NZVN May 2017

MAY 2017

Vol 235

ANZAC Dawn Service – Las Vegas Style

All praise to the Gencom team for gathering the willing and able for a time of remembrance in a foreign land. Keith Bremner has to be given the most credit for planning the event bearing in mind that the core concept was that, being 10,000 miles in the wrong direction, in the middle of the madness that is NAB, it would be very easy to let ANZAC day go by without a thought; and that would be unfortunate. We were fortunate that Gencom were keen to provide an environment where everyone could take a bit of time out to pay respects, raise a glass, and share the moment with others of a like mind. In Keith’s words …

“So there we were, on the wrong side of the planet, at a trade show, on ANZAC day. But, we weren’t going to let that go unnoticed, not recognised, under the radar. ANZAC is that special day of remembrance that we need to have; to stop, to recollect on a time in history that has put us where we are today. ANZAC is a day where we should be ( normally would have been ) back at home with family, up at dawn, down at the local RSA, followed by a jar in the air, and then put down … and then look … up in the air again … the flyover … I like old planes.

Actually it doesn’t matter where you are I guess, as long as you can find some Kiwis, and Ozzies, get together and take a moment to reflect on those times of horrible war, and the efforts and effects on those brave countrymen and women who fought for ours and their freedom.

For those who could be with us, for a brief time out, to pay respect, and wear those red flowers proudly, thanks for coming and sharing that moment with us.”

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

We will remember them.

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Cartoni for Gencom We are here at Cartoni with Luciano Belluzzo and Giles Coverdale from Gencom.

Ed: Luciano, we heard from Cartoni at IBC about the rationalisation of the product lines which is, honestly, a sensible move because who needs that many tripods – now?

Luciano: Well let me tell you first that the ENG and EFP range of the Focus line now has been settled from the 8 kilo, 12 kilo, 18 kilo, 22 kilo – I’m proud to tell you that two months ago we got the first order from BBC for 30 Focus 22 tripods. This confirms that the line has been accepted by the market.

Luciano with a very clever head in his hands.

Now we are concentrating on the 30 kilo and above – bigger heads, and at NAB, we are launching the Master 65 head. The Master 65 head will replace the Omega, so we are talking about heads for OB vans and studio big heads. The Master 65 is a completely different new product, with a new fluid mechanism and the Master 65 will be the head from which we will modify all future big OB van and studio heads from Cartoni.

And also this year we are launching a lot of products with cine applications – the cine digital market, which will extend Cartoni’s presence into this area as well.

Ed: Now just looking at the Focus range, one thing I immediately notice is this little side handle that I have not seen on any other tripod?

Luciano: Well on this range, we have also decided to make new investments on new products on the legs.

We are revamping and relaunching the famous Smart Stop tripod, just to give, let’s say, a better aesthetic.

We are hoping that all the Smart Stop tripods will have 100% the handle included. We are also offering the special new Smart Spreader which is totally different from all the others, which will allow the cameraman to make it very quick to collapse the legs and to go away to another shooting location.

This is of course connected to the Focus range. So now we have the Focus range already established and the new range of tripods both in carbon fibre and in aluminium, the new Smart Stop range, the SDS. Ed: So it’s a new name, SDS – Smart Deployment Series – and I particularly like the little red button there on the spreader that, with one press, the spreader arm slides out and then you let it go and it locks?

Luciano: You see the spreader, with locks like that you can remove it very easily. The handle, this red lock gives us, let’s say, a sort of aesthetic just to make it a little bit different. You know we are Italians, Italy is the country of the fashion and we have to keep on that.

Ed: Well red and black is a good colour combination.

Luciano: I agree with you, exactly.

So this is something we are working on now, because in our heads we have also to revamp the tripod range. We have so many tripods, when the market requires only standard tripods, but easy to handle, so the SDS system, the Smart Stop and the spreader will give us a boost in sales in the tripod as well, so in ENG and EFP. Ed: And if you want it, you’ve also got the base spreaders?

Luciano: Absolutely.

You can have the ground spreader as you like it.

Giles: One or two other new products now too, you’ve got the new head, the Master 65.

Luciano: The Master 65 is a 65 kilo OB van and studio head. This is not the top; the top is the Magnum up to 90 kilo. This is going in competition against the Vinten Vector 430 and it’s very good for sport, broadcasting, studio broadcasting up to 65 kilo. The major thing for us, and for our dealer partners, is it’s 2000 euros cheaper than the Vinten 430 and allows us to be more competitive, always including five years warranty on the head. It can be installed on tripods or it can be installed on pedestals as well. So it’s a brand new head, the mechanism is completely new; it’s something which we are going to use, the new mechanism, also for future Cartoni heads, always in the broadcasting heavy duty tripods.

Ed: Smart Lock has been around for some time, but it’s obviously a key factor in choosing a head?

Luciano: Exactly, well the Smart Stop is something that has around 10 years life. We decided to revamp it because we do believe that this product has a lot of features which have to be explained and displayed to customers.

It was our mistake, we didn’t push too much.

Now with this new appearance, with this new spreader, with the fact that this has a handle, we wanted to have a

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specific marketing approach, totally different thanks to our dealers in the world.

Giles: The last product that would be good to show is the new Lambda …

Luciano: You know the very beginning of Cartoni was in the cine business, so this year the Cartoni family, Elisabetta and Beatrice , invested a lot of money in developing new cine heads. We have developed the MAXIMA 30 which is a 30 kilo head in competition against OConnor 2065 and it is absolutely highly performing, but also we have developed the Lambda 25 which is a nodal head and from the development on the Lambda 25, we have developed the Total Dutch.

The Total Dutch is a special head which allows you 360 degrees rotation and 360 degrees revolution, so you can really move the head in each part of the image.

You can shoot everywhere and the advantage is that you can use this head – unfortunately not only on your Cartoni heads, but on all competitors’ heads. The Total Dutch is something which has immediate potential all over the world and it will allow Cartoni to be recognised in the cine industry as one of the main technical players in the world.

The Total Dutch allows you to even go up to one centimetre high from the pavement, especially for commercials, when they need you to shoot some special things really on the pavement surface, you can go there up to one centimetre high.

It’s unbelievable, it’s really unbelievable.

Avid for Atomise We’re at Avid with Richard Kelly from Atomise.

Ed: Richard, I understand you now have a brand new warrant of fitness as a result of the training you’ve received from Avid, because even you need training?

Richard: Absolutely, staying current is incredibly important. I’ve spent the week before the NAB show doing the Avid Certified Support Representative Elite Recertification – a big mouthful.

Ed: Does that have a number to it or something?

