014.

Also, work toward the description of an Augmented Reality Reference Model (ARRM) that will become MPEG A Part 14, has achieved the Draft Technical Report status.

Visit http://mpeg.chiariglione.org

AUDIO

ABC1 Audio Description Trial Concludes

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AUDIO

Capturing the Plight of the Great Apes RECORDING AUDIO ON FILM SHOOTS in extreme locations always presents technical issues, but when Great Apes are your subject matter you really can’t afford to get too close without upsetting the animals or putting yourself at risk.

This was the situation sound designer Craig Carter faced when he undertook 15 weeks of filming in the jungles of Africa, Indonesia, Sumatra and Borneo for The Last of the Great Apes, a 3D film covering all six species of Great Apes. His microphone of choice for capturing surround ambience was a DPA 5100 Mobile Surround Microphone. For avoiding unwanted extraneous noise he turned to the DPA 4017B Shotgun Microphone with a Rycote Windshield solution, which he used on a long boom so that he could capture the sounds he wanted without disturbing the animals.

“After taking some very helpful advice from Julius Chan at DPA’s Australian distributor Amber Technologies, I chose the DPA 5100 surround microphone for its sound pressure capabilities and its ease of use in the conditions I was working in,” Craig explains. “Thanks to its compact size and extreme portability, it was ideally suited to these very challenging conditions. Also, the DPA 5100 has only one multicore cable, which was an important consideration because I was mainly recording and booming on my own. Having lots of cables to worry about would have made the task way too difficult.”

AUDIO

Produced by Australian film company, Visionquest Entertainment, The Last of the Great Apes is a feature-length documentary that will be released in cinemas and supported by a six-part TV series. Conservationist Holly Carroll fronts the documentary, which focuses attention on the plight of these magnificent animals whose fate hangs in the balance as their populations decline. Holly’s adventure brings her face-to-face with the

52

poachers, animal smugglers and loggers who put the survival of the world’s Great Apes at risk. She also meets experts, like primatologist Jane Goodall, who are working hard to save the Great Apes.

“At times it was humid and condensation was the most constant issue,” Craig says. “However the DPA 5100 is surprisingly robust and was highly resilient to the humidity. We just took as much care as we could to protect all the equipment from the environment so that nothing came to any harm.”

“Getting in close enough to a subject to be able to record a defined effect and separate it from the background ambiance was tricky, especially as jungles are normally intense with the sound of cicadas, etc,” he adds. “The DPA 5100 coped with this very well because it gave us low sensitivity to background noise and good dynamic range.”

Visit www.dpamicrophones.com

AUDIO

Murdoch University Takes Sound and Media to the Next Level WESTERN AUSTRALIA’S Murdoch University launched its Bachelor of Media in Sound – a new course for media students – in February 2011, which required giving students access to the best facilities to use and study sound.

Rather than having sound studies included as an adjunct to the Film and Television or Media department, the University’s Bachelor of Media in Sound course now offers students the opportunity to study sound specifically, as well as exploring the use of sound for film, music, games and television.

“When we introduced the Bachelor of Media in Sound last year, we knew that we needed a new facility and the best equipment for teaching and learning all about sound,” commented Leo Murray, Academic Chair of Sound & Radio at Murdoch University. “We chose Avid for our new facility because of the quality and flexibility of the System 5-MC and because it works well with all the other DAW software. Whether we want to use Nuendo or ProTools or Audition, we can with this system. It’s incredibly versatile.”

The larger of the university’s two television studios was re-purposed into a brand new, multi-purpose studio facility specifically for use by sound students. A 14m x 12m studio floor with 7m ceilings, the 1000m³ space boasts a control room large enough to take a class of people for teaching purposes and studio area which can be used for anything from small bands up to large ensemble performances and recordings, or even as a soundstage for film sets.

“The Avid system is great because it enables you to get your hands on something and really feel as though you’re working on it, rather than just moving a mouse and not having that sense of getting right into what you’re doing. It also has the ‘wow’ factor because everyone is impressed when they first see the facilities,” Mr Murray added. “The System 5-MC is also a great teaching aid as you can actually show the students more about what they can do with sound and give them real hands on experience.”

The Murdoch University media production department has a smaller recording studio where students can use Artist series control surfaces as they start learning about sound. Then, as their studies advance, they can learn more and gain increased exposure to using sound in the larger and more professionally fitted multi-purpose studio.

“Having an Avid System 5-MC means that we can expose our students to the professional side of the industry and it helps them to readily see how what they are learning here will be transferrable to the professional world. In that sense, they’re getting a real world, real industry style focus to their studies as well as having exposure to the research and academic aspects. It’s a richer overall experience,” Mr Murray concluded.

In its first year, the course intake was 35 students, with the first group of Bachelor of Media in Sound students due to graduate in 2013. The intake has already increased to 45 students for the 2014 graduation.

Visit www.avid.com

Live Multi-Channel Dialogue Noise Suppressor CEDAR AUDIO HAS ANNOUNCED its latest developments in noise suppression, audio restoration and speech enhancement for post, broadcast, mastering, archives and forensic audio investigation.

The DNS 8 Live multi-channel dialogue noise suppressor boasts a simplified ’2-knob’ approach as well as a detailed editing mode that offers more control than any previous dialogue noise suppressor.

Nonetheless, it retains near-zero latency and, with its 12VDC input, it’s suitable for use in all live situations – not just broadcasting, but live sound in venues such as theatres, concert halls, conferences venues, and places of worship.

With the DNS 8 RC remote control software due for release later in the year, the DNS will no longer be tied to a DAW – it’s the DNS for everyone.