Richard: It has a T-shirt. It’s the equivalent of 16 days training done in 3½ days with 4 exams.

Ed: Including injections?

Richard: Oh it’s pretty brutal. Some injections of beer were definitely required.

Ed: Right, so you’re all up to scratch. And that’s important, now you can go back to New Zealand and you can get your own team in and you can bring them up to speed?

Richard: Absolutely, there are a couple of different aspects to it. One is that we’re delivering training, getting certification on the latest courses so we can present them ourselves. I’m not required to actually attend the classroom – I can go through the Avid instructor programme and get my certifications that way, go through the coursework by myself. But there’s such a massive value being in a room with 24 of the smartest guys in the US, that it’s an opportunity you just can’t miss.

Ed: Did you get to put your hand up and say “ooh ooh ooh, I know”?

Richard: Well that’s really the big value, it’s the shared experience. I learnt some amazing things this time from some really talented guys from the NBC. Steve Kistner who was the guy who did a lot of Avid support for a project that I worked on in the past, now is the Manager of Media Operations Technology at NBC Universal and he was able to show us how they’re

Ed: And it’s a beautiful piece of engineering as one would expect from an Italian company?

Luciano: This beautiful piece of engineering is where everything started – this is the Lambda 25; from the Lambda 25 we developed the Total Dutch and we call it the Dutch axis. It’s crazy.

NZVN dealing with virtualisation and presenting the Avid infrastructure throughout their environment and it’s just so much bigger than we would normally ever get to see.

As I say, we had 24 of the smartest guys from the American broadcasters in the room …

Ed: Plus Richard?

Richard: Plus me.

Ed: So obviously there weren’t questions to do with an effect in Media Composer, these were big questions, these were infrastructure questions where there’d been some issues somewhere and someone had solved it in a clever way – that was the sort of information you were sharing?

Richard: Yes, enterprise level and production level information on how some workflows have really worked well for people. It’s not necessarily "break-fix" stuff, you do get some break-fix stuff but you also get a lot of really good detail on how other people do things. There are lots of ways of doing things and sometimes someone has a way that really, really works well in a particular situation and you combine knowledge and some pretty cool stuff falls out, some really cool features out there have come out of weeks like we’ve just had.

Ed: Because you are dealing with some very large infrastructure, it’s not just guys at home with a Composer, you’re dealing with the broadcasters and major people in Wellington, so you’ve got to be able to come in and fix things really quickly?

Richard: Absolutely, and I always like to say, we’re a support organisation that also sells product, not a sales organisation that does some support. We are there right through the whole production to make sure that your production is working.

Ed: Right, now specifically – obviously introduced a few new things here at the show?

they’ve

Richard: We’ve got an absolute heap of really good purple goodness from the show. But we’re standing in front of some green goodness right now.

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your attention. This technology is now at the phase so let’s say you’ve got a feature film production, you’ve got a complete scan of your set which you’re going to do for a VFX process in a normal production. Let’s say that set’s knocked down and 6 months later you need to come back and do pickup shoots – we have the capability in this technology now, to do a full virtual set, so the actor can be on the set, on a green screen, blue screen, or a hybrid set and get immediate, full quality, real time feedback on their performance.

Ed: That’s the way it’s going isn’t it?

Richard: Absolutely, when you add in motion control cameras – let’s say you’ve got Maya and you’ve done a camera track in Maya, we apply that on top of RealSet and it’s an amazing thing to watch.

Ed: And? Richard: Avid Graphics is a whole pile of tools that fit seamlessly into the Avid environment, and a really big message this year was “this is the year of the platform.”

This is where Avid’s vision that Louis Hernandez jnr, the President and CEO …

Ed: The one we met at the Avid “do” who came up and said “hello Richard, how are you?”

Richard: Absolutely – that was pretty cool. This is the year the vision has all come together and I’ve chosen a good year to be here at NAB. So we’ve got sports, we’ve got production graphics, we’ve got TD control for controlling video wall and it’s just a really good integration into the workflows that our broadcasters already have.

Ed: Which makes a lot of sense. It’s silly that you have to write software for third parties for it to be able to work with Avid, why not have the whole package all in one – it’s one "throat to choke"?

Richard: One of the really cool things about Avid Graphics is that it works with just about everything, so it is a very capable system for dropping into an existing ecosystem.

Ed: And?

Richard in front of Avid’s Real Set.

Ed:

Kool Aid was purple wasn’t it?

Richard: I never tried the purple Kool Aid, that’s something I’ve missed. Jokes aside, we’re in front of RealSet on the Avid Graphics Booth. Three years ago, Avid acquired Orad. Orad is a company that produces an incredibly advanced set of broadcast and postproduction live graphics – so we’re in front of RealSet. RealSet will produce a complete virtual set that you can use motion tracking and AR to present exactly how you want the audience to see your environment. A great example of this is the technology that was used for the Rio Olympics that we saw in New Zealand from the Australian feeds. That was a virtual set, we had things rising out of the floor, we had graphics flying in and it’s a combination of a real set with a complete virtual environment. Right now we’re looking at a complete virtual environment.

Richard: Media Composer | First has been released.

Now Media Composer | First …

Ed: Oh, you’ve run out of numbers and now you’re back to “one”?

Richard: That’s right, Media Composer | First is exactly that. Last year, Avid released Pro Tools | First – a free version of Pro Tools that allows users to get in there and start collaborating, not just working by themselves – collaborating on a Cloud basis with other users of Pro Tools | First and bringing an amazing high quality toolset for free. Media Composer | First now brings that to Media Composer users. So you have an amazing opportunity …

Ed: And that’s really important with the advent of AR especially?

Ed: Well it brings it to other users who might want to try Media Composer obviously. If you’re already a Media Composer user, you won’t want to go to | First surely?

Richard: Absolutely.

AR’s there to make what’s being broadcast more relevant to the consumer of that information, to get your attention obviously and to keep

Richard: Correct, if you’ve already got Media Composer, it is a step up to go to the full commercial version, the professional version. Media Composer |

Go to https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews/ for more news.

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First is designed for people who might be working at home, might be students, might only need to do a few tasks, or just want to experience Media Composer for free and then we can help them see if they need to step up to other versions of the product. But it’s a great way of stepping in – obviously, we’ve had a trial version of the professional product for a long time and there is a feature set difference, but it very much is the same known and loved interface for free.

Ed: So if somebody makes a project in Media Composer | First, can that then be imported into a full strength one and tweaked?

Richard: That is a future announcement, so we’re still waiting to hear that.

Ed: Excellent, right. And? Richard: So in Media Composer itself we’ve had some great advances. For example, you can now edit VR using the mock of VR plug-in. So VR seems to be coming to the fore in our market for tourism, for different experiences, marketing – a real estate agent for example has a number of great little cameras now that can take VR, but editing it and putting it together has been an issue. Now, using Media Composer, there is a relatively simple process that allows you to work and put graphics in, in that 3D environment, so it understands the space and allows you to work with that space and very easily edit and output using a tool that many people are familiar with.

Ed: Well it would be sensible that it could do that – since you’ve got a virtual studio, you should have the software to be able to edit programmes with it?

Richard: 360 VR is very different, because that’s stitching multiple cameras together. So in our virtual studio, we’ve got a lot of hardware and processing doing that, compared to VR where you’re doing it on a single computer. So it’s a slightly different way of coming into it. The other really big announcement with Media Composer in mind – as I said, this is the year of the platform and Avid have announced Media Composer | Cloud VR. Media Composer | Cloud is a name we’ve heard before – that was remote editing over a VPN over a 4G connection back to your base, using the media that was at your base and streaming that out to you.

Avid have announced a massive virtualisation support ( and we’ll come to that shortly ) and part of that is Media Composer | Cloud VR. So instead of streaming the video out to you, you are working at your base.

You can be on a completely lightweight laptop that just has a good screen, and you have the full capabilities of Craft Editor at your fingertips from across the other side of the world.

Ed: So you’re not actually dragging the material to you, you’re editing it back at the base?

Richard: You’re editing back at the base and shortly, of course, you will have the ability to upload your high res media that you shoot on location and send that back to base as well.

Ed: This has got to be good for reporters doing News?

Richard: Absolutely fantastic for News reporters.

You get a simplification of what you need. All of a sudden, you don’t need a $6000 laptop to go into the field with; you need a laptop with a good screen and a nice keyboard and mouse and you have an incredibly high end experience. NBC were telling us about their savings after virtualising their environment. So it’s not just Media Composer that’s able to be virtualised, it’s

nearly every part of the Avid platform that can be virtualised. That saves rack space, that saves power, that saves technical support time. NBC was saying that they’ve saved millions in power and cooling in one year with their virtualisation. I know it’s a buzz word around the industry, but here we have an absolute working implementation at enterprise level that we can present to a client, and today, if you’re starting with a completely fresh environment, I think virtually all of our customers we would start off with a virtualisation process or some of the core infrastructure.

Ed: That’s obviously got to be good for reporters in New Zealand because of the geography – they could be in Westport for example, and cut and edit the story much quicker than they could do with the previous technology?

Richard: They’ve had that ability with previous technology and a number of our customers are using that already, but what it does is simplify what a remote reporter needs to work with. All of a sudden, they’ve got a much easier path for technical support in the field.

If their virtual computer was to have a brain fade, you can spin up another virtual computer and you’re back up and running. It just brings a whole new level of ease and capability to an environment.

Ed: A very sensible use for the Cloud?

Richard: Absolutely, and the Cloud of course is a massive thing for Avid here at NAB. A major announcement was support for Microsoft Azure as a platform, so we have one of the most powerful Cloud platforms formally supported for use on the entire Avid infrastructure platform.

Ed: But speaking of Cloud, you actually are in the camp that prefers the hybrid version aren’t you Richard?

Richard: We have a challenge in New Zealand and part of that challenge is that we don’t have the big data centres in New Zealand. We’ve got edge data centres.

We don’t necessarily have the big network capabilities to go in and out. So an easy step for us is a private or hybrid Cloud model. Let’s use a television station as an example – you’ve got all of your in-house equipment and that’s virtualised in your environment, and that works for everybody on your VPNs and you’ve bought the number of licences you need to work with your normal projects. Everything’s working as you would expect, you’ve got complete control of your environment which is very important for a lot of

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business processes, to have that complete understanding of what you’ve got, where you’ve got it.

However, let’s say you have a production that’s going to start for 6 weeks, Commonwealth Games, perfect example. Let’s say you need to spin up an extra 50 seats of Media Composer and Media Composer | Cloud UX. We can move that into a hybrid Cloud environment where those cores are running in Azure, talking back to your core storage and infrastructure back at base. So you can just turn it off and turn it on when you need it.

Very, very powerful and it’s got full support of the MPAA so we know it’s good security, we know it’s the gold star standard.

So yes, you’ll very likely still use VSphere version 6 which is still fully supported in your private Cloud environment, that’s still a completely valid infrastructure choice, completely supported infrastructure choice … now we have the opportunity to use Azure which opens up a lot of opportunities for Avid because there are government and different organisations who have already taken on the Azure platform and now have an opportunity to include in that platform their Avid infrastructures.

Ed: So with the Azure platform, is that a Cloud that Microsoft has set up in New Zealand or is it an overseas data sender?

Richard: Microsoft has an edge data centre in New Zealand so it’s caching. They have 2 main data centres in Australia – I think it’s Sydney and Canberra. It will be really interesting to see because it’s going to come down to a phrase we’re going to hear a lot when we’re working with media in Cloud, which is “total latency.”

In New Zealand, I think we’re going to struggle with that for a while, which is why I think a hybrid Cloud model is the way we’re going to go.

I was very fortunate to be at an evening with Pixar on Wednesday night and they were saying that they’ve rolled out a massive amount of Cloud computing to do bursts in increases in the amount of virtual CPUs that they have available to use – their Render Farm. Their experience is that you need less than 5 milliseconds of total latency to be able to perform efficiently in that environment. 5 milliseconds of total latency I think is about a thousand kilometres.

Ed: That’s not quite Oz? Richard: It’s not quite Oz. It’s going to be a matter of working through. I’m aware of a number of data centres around New Zealand – hopefully some of the big players come in and move in and that will increase the options. But at the moment, we’ve got a really powerful offering for hybrid Cloud and private Cloud and, depending on your operations – let’s say it’s archive, let’s say it’s disaster recovery, using Azure as a platform is absolutely ready for us right now. So you can have completely geo-diverse DR for your organisation very, very simply, because we’ve got a virtualised environment. So you can be able to stand up your entire operation in 3 parts of the planet with all of your media ready to go.

Ed: And you’re quite comfortable with the security aspect of putting a lot of your data into a third party?

Ed: As the Iranians found out with their nuclear programme?

Richard: Absolutely – it’s an interesting piece of using people to spread a message.

Ed: Followed by?