Visit www.cedaraudio.com

AUDIO

WohlerLoudness Leverages AERO.file Technology WOHLER TECHNOLOGIES has announced that the Linear Acoustic AERO.file audio processor and loudness manager will be offered exclusively by Wohler as a turnkey solution: WohlerLoudness. This solution for file-based loudness correction offers users an efficient method of solving loudness problems and maintaining compliance with global loudness standards.

“We’re building on our acquisition of RadiantGrid Technologies and extending the broad set of RadiantGrid features by creating tightly built appliance and software packages that solve broadcasters’ most challenging issues,” said Carl Dempsey, Wohler president and CEO. “Enabling new levels of efficiency in file-based loudness and audio control, WohlerLoudness is just another example of this initiative.”

“We are proud to be working with Wohler to help broadcasters achieve

loudness compliance while maintaining quality,” said Tim Carroll, founder and president of Linear Acoustic. “WohlerLoudness sets a new high standard for file-based audio correction.”

AERO.file was designed by Linear Acoustic and incorporated by RadiantGrid Technologies to raise the bar for loudness and audio control in file-based workflows. Now part of WohlerLoudness, this solution provides file-based inspection/correction software that enables users to identify and correct loudness issues at ingest, before they become a problem.

When processing the audio associated with video, RadiantGrid transwrapping enables rapid audio processing without the need to decode and re-encode video files and without compromising the quality of the original content.

Visit www.linearacoustic.com and www.wohler.com

Fairlight Introduces QUANTUM with faders, switches, knobs and jogger wheel, augmented with touch screen and mouse based functions. QUANTUM’s motorised faders combine with a dual row of rotary encoders to provide touch-triggered automation of all mixing parameters. QUANTUM includes an embedded Edit controller utilising Fairlight’s unique Picture Keys. These adapt their appearance and function for easy navigation with fewer keystrokes.

The control surface reinvents itself for each task you undertake, presenting the commands you need at the right time. Fairlight’s new iCan technology, with drag-and-drop Layout Editor, allows audio engineers to design their own button layouts for specialised functions. Also available are flexible mounting systems to attach speakers and screens from the rear of the console.

Editing, SD/HD integrated video, mixing, plug-ins, file transfer, recording are integrated all in one system. As part of the Fairlight range it is fully file format compatible with all Fairlight products, and provides workflows for virtually all SD and HD file formats. The CC-1 Media engine supports up to 192 disk recorder tracks, 230 mixing channels and 2 HD video tracks for 3D work.

to the company’s high-end Audio Post Production range. QUANTUM is a complete audio post production system combining the power of Fairlight’s hardware and software, recording, editing, mixing, plug-ins, MIDI and video with a fully integrated, 12 or 24 fader console.

Included is support for up to 256 inputs and outputs, built-in EQ and dynamics for every channel, access to VST plug-ins and instruments, and mixing to multiple bus destinations up to 7.1 wide. The QUANTUM audio post production system interfaces to popular server architectures and its compatibility with professional video file formats make it the natural choice for post-production in a busy multi-purpose facility.

QUANTUM offers control through the operation of its tactile control surface

Visit www.fairlight.com.au

AES 2012 HAS SEEN the debut of Fairlight QUANTUM, the latest addition

Live Loudness Processing from TC Electronic TC ELECTRONIC’S ‘LIVE AID’ Processing for its System 6000 MKII includes BS.1770-3 compliant processing and metering solutions. The Live Aid license includes the ALC6 algorithm that introduces five industry-first features.

AUDIO

Without sacrificing audio quality, OB and Live production may now comply with the latest international standards on loudness and true-peak level.

Live Aid also contains the DMix algorithm that is able to downmix, loudness process, headphone optimise and true-peak limit any mono, stereo or 5.1 source. Precise conditioning of a program for Mobile TV, iPod or IPTV is now possible, thus creating a 5.1 audio and Mobile feed directly off the OB truck.

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In conjunction with TC’s Radar Loudness Meter, ‘Live Aid’ forms a full package for production, post or mastering facilities delivering content for film or broadcast. In short, the Radar Loudness Display provides the user with coherent information of all relevant loudness data, including history, in a single, recognisable view. The Radar Meter is available on several different platforms such as System 6000 MKII, DB4 MKII/DB8 MKII and LM2, as well as in the form of native plug-ins supporting AAX, RTAS, Audio Suite, AU and VST formats.

Visit www.tcelectronic.com/loudness

Neyrinck SoundCode Pro Tools Plug-in THE NEW SOUNDCODE LTRT TOOLS for Pro Tools 10 plug-in is now shipping. It features LtRt encoding and Pro Logic IIx decoding for broadcasters and audio post facilities. Neyrinck’s older SoundCode Stereo LtRt plug-in for Pro Tools can be upgraded to add the new Pro Logic decoding features.

SoundCode LtRt Tools is a suite of Pro Tools AAX Native, AAX DSP, and Audiosuite plug-ins designed for post-production studios, TV mixers, video game mixers, and broadcasters that monitor or deliver stereo down mixed and LtRt encoded audio compatible with Pro Logic I and II decoders.

Founder, Paul Neyrinck, said, “SoundCode Stereo LtRt is the standard for LtRt encoding in Pro Tools with its flexible, fast encoding. And, now that Avid is not updating Dolby Surround Tools for AAX, customers need a new way to decode and monitor LtRt encoded audio. So we partnered with Dolby to bring Pro Logic decoding to AAX Native and DSP systems. Now users can decode and monitor LtRt encoded material within Pro Tools so this is a welcome update to our surround sound product range.”

Visit www.neyrinck.com

TRANSMISSION Signal distribution, test & measurement

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) has announced the appointment of Broadcast Australia as the Program Manager for the Australian Government’s Restack of digital television services.