Richard: So the next major announcement in the platform is Media Composer Central | UX Cloud. So again, a new look to Media Composer Central, with some great new features, a very intuitive design, very, very easy to understand, very much "click and drag", and that’s the system that allows a user just via a website to access fully rich content in their environment and in associated environments that they’ve got permission to access. One of the amazingly powerful tools that has come back in Media Composer is PhraseFind and ScriptSync – the ability to search automatically through audio and be able to search for a word or a phrase and find all the pieces of media that that occurs in. That is then used to create a lined script. So if you imagine a documentary where you’ve shot hundreds and hundreds of hours and you go “I remember someone saying this, where was it?” you can type it in and it will find that for you. It’s a very, very cost effective option that’s available to every Media Composer user.

That is now available on the UX platform on an Enterprise level, so you’re not just able to search on the name, on the meta data in the clip, you can search on what was said in a clip.

Ed: I would hope that that would have a time constraint because, if you’re dealing with very large databases, you don’t want to pick up every time a word was used – you want to have a time range surely?

Richard: You’ve got very advanced searching so you’re able to search within a very short space of time, a very large space of time, very, very detailed searching, but the system is inherently designed to work with very large amounts of information and report a search back quickly.

Ed: And I guess, as a reporter, you’ll soon discover how to use it best, rather than just do a blanket search for “bunnies” or something?

Richard: Exactly. It’s all about getting that detailed search and, in the new version of the UI, the interface, the representation of what you’re searching for is very graphical – it’s very, very friendly, it’s very, very easy to understand.

Ed: It sounds as though the tools are just getting better and better Richard?

Richard: Azure is incredibly secure.

Big Cloud providers are already working with major governmental defence organisations and we’re talking about security at its highest level.

In my opinion, the biggest risk to security of any of these environments is a USB stick in a local machine.

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Richard: Absolutely. One Archive’s a really good example. Avid’s had an archive product as part of its platform for quite some time. That’s been revised as “One Archive” and that brings a very, very simple and easy to use archive infrastructure at a new very low price point that makes it very relevant and easy to put into this ecosystem. We’ve seen this year an amazing point where everything has reached where we hoped it would be 5 years ago – we’re there now and for me, the training with the people I was with in the last week, the

Source Digital for Atomise For Atomise we are at Source Digital with Michael Phillips.

Ed: Richard, you’ve made a new friend?

Richard: Well an old friend. I’m here with Michael Phillips whom I’ve known for 16½ years. Michael is well known in our industry; he has been on stage and received the Technical Oscar for the invention of the Avid Film Composer. So some technical chops there and a large number of patents to go with it, so a very, very talented man who I’ve been very fortunate to know.

Ed: And now he’s moved on and he’s got his own company?

Richard: It’s great to have an opportunity to see what Michael’s working with now.

Ed: So Michael, you’ve had the chip removed?

Michael: I’ve had the chip removed, so Avid ended in 2011 but I have stayed in touch with everything Richard’s doing in Australia-New Zealand which I’ve been to a couple of times and love.

Ed: I don’t think you’re in Australia yet are you Richard?

Michael: Aren’t you in Australia?

Richard: Well I am for you.

Ed: Soon baby.

Michael: What we’ve created in the last couple of years is that, while people can have lots and lots of content, there are lots of different ways people can further monetise the video in ways that they haven’t been able to before – we call it taking advantage of unused metadata that you already have been gathering throughout a production or postproduction process.

Now in a scripted world, it’s fairly obvious where it’s coming from, we parse the screenplay, the costume data, location data, everything that people are already collecting during production, we grab the script supervisor’s notes, the dailies’ notes and we time on in everything in our database so, when editorial’s done and you’ve locked picture, you can get an XML or AF and it comes back into our platform and we now know which characters are where based on scene because we know where the scenes are and because t he co stu me designer said that character Joe played by Brad Pitt is

great thing is I’ve already seen them working. NBC’s putting shows out using their environment today.

So the confidence it gives me going back to New Zealand and having talked to their operations team, I can say “yes, it does work, it’s fantastic.”

Ed: So you won’t be having a holiday for a few months now?

Richard: now!

I think I need a holiday for a few months NZVN

wearing Boss we know what they’re wearing and everything gets timelined.

We try to do as much programmatically through parsing of stuff. My goal is to maybe get 80% of the way, because now you have the opportunity, you could be on a cooking show, a reality show and you see now when you put this chef comes on or they’re using these knives and he’s a sponsor for Quesi knife; we can bring up coupons that are timelined – and do all this from the information on the database.

The database has all the relationships you want to create … you could have one for New Zealand and one for Australia because you may have different vendors or different deals, so all that’s managed on the platform.

One of our little secrets, more of an enabler, is we just got a patent on our audio fingerprinting technology, so it’s not an embed technology at all.

We do a representation fingerprint and kind of like Shazam we can automatically detect what the programme is from your mobile device through the microphone, but we also know position, where you are in the programme down to the second.

Ed: So in other words, the consumer with their phone can be listening to a programme …?

Michael: They could turn on their phone and we say “hey” – so it could be a Channel 9 app or whatever type or the ABC app, or it could be a show app, we don’t care where it goes, we’re fully API. So let’s say I’m using an ABC app, it could be running and then Modern Family comes on. It knows what episode of Modern Family it is and we know where we are in the programme and at that point the world’s your oyster – what do you want to serve up to your end viewer at that point in time? Maybe it’s the back story; maybe you’re watching Game of Thrones and a character pops

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Richard and Michael.

up, you say “oh that’s a Lannister.” We have sibling relationships and stuff you can create so you can say this is a brother or the sister of these characters, you can start creating storylines, e-commerce, behind the scenes.

I did a documentary where I call it “Video Footnoting” so I wasn’t trying to sell anybody anything, but as you know with documentaries or even News, there’s more information than what you can actually convey on a 30 minute programme or an hour movie, and then those things come up and pop up and say “here’s more of the research that we did for what we just talked about and you can just swipe and say "I’ll get back to you later", but you’ve served up this information in the context of what the people are interested in.

Ed: So you’re watching a delicate sex scene in Game of Thrones on your iPad and suddenly an ad for condoms comes on – one of your pop ups?

Michael: I’ll up you one even better – we were at CES in January and one of the vendors who came up to us is a company called OhMiBod and they sell remote control vibrators and panty stuff and the like. "Yeah, we can map that to any part of the programme, speaking of Game of Thrones ..." and he goes "I want my Game of Thrones episode where I can set when Daenerys comes, I’m like ... let’s go."

All of that stuff that’s kind of possible is time aligning to audio so that your radio is another big one. So we can bring images to radio. I prototyped the Howard Stern interview, so I just had the app on and he’s talking and he’s always talking with some hot woman or whatever’s he’s doing and the picture comes up and whatever she’s selling – her cookbook or her video site, we can actually bring images to radio.