BROADCAST AUSTRALIA will coordinate and manage the spectrum clearance (restack) works for all national and commercial television services to clear the 700 MHz band spectrum in advance of the Government’s Digital Dividend auction.

While switchover to digital television in Australia is due to be completed by 31 December 2013, the final step to realising the digital dividend is for a significant number of digital television services to be moved to new channels so that channels 52 to 69 can be cleared and made available for new services such as wireless broadband.

This will involve a major reorganisation (or ‘restack’) of digital television services across Australia, with some equipment at affected transmission sites being retuned, replaced or otherwise modified to operate in new channels below UHF channel 52. Generally, this will take place once digital television switchover has occurred in an area. Over 1300 television services at more than 400 locations will need to be moved to new channels.

Most free-to-air television viewers will be affected to some extent. Viewers will not need new televisions, but will generally need to retune their existing televisions or set top boxes to maintain access to free to air services that have undergone a channel change under restack.

The Government expects that the restack of affected digital television services be completed by 31 December 2014. It has committed AUD$143.2 million to meet costs associated with the program.

Broadcast Australia CEO, Graeme Barclay said, “Broadcast Australia is pleased to have been selected by the Australian Government to undertake the critical role of Program Manager for the Restack programme. Restack is one of the most innovative and challenging projects in the broadcasting industry and is also significant for future advancements within Australia’s telecommunications sector.

“This appointment reaffirms our expertise in broadcast engineering and our strengths; such as our long established relationships with both the national and commercial broadcasters. We look forward to working in partnership with the Government and the broadcasters to undertake the complex engineering work that is required to clear spectrum.”

Broadcast Australia has developed an Indicative Nationwide Restack Timetable in partnership with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and industry. The current timetable outlines a national schedule for restacking TV services, and a more detailed timetable will be released in November.

where physical space permits, a technical team will visit the site and where required install the new combiner along with any new transmitters. These will be tested but not placed into service until the appointed restack night/ day. The intention is that restack works will be undertaken during a single outage period, and generally undertaken overnight, where possible.

On the restack night/day, a team will attend the site and will: + Retune the existing transmitters (as necessary), + Connect the existing on-channel transmitters and retuned transmitters to the new combiner (the replaced transmitters will already be connected), + Connect the new combiner to the antenna (new or existing), + Test the operational parameters of all equipment, and + Where possible / necessary recover any ground based surplus equipment from the site.

A further visit may be required at many sites to recover surplus digital television related equipment made redundant by any newly installed equipment and to undertake make-good works.

As a number of antennas will need to be replaced, replacement antennas will be planned to have sufficient bandwidth to carry both the existing and the restacked channels so that only one site visit for antenna works will be required. Where possible, the use of multiple antennas on a structure will be avoided, as this will significantly increase the cost and time, because it would require a second visit to remove the original or temporary antenna and may require structural analysis work.

With regard to transmitters, unless there is a change of band from UHF to VHF, or VHF to UHF, it is expected that high power transmitters will be retuned. The retuning process may take two or three consecutive nights to complete. After the first night, the services will be operating on the new channels. On subsequent nights, fine tuning is expected to take place to bring the services within the required operational specifications.

Some low power transmitters will need to be replaced as they cannot be re-tuned and placed back into service overnight. Depending upon the number of services that will require a retune on a particular site, it may be necessary to provide replacement transmitters to ensure the works can be accommodated within a single outage period.

Combiners will be replaced unless, in particular circumstances, they can be modified overnight. A technical team will visit the site and where required install the new combiner along with any new transmitters. These will be tested but not placed into service.

STAFFING THE RESTACK The indicative restack timetable is based on 15 separate restack teams being available from the start of the program. Of these 15 teams, at least five teams must be qualified for working on high power sites. An additional two rapid response teams will also be needed where restack work is underway in order to correct faults or undertake clean-up work not attended to by the restack teams. This will take the total number of teams required to 17.

The timetable states that high power teams will nominally consist of four staff and low power teams of two staff. The total number of qualified technical staff required is therefore 44, plus an allowance needs to be made for attrition during the 2 year program. Allowing for sick leave and training requirements the actual figure is more likely to be about 50 field staff or about 20 teams in total to reduce risk.

According to the Broadcast Australia/ACMA indicative timetable, a staged approach to restacking at each site will be adopted. Any antenna replacements will be undertaken at least one month in advance of the proposed restack date. This work is done by antenna rigging teams.

However, the timetable states that preliminary advice from industry is that only 12 teams would be feasible from within Australia. This will mean that to start in early 2013 with 15 teams will require the identification of additional resources plus the necessary training, induction and certification of staff.

Some teams may need to be sourced from both overseas organisations and industries from within Australia with similar skill sets (such as telecommunications and mining communications) to allow the requirement for 15 teams to be met. Work is underway to identify and engage these additional staff.

Again, well in advance of the restack day (at least one month prior), and

Visit www.dbcde.gov.au/restack

RESTACK LOGISTICS

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Broadcast Australia to Manage Channel Restack Program

www.content-technology.com/transmission

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UK Completes DTV Switchover OCTOBER 24, 2012, saw the UK end more than 70 years of analogue broadcasting with the completion of its switchover to digital television.

Switchover has boosted digital terrestrial TV (Freeview) coverage to 10 million viewers in reception blackspots across the UK and cleared airwaves for new uses, including the next generation of mobile broadband services.

The final stage of the change got underway after Olympic gold medallist Dame Mary Peters switched off the last analogue signals in the UK at the Divis transmitter, just outside Belfast and Freeview signals were boosted across Northern Ireland.

Industry group Digital UK led co-ordination of the switchover, including transmitter upgrades and a viewer information campaign. Transmission company Arqiva undertook the re-engineering of more than 1,100 transmitter sites.