Ed: But don’t people find these pop ups annoying, I mean, that’s why you employ AdBlocker?

Michael: If it’s only ads then it’s as annoying as hell.

If you create experiences which are more informational with ads then it’s how to create the experience for your end users to keep them engaging. So with Toymakerz, we announced at the show, they’re a reality show, they’re going to broadcast their second season in October for the Velocity Channel, and Velocity is owned

by Discovery. So what they do is – and we’re seeing more of these deals being made where the content owner only has a short window licensing deal with the licensee. He has his whole series, Velocity gets it for 90 days and he owns everything after that. So it’s one of those shows where it’s invent, build and unveil, so he does big boy toys like cars and things like – it’d be your kind of show. He has a brand, he has T-shirts, he has all these things so we’re creating, first of all, a basic app, he hired somebody to do the basic app that says the cast, the usual stuff you might find in those types of apps – who’s the cast who’s in it, snippets from behind the scenes etc. It will have a sync mode that says "when you sync to our programme as you’re watching it, you’re going to get a whole other experience that you don’t normally get in the app." You might get opportunities to learn more of what’s going on in the show; popping up there’d be ads that are just doing it for eyeball retention – he may sell the T-shirt that says "hey, if you buy this shirt during the show you get 10% off."

Ed: So really, you’re just providing the tool, it’s up to the broadcaster or whoever uses it to either screw it up by just bunging lots of ads in or actually using it intelligently?

Michael: We try not to limit what you want to do creatively on the platform. To us it should all be possible to create those experiences.

Ed: So lots of people you can sell this to Richard?

Richard: Did I not promise you a really cool thing to come and see today?

Ed: I like those remote control panties?

Richard: I’ll leave that one to you, I’ll go with the buying the car show T-shirt. The thing I really like about this is, for us, it’s a great opportunity to work with Michael again, but it’s also a great opportunity to step outside of our traditional market. This product I think is one that’s really grabbed my attention and it allows us to move into a slightly different space with a very cool product.

Ed: But still it’s a product that requires some clever integration. It’s not something that one could just download and start running, that’s where the expertise of the Atomise team comes in as to how to actually implement this technically in an organisation?

Richard: Oh absolutely.

I mean integration is important and we’ve got a great man to learn from here with Michael.

It’s a very powerful tool that really excites me, it gets my Cool Award of the show, other than the purple triangle’s stuff. ( Sorry Michael, I have to say that ). This is fantastic.

Michael: What’s different about selling this type of solution is, when you go to your vendors and your customer base, that they can actually adopt the technology for very little, so it helps them make money rather than looking at the typical solutions you find here at NAB – how can I save money by streamlining something and hope that that works out. So it’s a whole different way to look at selling this type of solution as "the more you do the more you can make."

Ed:

But used intelligently?

Michael: with class.

Ed:

Is that what your wife tells you every day?

Michael:

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Absolutely, everything in moderation and

We try.

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KinoFlo for PLS We are here at Kino Flo with Scott Stueckle.

Ed: The big news I covered at IBC last year was your move from fluro to LED and it was explained to us that really it’s the way it’s going, but also the manufacturers of the fluro tubes are getting fewer and fewer.

Scott: Yes, actually on the business side, we’re doing well on the fluorescents because it’s not so much that fluorescents are outdated right now, they’re not, but there’s hardly anybody manufacturing fluorescent products for the professional industry. We just got a big order out of New York for a half a million dollars and it’s almost all fluorescent.

So we’re still doing a lot with fluorescent, but I would say that you look at the numbers and about half fluorescent and the other half would be LED technology. So we’re doing both, but probably you’re looking at the next 5 years to see that shifting dramatically towards the LED product line … unless there’s something else, some other lighting technology that comes along.

Ed: So what produces the light is only part of the package, where you’ve really come to the forefront in the industry is that total package of, not only the light source, but all the reflectors and, as you say, the software that goes with it?

Scott: Yes, it’s software and hardware. You really have to solve the problem with the light, the way we’ve focused on the past 5 years with our product lines, to make sure that the light quality works for all the levels of professional shooting out there, whether it’s somebody just getting into the industry as a student, or a long-time photographer or cinematographer. Our lights have to work side by side with other professional lighting instruments on the set.

They have to be seamless, so you can’t look at a shot and go “oh this side of this talent’s face is keyed for Kino LED.” You shouldn’t be able to tell, you should just be “oh it’s keyed with a softlight and the fill is a tungsten.” There should be no difference between the light source and the look. You should be able to achieve that look and not have to worry about whether or not it was produced with tungsten, HMI, natural daylight or an LED. A lot that’s happened and a lot of discussion in the industry – I know a film school just had an article they did where they did all the tests of 28 LEDs and it was pretty obvious from their testing that most LEDs don’t really match natural daylight or tungsten. Even after you correct them it’s a problem. We have at least been fortunate in having all those years of working and designing on the fluorescent side, doing the chemical phosphor blending and so forth, that we have a real background in chemical mixing for LEDs as well. That brought us into the LED realm. So we’re a little bit ahead of a lot of people, but it’s still a very difficult thing to achieve – it’s a white light with an LED that stays balanced over the life of the LED, that’s actually the challenge. Adding in these other features as we’ve done with colour and flicker and things like that, which

Scott with the Celeb 850.

you can manipulate, are great features and tools that you didn’t have before fluorescent. It wasn’t you could get the light right, but then again, to change colour, you had to put gel on. With the LED software now, you can take all those features that go into making the white light as pure as possible, just add in some RGB chips and now it’s a whole other dance. You’ve now got colour and you’re working with production designers and art directors about building products for the sets and that type of thing.

So it’s got a lot more sophisticated, but we’re still focused every day on making sure that quality light is pure white, as good a quality light as we can make. Then from there out, we’ll work on the other features.

Ed: And that’s really down to the phosphor so were the phosphors that you were producing for the inside of the fluro tubes – are they similar to what goes on to an LED? Scott: Now you’re not dealing with the mercury spike, but you’re still dealing with other issues having to do with peak and also you know, there’s broadband and Aerolux phosphors. It’s a real question, if you want drill down on those types of issues, you should be talking to chemical engineers and electrical engineers, because they’re the ones running the show now. We didn’t take the approach of going to manufacturers who have device level products like LED and meters, things like that, and asking them for the best they have and putting it in our fixtures. We went to them and said "you have to make them to this specification or we won’t use your products." We did that, and then after that our engineers got involved with actual device level design of the LED. So we’re still I think probably one of the only companies who are actively involved in the manufacturing process at that level, because we can’t afford all the different products that we make and over the lifetime of our lights, to have them be inconsistent.

You can’t have like film batches – all of our batches have to be the same all the time and to do that you have to have the knowledge and you have to have access to control the development and the manufacturing process. Just binning LEDs may get you one batch that is good, but it’s not going to guarantee you anything in the next batch or the batch after. So if

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you want consistency over your line of light, you have to take control at the device level manufacturing process.

Ed: So what happens to all those LEDs in the bins that don’t meet your specification – because it’s often said that, in that process, there are a lot of "near misses" and they go into home lighting. What do you do with yours?

Scott: Our guys go over there and meet with them and so forth. I don’t know how they decide – is it by batch, is it by LED – I’m not sure how they go and test them because our engineers are always testing them. You’re right, after something falls out of the tolerances, I’ve seen the tolerance chart – here’s the chart which you can make it to, stuff like that, and this is what we have, this is what we’ll approve, this is what we won’t approve … here’s some of our testing, we think you should go this direction with the phosphor design and so on and so forth. So you see all that and once we get a product out of that, I don’t know what it costs for the LEDs we get and I don’t know what happens to the residual – the stuff that doesn’t make it in, that doesn’t make the grade. The manufacturers of that, I’m sure they have another market for it; you could probably use those products outside our industry where the critical things are not relevant. I mean, if you want to make money making LEDs, why don’t you make LEDs for reflectors on cars or for tailgates on cars – there’s like a gazillion of those and you don’t have to worry about colour quality.

Ed:

It’s just got to be bright, yeah.

Scott: Well there’s a whole broad spectrum literally and figuratively of LED quality out there. One light might just need to be blue and bright as it can be and the other, they don’t worry about colour, they don’t care about a green spike or balancing in the reds, because it’s for airport runways.

Ed: Now in terms of continuity, you’ve kept the Celeb name right through your line, so we were dealing with the fluro Celebs, now we’re still dealing with a Celeb but it’s now an LED Celeb. Is that because the Celeb part of it is just the change from the fluro source to an LED source and really you’re keeping the technology that went into the Celeb product – that’s why you’ve kept the name?

Scott: We have 3 products now that are in the LED world. We have a Kino Flo Celeb line; we have a Diva-Lite line and a Select line. The Select line and the Celeb line people get mixed up sometimes. The Celeb line was the first LED line we made and it had no reference per se to our fluorescent line.

The Select line does.

That was a fluorescent line. The Diva-Lite was a very popular product and still sells very well – a fluorescent interview light. We kept the name on those two because they match so closely to their application. The Diva-Lite is still used so much for interview situations and electronic field production, the things that the original Diva-Lite was used for.

But it’s the original Diva-Lite on coke not on crack right. I mean, it’s just like it’s got all those features we just talked about, plus you can run it on battery, all those types of thing come into play. The Select is more like a 4Bank in the sense

you have a remote control system that can mount on the fixture, take it off, you can take the electronics – you know the LED panel, you can take it out of the fixture, you can mount it on a set somewhere remotely.

And it goes beyond that of course, it’s an LED product, so the 4Bank could never change gels at the touch of button; with a 4Bank you couldn’t go from let’s say daylight to tungsten just by turning a dial.

Again getting in all those features that you have with LED and software technology were applied to the Selects and the Selects then took what we were doing with 4Banks and those type of location lights, and took it to another level. The Celeb line we introduced that because at the time the main products that were available in the marketplace where people identify it as LEDs, were these panel type of LEDs, these 12x12’s. Everybody was making them, every country in the world, everybody was knocking everybody off and nobody was making a decent quality LED – they were binning LEDs and every LED panel was different in colour from one to the next and they didn’t really care about when you changed from tungsten to daylight, whether or not the light level changed, because you turn half daylight, half tungsten, or turn it all tungsten or all daylight, and your light levels would shift all over the place. So we went back and said listen, let’s make an LED product that matches our fluorescent or at least the expectation and perception that you have lighting with the Kino Flo 4bank or something like that. We achieved that look with the Celeb. That’s why we had that milky soft unique proprietary panel that’s on all of our Celebs, that gives a lighter spread and a softness and evenness that kind of looks a lot like film, you know electronic imaging capture, it looks just the same as the 4Bank or say a tungsten light through a softbox or HMI balanced off a wall – a nice soft source that just has a shadowless kind of quality to it. That’s what we are trying to achieve.

Now you look around the show here and nobody’s making those little 1x1 things anymore, they’re all making lights that look like Kino Flo Celebs. So again, the Celeb was unique to Kino Flo and it was our first real commercial success in the LED market. Way back in 2002, 2004 we had what was called the Koloris, which was a Kino Flo RGB blaster LED which was designed to run on DMX, it was very popular, but it cost about $7000 for these 4 little head you made and in those days people didn’t want to spend $7000 on an

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LED like they will now. But back then they wouldn’t do it, so it was a rental item mainly.

The next one we made was a Kelvin Tile with filament lamps, we worked on the marketing and just co-operative worked with them on that.

That’s where we learned a lot about LED manufacturing. That company eventually went away; we also left it and went our own direction, the sleds are what you saw out of that process.

So the Celebs are the third try for Kino Flo really and the ones that really stuck.

Ed: Yes, they’re certainly very, very popular. Now lastly, for the people out there who have got traditional Kino Flos with the phosphor tubes, how long do you think you can continue to supply them with replacement tubes?

This looks great in colour!

Scott: We’re continuing to manufacture them. The tubes are a bright spot in our portfolio because there is still a ton of demand for fluorescent tubes that are colour correct round the world. If you can try and imagine the number of knock offs of Kino Flo 4Banks in China that were there and have been there and currently are there – they still do all those 4Banks, they use them all over the place, tens of thousands, and they still use Kino Flo tubes.

Ed: They make their own backs and you supply the tubes?

they have in New York. New York is no different to anywhere else, they still use a lot of 4Banks. If you want to talk about what’s popular on the fluorescent side, it’s 2 main products – it’s mainly the Diva-Lites and mainly the 4Banks and I’m still doing from time to time, quarterly as certain jobs come up, several hundred of the Image Fixtures as well. And all those products take the T12 or the Compact tubes. So I’m sitting pretty good with the tubes that we do – that’s good.

Scott: Yes, I’m still selling tubes like crazy, so it’s great. Now a lot of people have demand for the tubes because, like I said, that project we just did in New York, was a half million, all fluorescent, well they need tubes and they need tubes for the other fixtures that

Scott: No way, for 2 reasons – we feel like we need to support the products that are out there; and more importantly I think financially it’s really a money maker. It’s a good profit centre for us.