UK regulator Ofcom welcomed the successful completion of the UK’s switchover from analogue to digital terrestrial television, saying it has

not only ensured that all UK households now have access to wide range of digital television channels, but has also paved the way for the next generation of mobile broadband.

According to Ofcom, the switchover to digital has freed up much needed capacity that will be used to deliver the fourth generation (4G) of mobile services. At the end of 2012, Ofcom will start the process of auctioning the Digital Dividend, the airwaves previously occupied by analogue television.

The switchover process began in April 2004 when Ofcom published the blueprint for turning off analogue television in the UK. A switchover trial then followed in Whitehaven in 2007, and the rest of the UK has since been switched to digital region by region.

In all, Ofcom produced a coverage plan for 1154 digital TV transmitter sites which secured near universal access to digital public service broadcasting services and cleared new capacity for other uses such as 4G mobile services Visit www.digitaluk.co.uk and www.ofcom.org.uk

Broadcast Australia to Share Sites with NBN Co BROADCAST AUSTRALIA has signed an agreement to assist NBN Co., the company established to implement Australia’s National Broadband Network, in rolling out its fixed wireless network, through the co-location of radio communications equipment on Broadcast Australia’s national site portfolio of wireless communications infrastructure.

As the owner and operator of communications infrastructure sites across metropolitan, regional, and remote areas; Broadcast Australia is a “neutral host” for wireless communications requirements.

Brett Savill, Broadcast Australia’s Strategy and Corporate Development Director, said, “Broadcast Australia is committed to working with customers and industry partners such as the NBN Co. to support the deployment of new wireless technologies. Through this arrangement, NBN Co. will have access to our sites across Australia, which will enable high quality wide-area communications coverage in remote regions as well as metropolitan communities.”

Visit www.broadcastaustralia.com.au

WTS

Lumina Broadcast Systems are proud to represent these world leaders in broadcast equipment.

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WILL- BURT

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Lumina Broadcast Systems Australia Pty Ltd, P.O. Box 1693, Lane Cove NSW 1595 Phone: +61 2 9113 0720. Fax: +61 2 8572 5285. Email: sales@luminabsa.com www.luminabroadcast.com.au

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Skyline Launches DataMiner 7.5 SKYLINE COMMUNICATIONS, a leader in end-to-end multi-vendor network management solutions for the IPTV, HFC broadband, broadcast and satellite industry, has announced the launch of DataMiner 7.5.

Amongst the enhancements, DataMiner 7.5 will bring its users a new, usercentric approach on notifications, an enhanced service management layer, the introduction of DataMiner Applications that will empower out-of-the-box solutions for a wealth of popular products and technologies, new add-ons for the correlation engine, a complete suite of mobile applications, and much more.

“As you roam between work stations and mobile devices, DataMiner 7.5 will offer you a seamless experience. In other words, whatever mobile device you are working with, you will be able to monitor any active device in your operational system, irrespective what vendor it is from. And even control those devices, view performance graphs, manage alerts and much more. Apple, Microsoft, Google or Research in Motion, we have you fully covered for any of the mobile phones or tablets you use,” commented Ben Vandenberghe, Sales & Marketing Director at Skyline Communications.

DataMiner Applications is an entirely new framework within the DataMiner network management system, which will enable designing out-of-the-box product- or technology-specific applications. These DataMiner Applications will be designed by Subject Matter Expert teams, composed by both Skyline’s DataMiner experts and product experts from various vendors.

Also, the DataMiner Service Management gets a complete overhaul in DataMiner 7.5, with a large number of advanced new capabilities. DataMiner Service Management is responsible for the run-time aggregation and translation of device information into service-oriented information. The technology is used to manage a wide variety of services in IPTV, satellite, broadcast and HFC broadband environments. It enables operators to instantly see the impact of infrastructure incidents on a service level, and to take the appropriate actions to safeguard their revenues.

Visit www.skyline.be

Video Routing, Switching and Conversion THE C3-340 FROM TV ONE is a firmware based platform. Sixteen AV universal module slots are available and TV One’s CORIO matrix automatically recognises the modules inserted as an input or output module. There is no dedicated input or output slots when using 2-Channel DVI-U or 3G-SDI modules. It can be configured with up to 64 x 64 input/output 3G-SDI/DVI-U connection combinations. This flexibility allows end user configurations to be based on their own needs instead of the router forcing a certain setup and limited configuration.

The CORIO matrix also provides Up, Down and Cross conversion between a variety of analogue and digital video formats through 3G-SDI. The modules selected determine what format will be accommodated and the matrix size. Signal parameters of the incoming video may be adjusted. All settings are stored in non-volatile memory and are retained even when power is switched off.

All the functions can be controlled via serial connection via RS232/422/485, USB or IP. Windows software is provided. A front panel LCD option makes direct setup easy and third party controllers permit a wide choice of control options. The unit is housed in a standard 4RU rackmount case and features an optional redundant hot swappable internal PSU and power inlet.

The CORIO matrix includes Digital Flicker Elimination circuitry and high 4:4:4 full bandwidth sampling rate ensures crisp, clear images, while full bandwidth chroma sampling ensures faithfully reproduced, high resolution colours. Pixel Level Motion Adaptive Diagonal Interpolation and Noise Reduction ensures high quality de-interlacing of PAL, NTSC and 1080i signals.

Visit www.tvone.co.uk

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TRANSMISSION

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The Future Direction of Channel Playout By: Andrew Warman, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Harris Broadcast Communications

When it comes to broadcast play to air, conventional thinking says a variety of equipment is required to reliably play out the schedule created by the traffic and sales system that drives each channel. This includes automation for control, asset management to make sure the right content is available at the right time, a video server for clip playout and graphic branding equipment to individualise the channel. Master control must be considered if live content is added, or there is a need to jump in and out of a main feed. A variety of other supporting systems are also needed to ensure compliance with prevailing regulations.