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Ed:

So it’s not going away anytime soon?

Mathews for PLS For PLS, we are here at Matthews with the lovely Linda Swope.

Ed: Linda, more products from Matthews this year and you’re going to introduce me to some clever people?

Linda: I am. We have a lot of new things and we’ve got product specialists who can tell you better than I can, so I’m going to let them tell it.

Ed:

And first on the list?

Linda: This is Alex Amyot.

Alex is our wonder-ful gaffer friend who brings us a lot of really cool toys and he has a new cool toy here called the Elevator.

Ed: Well Alex I’ve had a look at this and a play with it. I can see the benefits immediately.

Just explain to our readers what this is all about?

Alex with his Elevator.

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Alex: Basically it’s an elevator – a vertical column, so for smaller Indie produc-tions that cannot afford to rent a dolly or that lack space for a crane, this product enables them to follow an actor from standing to sitting position or the other way round, which is much more elegant than tilting up or down.

It has a very small footprint, payload of a maxi-mum of 52 pounds which is roughly 28.5kg.

It’s a 1:1 counterweighted system, extremely low maintenance, very quiet and a whole lot of accessories are available with it, different bolt sizes or Mitchell size.

Ed: It’s certainly a lot easier to move around than a crane?

Alex: Yes, because the column itself weighs 14 pounds and then it’s your camera, your head and your counterweight, and it’s all moved separately which is a lot easier carrying it up 4 stories for example, than bringing up a dolly or bringing up a crane. It’s a totally perfectly vertical movement, there is no circle of arc in it like you have with a jib arm or you have with a dolly.

Ed: But also, as well as the vertical movement, you’ve got …?

Alex: It pans – it has infinite swivelling 360 degrees. It can be hung upside down too like we have at the booth for example. Worst case scenario, you could even use this as a slider with a wedge plate and just put it on its side, without the counterweights. It’s a poor man’s process but that would work too.

Ed: You say it’s a poor man’s process but you put the same camera on there, if you’re looking for that range of movement, you’re going to get the same movement from this as you would with a very large expensive crane. It’s not degrading the picture or the movement?

Alex: It’s the amplitude of the movement that’s different. This only has a little over 40 inches of travel, which is again a little more than the average of a person from standing to sitting and that’s what we wanted to do with that product, is to have that range.

We didn’t want to go more and we certainly didn’t want to go any less than that. That’s why this product will only come in that size.

Ed: But it’s as smooth as a crane would be in the same operation?

Alex: Yes, definitely. It takes some using to operate because it’s a new toy, it’s like you don’t play the guitar after one day, but it’s actually a simple process and, like I said, on a very small footprint, you could put this in a corner of a room and still have that movement, without having a dolly jutting out.

Ed: And we need to mention that the Elevator can go on a range of bases, a tripod base, a dolly, even a slider, so you can just imagine the range of movement that’s possible.

And now we have Linda exclusively.

Ed: Linda, you want to talk about the Rover – and it’s not a dog?

Linda: It’s not a dog, it’s just called the Rover. It is a handheld mounting system for iPhones.

Everybody’s making movies these days …

Linda with the Rover range.

Ed:

Oh no please – some people …

Linda: Well lots of people are making movies and believe it or not there are movies being made on iPhones.

Ed: But not very good movies?

Linda: Well with this they’re going to be great movies. The Rover cage has got handles, the phone just fits right into the cage, it gives it stability, the handles can be adjusted so you can turn them to sit flat on a table for editing. You can take the handles off, put one here so you’re one mounting it, so you can get up high, down low, whatever you need to do. It’s a stable way to mount your iPhone to do everything you do on your iPhone. We have a great video on the website that shows a lot of good shots with it – this is actually it, she’s mounting it on some railing; she’s putting it on a suction cup on her car; she’s putting it on her bike in different situations.

Ed: So is this really just for an iPhone or can you use a range of … well any Smart Phone I imagine?

Linda: Well actually yes. It’s kind of component driven, so if you want to go with something bigger, you just get longer rods and it just expands.

Ed: Could you squeeze a Canon 5D in there?

Linda: I don’t think so. It’s mostly used for mobile devices.

Ed: Now I took a photo here of the VRig and Linda says we talked about it last year, but this is obviously becoming more and more relevant in today’s 360 camera use, so the idea is that it’s an incredibly small footprint and yet stable?

Linda: That’s exactly what it is, just a super small footprint, very stable, so the 360 camera doesn’t get that base in the shot.

Ed: Well it does get the base in the shot, but that’s stitched out?

Linda: It can be, yes … because ours come with a skirt that is just solid black if you like, or a green screen, so it can be edited in post if it does get in there.

But the accessories are pretty cool on this one – the bottom tube is three-eighths tapped, so you can put a suction cup on the bottom and, say you’re in a gymnasium, suction it to the floor so it’s even more stable; or if you’re on a soccer field or a football field,

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Matthews Infinity Arm Superior Strength. Interchangeable Tips. Infinite uses…

• • • • • • •

Strongest ar�cula�ng arm on the market Weight capacity of 7-14 kg Rig cameras, lights, monitors & more CNC tool'd 6061-T-6 Aircra� Aluminium 100% manufactured in California, USA 60 sec�on ‘No-Slip’ centre rose�e Quick release �ps: 1/4" Male & Female 3/8" Male & Female 5/8" Male & Female Ma�hellini Cold Shoe GoPro

Brandon McCormick who is our mechanical engineer, who knows this stuff inside out. He can tell you about it a lot better than I can.

Ed: Brandon this looks like a pretty impressive line-up of – well, bits and pieces for putting other bits and pieces on places?

Brandon: All the traditional grip equipment that is one piece like a baby plate with a 3 or 6 inch pin that you nail or screw to the wall … now we’ve taken that to the next level and made all the pins and adapters and now we’ve got receivers and angle adapters and lots of different configurations of pins that can be mounted in the same way. But instead of having to go up and down the ladder and change out a baby plate that might have too long a pin on it, all you have to do is quick release the pin from the plate or from the clamp and insert the pin that fits your needs. So it’s really a nice way to reduce weight and for new people in the industry that are just starting to purchase stuff, it helps cut down on cost and it gives them more flexibility as they’re trying to grow their business.

Ed: So it’s a system that replaces a whole lot of other independent systems?

Brandon: Yes, the old style stuff one tool that fits one purpose. Now it’s one tool that fits any purpose you can think of that it will work with, it’s really extremely versatile and opens up opportunities that we haven’t even thought of. We’re learning from our customers as they come through here and look at this stuff, and we’re getting lots of ideas from them as well, as to how they see their ability to apply this type of idea.