THINGS LOOKED RATHER DIFFERENT 15 years ago. Control systems were simpler, video servers were in their infancy, and on-air graphics used were not nearly as intricate. It seems reasonable to assume that the growing popularity of “channel in a box” (CIB), or “station in a box” systems aimed at play-to-air should ultimately replace conventional wisdom as it exists today.

That said, there are challenges to consider.

Those that have either looked at or implemented systems around CIB have, for the most part, focused on low revenue-generating channels. This is driven by the ever growing proliferation of channels serving different niche interests.

This makes sense, since a key promise of CIB is lower capital costs. The costs of launching new services need to be modest in light of the modest revenue generation expected in return. Bottom line impact on a low revenuegenerating channel is relatively modest, so gambling on a less mature technology is often worth the risk.

The overall reliability of CIB has been questioned. There are numerous areas where these systems can go wrong. The primary area revolves around relative complexity of the channel being delivered. The more you ask of the channel the less stable it becomes. This is because CIB systems are running on IT solutions. Essentially they are as good as the software applications they run, and the strength of the broadcast hardware inside.

Two areas that chiefly impact CIB reliability are graphic branding and clip playout. Graphic processing power is growing rapidly, thanks to the growing demands of computer gaming and related industries. Yet loading and playing graphic elements generate spikes of activity with variable load depending on the graphics requirements for that particular element. These bursts of activity can cause issues to other software systems running on the computer used for playout.

In contrast to graphic branding, playing video clips is a relatively simple task. But clip playback can also confound CIB solutions. Common causes are the complexity and variety of codecs, malformed content received by file distribution, and the appropriate use of QC to ensure valid files are ingested.

Hardware reliability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Building a system that requires 1:1 redundancy may be wasteful, so being able to deploy N+1 solutions to ensure system availability is desirable. This approach reduces the volume of file transfers, space requirements and equipment costs.

TRANSMISSION

Overall reliability as related to software and hardware is something that maturity will ultimately bring. Some solutions are more mature than others, either due to the underlying intellectual property they are built on, or evolution of the system over time.

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It has been said that unless everything to drive a channel is in “the box”, then it is not a channel in a box. CIB systems do not have everything that is needed fully integrated within. There are additional costs to ensure the channel has everything needed to go to air. So, while you may not be able to get a complete channel in a box, you can get several channels in a rack.

Since many CIB implementations are around low cost or niche channel applications, the interoperability and scalability of the system is likely small, or simply non-existent. This begs the question, “What if my channel becomes successful?”

One scenario to avoid is system replacement. Long-term value is maintained if the CIB has the ability to grow and adapt over time. That does not just mean new software modules added to the box; but also how it interacts with external systems such as traffic and billing, redeployment in shared storage applications, and the ability to support more complex automation control.

Solutions that cannot grow in functionality are little more use than the single function devices that CIB is intended to replace. This is the chief reason why IT-based solutions are chosen to build upon. Vendors get to ride the IT performance curve. CPU, GPU, RAM and drive performance is always on the rise. Parts exchange for more performance is better that complete chassis replacement to get more value long term, and support more complex features as they become available.

CIB systems rely on caching content to the playout device, and then playing that content to air. This approach is fine for many applications. However, if a channel needs more dynamic access to content, having the option to directly play from shared storage is important. This applies to cases where content is edited or added at the last minute, or where multiple channels play most, if not all, of the same content in their schedules.

One of the attractions of digital solutions and file-based workflows is the ability to make changes at the last moment. This is commonly supported in many systems, and can be further extended to activities such as selling commercials right up to airtime. There is no reason why a CIB system should not support this same dynamic approach possible with conventional solutions. Therefore, the way the system works with traffic and billing and automation can become an area of focus.

It seems that channel in a box solutions are here to stay. It is entirely reasonable to expect they will eventually play a key role in channel delivery.

While they do not suit all needs, many applications of the technology will solve and simplify the air chain and address ease of use and maintenance issues. How long it will be before they become a dominant force in play to air remains to be seen.

Versio IBC2012 saw the introduction of Harris Versio solution – a channel-in-a-box design for broadcasters that combines baseband video, channel branding and automated workflow capabilities in a software-based, single-rack-unit (RU) solution.

Versio significantly reduces the cost and time to launch broadcast, cable and other TV channels and services while offering simple integration with production, traffic and billing, scheduling, asset management, content playout and master control functions.

The initial release compresses multiple single-channel workflows into the 1RU platform, incorporating Harris video server, channel branding and graphics, and optional on-board automation components. Flexible software-based configurations range from single-channel launches to multi-channel distribution, expansion and disaster recovery systems.

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T-VIPS Simplifies IP Video Transport THIS YEAR’S IBC saw T-VIPS demonstrate its Connect5 video-centric network management solution which allows broadcasters and network operators to monitor, control and expand their video services.

Connect5 provides comprehensive monitoring, management and reporting capabilities in an easy to use framework. It can be combined with products in the T-VIPS Video Gateway, cProcessor and nSure ranges and integrated with other network management solutions.

Also showcased was the CP524 TS Adapter, the latest addition to the cProcessor toolbox. The T-VIPS CP524 enables operators and service providers to repackage and deliver content to multiple end points. The CP524 TS Adapter provides a single-box solution that takes the pain out of remultiplexing, filtering and mixing & matching services from multiple inputs to multiple outputs.

Another major new product to launch at IBC was the TNS460 HD/SDSDI Monitor, which ensures the efficient and continuous monitoring of HD and SD-SDI video signals allowing operators to better manage and deliver high quality content. Adding to the nSure product portfolio, the TNS460 is a compact and cost effective real-time solution intended to monitor video signal at central head-ends and at hand-over points in the broadcast value chain.

Visit www.t-vips.com

Rohde & Schwarz Closes Transmission Power Gaps DESIGNED FOR the lowest power classes (up to 10 W), the R&S MLx UHF low-power transmitter from Rohde & Schwarz integrates up to six transmit channels in one system. The transmitter boasts flexible configuration options for various applications and receiving conditions and, with a depth of just 250 mm, the R&S MLx is the most compact transmitter on the market. All interfaces can be accessed on the transmitter’s front panel, the transport stream can be fed via coaxial cable or satellite and the R&S MLx supports UMTS for monitoring broadcast operations.

The autonomous transmitter unit is ideal for rural areas with poor reception such as mountain valleys and islands, as well as for small private networks at trade fairs, shopping centres or universities. Even in city centres with many high-rise buildings, the R&S MLx can bolster network coverage. The R&S MLx supports echo cancellation with levels that are up to 24 dB higher than the input signal. With three echo windows and seven echo detection speeds, it provides a diverse range of optimisation options to improve digital TV reception.

The compact, 5 HU cabinet accommodates any combination of transmitters, gap fillers and re-transmitters with power classes of 1 W, 5 W or 10 W and allows them to be operated simultaneously, offering flexibility for any application. The redundancy concept is both fail-safe and customisable, from 5+1 redundancy all the way to three individual modules in passive standby.

Mixed DVB-T/H and DVB-T2 N+1 systems are also supported.

Visit www.rohde-schwarz.com

Flanders Monitors Support 12-bit Signals FLANDERS SCIENTIFIC has announced that the latest monitor firmware version (9.47-1830) is now shipping on all its units and is also available as a free firmware download to all FSI customers. This new release includes the official addition of the 12 bit signal support and processing announced at IBC, as well as other useful updates, including: + 12 bit RGB & YCbCr signal support & 12 bit processing Record Status Tally Feature that allows the monitor to read Start/Stop Record Flags in the SDI ancillary data of compatible cameras and to indicate when the camera is recording by activating the monitor’s red tally light. ARRI Alexa and Sony cameras with this feature enabled are currently supported New function button access to Log monitoring modes for faster single button press activation of Log monitoring modes introduced in the previous firmware release + BETA support of 12 bit XYZ format signals Current owners of FSI monitors can download the latest firmware from the update site where more detailed release notes can also be found. An updated user manual is also available.

Visit www.flandersscientific.com

RF Over Fibre DEV SYSTEMTECHNIK’S new OPTRIBUTION Desktop Modules transmits Radio Frequency (RF) signals over fibre optic links of up to 5 km over the Extended L-band. The new products offer advantages for use in cable TV heads, as well as satellite newsgathering (SNG) vehicles.

With options for low-budget applications and test setups, the new modules are a low-cost alternative to standard OPTRIBUTION models.

The first OPTRIBUTION Desktop Modules are the DEV 7285 transmitter and DEV 7385 receiver, which are stand-alone modules for optical transmission of RF signals in the 700 to 2300 MHz range. Measuring just 138 x 42 x 23 mm, the Desktop Modules are suited for space-limited applications, such as in TV news gathering vehicles. For satellite antenna hook-ups, the transmitter modules offer an output port for LNB bias current supply.

In addition to saving physical space, the new Desktop Modules offer significant cost-savings. For example, a link established with four DEV 7285/7385 costs about 25% less than a comparable configuration using two DEV 4111s, which are larger, more feature-rich units.

Visit www.dev-systemtechnik.com

Ensemble Signs BrightEye Converter Range with Gencom to represent Ensemble Designs’ BrightEye range of compact scan converters in Australia and New Zealand.

Gencom Distribution National Sales Manager, Noel Oakes, said, “With their industry-leading scan converters that include the much-heralded Mitto family of products this is a real coup for Gencom Distribution and a major win for our clients in Australia and New Zealand.”

The BrightEye line of compact converters from Ensemble Designs is a complete conversion solution for desktop, mobile and broadcast applications. With over 50 different BrightEye units to choose from, these self-contained converters interface to a full range of video formats: high

definition and standard definition SDI, 3 Gb/s, analogue component, analogue composite and Y/C (S-Video). The range also includes analogue audio and AES digital audio converters and embedders.

Oakes added, “With their multi-format inputs and outputs, BrightEye converters are a flexible and cost-effective answer to any conversion requirement. BrightEye’s easy configuration interface and signal status indicators make them simple to install and troubleshoot. Their compact size lets you put conversion right where it’s needed: at a camera, non-linear editor, or projector.”

Visit www.gencom.com/distribution

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GENCOM DISTRIBUTION has announced that it has signed an agreement

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C+T FEATURES + DEADLINES 2013 C+T AUSTRALIA-NEW ZEALAND FEATURES + DEADLINES 2013 In Every Issue of C+T ANZ magazine: Acquisition, News Operations, Sportscasting, Post-Production & VFX, Media in the Cloud, Digital Asset Management, Audio, Radio, Transmission, Signal Distribution, Command & Control – Automation, Monitoring, Systems Management ISSUE

Jan – Feb

EDITORIAL + AD DEADLINES

Early Bird Deadline:

14-12-2012

Final Ad + Editorial Booking: 15-01-2013 Mar-April

May-June

July-Aug

Sept-Oct

Nov-Dec

Ad Bookings:

18-02-2013

Editorial Submissions:

21-02-2013

Ad Bookings:

22-04-2013

Editorial Submissions:

29-04-2013

Ad Bookings:

25-06-2013

Editorial Submissions:

01-07-2013

Ad Bookings:

16-08-2013

Editorial Submissions:

22-08-2013

Ad Bookings:

21-10-2013

Editorial Submissions:

24-10-2013

PUBLICATION DATE

PRODUCT ROUND-UP

Scan to download pdf of 2013 Info Kit

SHOW COVERAGE

+ Channel-in-a Box Solutions

+ Australian Broadcasting Summit, Sydney (Feb 26-28)

2nd Week March

+ Loudness Solutions + Cloud Solutions

+ NAB Preview (April 6-11)

2nd Week May

+ Digital Asset Management Solutions

+ BroadcastAsia (June 18-21) + NAB Review

2nd Week July

+ Non-Linear Editors

+ SMPTE Australia Preview (July 23-26). C+T also produces Official Show Guide

1st Week September

+ Encoding, Transcoding Solutions

+ Commercial Radio Australia RadioFest + IBC Preview (Sept 12-17)

1st Week November

+ ENG Systems + Stereoscopic 3D Solutions

+ IBC Review

Last Week January

C+T ASIA FEATURES + DEADLINES 2013 In Every Issue of C+T Asia magazine: Acquisition, News Operations, Sportscasting, Post-Production & VFX, Media in the Cloud, Digital Asset Management, Audio, Radio, Transmission, Signal Distribution, Command & Control – Automation, Monitoring, Systems Management

ISSUE

Feb-Mar

April-May

June-July

FEATURES + DEADLINES

Aug-Sept

60

Oct-Nov

Dec-Jan

EDITORIAL + AD DEADLINES

Ad Bookings:

04-02-2013

Editorial Submissions:

07-02-2013

Ad Bookings:

15-02-2013

Editorial Submissions:

18-02-2013

Ad Bookings:

20-05-2013

Editorial Submissions:

23-05-2013

Ad Bookings:

30-07-2013

Editorial Submissions:

31-07-2013

Ad Bookings:

30-09-2013

Editorial Submissions:

03-10-2013

Ad Bookings:

22-11-2013

Editorial Submissions:

25-11-2013

PUBLICATION DATE

PRODUCT ROUND-UP

SHOW COVERAGE

3rd Week February

+ Channel-in-a Box Solutions

+ ABU Digital Broadcast Symposium (March 05- 08) + CCBN Beijing (March 21–23)

1st Week April

+ Loudness Solutions + Cloud Solutions

+ NAB Preview (April 6-11) + KOBA (May 13-16)

1st Week June

+ Digital Asset Management Solutions

+ BroadcastAsia Preview (June 18-21) + NAB Review

2nd Week August

+ Non-Linear Editors

+ BIRTV (Aug 22-25) + IBC (Sept 12-17)

3rd Week October

+ Encoding, Transcoding Solutions

+ CASBAA + Broadcast India + InterBEE

+ ENG Systems + Stereoscopic 3D Solutions

+ BES (India) + Convergence India

2nd Week December

CLASSIFIEDS what’s on JANUARY CONVERGENCE INDIA 16-18 January Pragathi Maidan, New Delhi, India www.convergenceindia.org BES EXPO 2013 29-31 January Pragathi Maidan, New Delhi, India www.besindia.com

FEBRUARY

PUTTING IT IN PERSPECTIVE, NAB 2012 attracted some 92,112 attendees while this year’s IBC show in Amsterdam recorded some 50,937 visitors. Completely dwarfing these key industry shows, the 2012 International CES featured 3100 exhibitors launching over 20,000 new products across 1.861 Hans Vestberg, CEO, Ericsson. million net square feet of exhibit space and attracting more than 153,000 attendees.

A launchpad for the consumer devices that will affect the future business models of content creators, the 2013 International CES promises to be just as vast and significant.

The U.S. Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has announced a robust SuperSession lineup as part of the 2013 International CES conference program, with participants including U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski, Ericsson President and CEO Hans Vestberg and the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington. Owned and produced by CEA, CES is scheduled for January 8-11, 2013 in Las Vegas.

“The CES SuperSessions feature top technology and policy experts who share their insight and vision for the future of our industry, and we are thrilled to welcome the incredible panellists slated for the 2013 program,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CEA. “I am very excited to have Chairman Genachowski, Ericsson’s Hans Vestberg and Arianna Huffington join our dynamic SuperSession lineup and we look forward to hearing these experts share their thoughts on the next generation of technology.”

US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

The CES SuperSessions are part of the 2013 CES conference program, comprised of 300 panel sessions and featuring 800 speakers, including keynote addresses from the leaders of Qualcomm, Panasonic, Verizon and Samsung.

Visit http://cesweb.org

MARCH ABU DIGITAL BROADCAST SYMPOSIUM March 05-08 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia www.abu.org.my FILMART 18-2 March 2013 Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre www.hkfilmart.com/filmart/index.htm

APRIL NABSHOW 2013 April 6-11 Las Vegas Convention Center Las Vegas, USA www.nabshow.com

MAY KOBA May 13-16 Seoul, Korea www.kobashow.com

JUNE BROADCASTASIA June 18-21 Marina Bay Sands Singapore www.broadcast-asia.com

JULY SMPTE AUSTRALIA July 23-26 Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia www.smpte.com.au

Advertiser Index Adimex............................................39

Lumina Broadcast Systems.......56

ARRI ............................................... IBC Avid Technology ..........................15

Magna Systems & Engineering ....................................................13, 24

AVTech Video .................................. 6

OB group ........................................61

Blackmagic Design ........................ 5

On Air Systems ......................31, 35

Canon ..............................................21

Powermedia ..................................41

CMI Music & Audio ......................46

Professional Audio Technology ....................................................33, 52

Commercial Radio Australia.....49 Digital Rapids ...............................30 Eureka Pacific..........................43,45 Fuji Film ....................................62,63

Quinto Communications ............. 9 Riedel Communications GmbH & Co....................................29 SMPTE 2013 .................................17

Gencom Technology ...................11

Sony Australia...............................23

Harmonic.......................................... 3

Storm FX .........................................38

Harris ..............................................IFC

Studiotech Australia ..................... 4

IBC ....................................................27 IRT.....................................................16

Syntec International Pty Ltd ............................................ 47, 50, 53

Jands Pty Ltd .................................37

Techtel Pty Ltd ..............................57

Jumbo Vision ................................32

Videocraft .................................. OBC

CLASSIFIEDS

International CES The Biggest Show on Earth

AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING SUMMIT Feb 26-28 Sydney Exhibition & Convention Centre Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia www.acevents.com.au/ broadcasting

CHINA CONTENT BROADCASTING NETWORK (CCBN) 21-23 March, 2013 China International Exhibition Center (CIEC) Beijing, China www.ccbn.tv

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TIME shifter Baptism of Fire In this excerpt from his 2012 Andrew Olle Lecture, ABC Radio’s Mark Colvin recounts his first journalistic experiences and encounters with technology.

I JOINED THE ABC as a half-English dilettante with an arts degree and a Pommy accent. I remember going for an interview at the Sydney Morning Herald. First mistake – I went to the Hunter Street office which was just their corporate headquarters, not the actual newspaper. Then I asked someone the way, but apparently the way I said ‘Herald’ was unintelligible, because I ended up at Harold Park.

I did make it to Broadway on time despite all that, but the Herald found my minimal charm and talent easy to resist. Somehow, Aunty, where the BBC voice was still pretty prevalent in those days, saw something in me and, stylish in a denim jacket with patch pockets and a pair of flared trousers, I turned up on February the 11th, 1974, at 164 William Street, headquarters of ABC News.

It was a time of turmoil in Australia and elsewhere. Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister. President Nixon was in trouble at home over Watergate, and losing the war overseas in Vietnam.

Britain, where I’d been at university until the previous year, was sinking further into a slough of intractable industrial disputes, three day weeks and power cuts. The Cultural Revolution in China was still not over, Brezhnev’s stultifying rule still had a decade to run in the Soviet Union.

And so it was that a mere two months later, on what was effectively cadet work experience in Canberra, with most of my colleagues at lunch in the late lamented non-Members’ bar, I found myself writing the ABC News story of the double dissolution of Parliament and the announcement of the Federal election.

It was only a few pars for a radio bulletin, but it brought home to me in a tiny way the old adage that journalism is the first draft of history.

Later in 1974, I was working at the ABC’s office in Orange, filling in for the correspondent there. Great experience, because ABC Radio was so central to people’s lives in the bush – and you learned the importance of sweating the small stuff and getting it right for them. But, a huge bushfire broke out around Cobar, and for about a day I covered it by phone, ringing the fire service and anyone else I could find. Cobar’s about halfway to Broken Hill, 450km from Orange by road, and I had three local bulletins to file a day, so I thought I didn’t have a choice.

Then a bloke called Terry Berkrey, who was an announcer there under the slightly more butch name of Burke Rees, said to me: “Why don’t we hire a plane and fly up there?” I was still so green that this struck me as an astounding idea, but I rang Sydney and they OK’d it, and someone else took over the local bulletins, and we went.

TIME SHIFTER

As we flew towards Cobar, you could see the fire as a wall of smoke and flame stretching many kilometres along the ground, and hundreds of metres into the air.

64

A fire that big sucks in powerful winds at its base and creates huge thermal eddies all around it. The plane was thrown about the sky, and the pilot had to wrestle to keep it on course. I scribbled a description of what we’d seen from the air, and filed from the airfield. When I arrived at the emergency centre, people were listening to the ABC bulletin – and I was the national lead.

A word about technology: I was carrying a Nagra, a superb Swiss tape recorder we used in those days. Nagras were highly engineered, almost unbreakable – years later I saw one that was still working after being run over outside the Soviet Embassy in Paris by Mikhail Gorbachev’s limousine

ABC Radio’s Mark Colvin.

– but they weighed several kilos and they had to be regularly refilled with a dozen D- Cell batteries at a time. Of course, you also had to remember to take plenty of tapes, usually recycled ones because they were expensive.

But when you’d used your Nagra to do an interview with the local fire chief, how to transmit it back to base?

The answer, I discovered, was to make friends with the PMG. The PMG – the postmaster-General’s department – was what we had before Telstra or even Telecom. A friendly tech ushered me behind the scenes into a world of switching-boxes, cords and plugholes, and lo and behold, my audio was on the line to Sydney.

That fire around Cobar burnt out one and a half million hectares. One and a half million. I remember interviewing people who’d seen rabbits and kangaroos with their fur burning running, panicked, across firebreaks and spreading the blaze to new areas. I remember seeing the air over and around a stand of trees – not the trees themselves – explode into flame as a spark hit the halo of evaporated eucalyptus oil they were giving off in the heat.

I think I was in Cobar for a few days, sleeping on floors and filing around the clock, before the fire was sufficiently under control for Sydney to pull me out. I hitched a ride on an RAAF Hercules back to Sydney. When I got there, I was surprised to see a bunch of other ABC reporters cadging lifts north. The news of Cyclone Tracy flattening Darwin had come through while I was out of the loop. I got a cab into the city and reported for duty. Could I go to Darwin, please? Very sensibly – because I was still a raw cadet – they said no, and sent me home for Christmas.

But, by then, I was hooked.

The full transcript can be found at: http://about.abc.net.au/speeches/2012-andrew-olle-lecture/ An MP3 recording of the lecture can be found at: http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/11/02/3624286.htm

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