Ed: And I would hope there’s a lot of compatibility here – that if you have got some pins already, it’s going to be compatible with this product, or not?

Brandon: Well the pins are the same diameter, but the system – how it works …

Ed:

The small footprint of the VRig.

we have an auger spike which screws right down in there and attaches to the bottom, so it gives you that extra stability.

The locking system’s going to be different?

Brandon: The locking system is different. You could modify your pins to work, the end of a baby pin usually has a hole on it and you could drill that hole out to where it would be big enough to accept the locking pin but you know it’s really the business end of the pin that you need sticking out, so it’s not so compatible with the stuff that’s out there already, but it’s there to replace that and add flexibility to the product line.

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There are three-eighths holes tapped throughout, so you can actually mount lights to the stand – and that’s it.

We have 2 versions, 30 and a 75.

Ed: A comment I’ve heard about Matthews is that so many products have got little threaded taps on them – you seem to put them on pretty well everywhere and there’s lots of them and they’re really robust?

Linda: Yes, and they’re there because you’re mounting lots of items onboard – lights, monitors, you’re mounting different equipment and the industry standard is three-eighths for all those fun accessories, so that’s why we do that.

Now we’ve come to our new product called MyWay Grip and I’m going to turn it over to

Brandon with the enhanced grip range.

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Sony for Protel For Protel we’re here at Sony and we’re doing it a little bit different. We’re going round the different spots and talking to expert users and the place we want to start is with the Sony FS7 because now we have the Mark II. To tell us about this we’ve got Chuck Fishbein from Crazy Duck Productions in the USA. Ed: Chuck, I’ve been told the improvements are not huge, but in some areas they’re significant?

starts to sparkle like the opening of Saving Private Ryan. So now it’s just a smooth transition and it will follow with you, or you can manually dial it in. Or, as in my situation, I often run into when doing a headshot or talking head, and you’re all set up and you decide you want a little bit more softness in the background, so what you would do is sort of “well I’ll just go down one notch on my ND” and then suddenly you’re going “oh I don’t have enough light” even though you opened your lens all the way.

Chuck: Well I’ll start with the significant changes.

First, can I turn your attention to the new mount.

The old E-Mount release used to be a button on the side and you just twist off the lens, which caused some problems because it wasn’t as strong of a mount, and secondly, if you had hardware on your lens, your Metabones, it was difficult to twist sometimes if you had rails or whatever. The new mount allows you to just flick the button, twist it like a PL Mount, the opposite direction of a PL Mount and then pull the lens straight out.

Ed: So this is the Alpha Mount?

Chuck: It’s an E-Mount but it’s a strengthened EMount and it’s a locking EMount, so it’s more like a breach lock. So as you put the lens in, you turn it and you hear it click and it’s solid. The big deal on this new camera is the variable ND. What the variable ND allows you to do is normally you have a 3 click ND or a 4 position ND wheel which will give you maybe 2 stops, 4 stops, 6 stops or 9 stops – whatever. Here you are in the open clear position, you click it in and it drops an assembly in front of the sensor and that is a variable window, and that will give you variable ND from a quarter all the way down to 120f. So you get 7 stops of Neutral Density.

Ed: And this is a mechanical operation, it’s not software that’s doing it?

Chuck: It’s actually electronic, electronic in the sense that you are …

Ed:

but

it

is

not

Chuck with the FS7 Mark II.

So here instead of going a full maybe 2 stops or 3 stops, you’re able to dial in one and two-thirds stops or one and an eighth stop – whatever makes it work for you. And that’s a huge timesaver, because once you’re in position, you don’t want to start rearranging lights and moving and opening the window and hoping whatever’s going to work for you.

Ed: It really enables you to make much more of the camera at a certain iris opening?

Chuck: Exactly. Some of the other benefits they’ve added, along with getting the normal viewfinder there’s also this small open viewfinder in case you just want to keep the camera without using your eye, and it’s lighter than using the full eyepiece.

Ed:

Is it a bit like variable sunglasses?

And it’s got a built-in hood?

Ed: So this enables you to set an iris at a certain opening and then the adjustment is in the Neutral Density?

Chuck: Yes, the built-in hood and it’s removable.

They’ve also changed it from having 2 latches, a top and a bottom latch, there’s just a single bottom latch, so now it just hooks on the top and latches on the bottom, which just means less fumbling with the camera. They’ve also squared off this rod here which was a problem for some because the thing would like lose its horizon if you didn’t have it tightened down enough.

Chuck: Exactly. You can work this manually, but you can also do this automatically. So if you’re in a situation where you’re in a car and you’re going from the inside of a tunnel to the outside, or from indoors to outdoors, or from one room to another, there’s isn’t that chunk chunk chunk of the Neutral Density as you go outside, or you’re not suffering by suddenly speeding up your shutter speed which you might have on automatic to do the same job, and suddenly everything

So now the horizon remains solid, and it’s also more of a component style where more things move because they’re not attached directly to the rod, they’re components on the rod. But it will still work with 15mm accessories, so you can build your own stuff if you want to make this rod from here to here, if you’re working with your left eye instead, you can do that. This comes off, you can even put your eye pad on the other side if you’re pressed against the wall. It just gives you more

Chuck: In a sense, yes. Basically, what you have is that the glass is getting electronically darker. It’s actually LCD technology where the glass is essentially dimming by becoming more dense.

Page 19

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flexibility in my eyes. A few other minor things they’ve changed – they’ve added about another 3 user assignable buttons and also because you would have to choose between … you know this lens has its own iris, this is the Sony 18-110 so a new lens, and it can be totally automatic or totally manual. It’s not one of those swimming electro lenses you know where you’re like focus for infinity and just keep turning and turning. Here you can take it out of automatic, sort of like an old EX3 lens and have hard stops.

It means you could even use a follow focus – in fact there’s even rings, threads for follow focus on here, so you can just instantly go right in and be in position to work. You can do that with the zoom as well, where it’s servo zoom, you can reverse the direction of the servo zoom, so it’s comfortable whichever way you want to push the button; or you can take it off automatic and do a total manual zoom. So you can do snap zooms.

Chuck: At Six Flags we everything at 30p, because anytime you’re doing stuff for the press they don’t want it to look like it’s art or commercial, they want it to look like it’s press, like the News came in. Because the News agencies won’t play stuff that’s shot in a film format …

Ed: You sound as though you’re a user of this model camera?

Ed: No, but I mean you’re dealing with fast action, so why wouldn’t you use 60p?

Chuck: I’m not a Sony salesperson – I’m part of the Sony ICE team, I’m a user of Sony gear.

Chuck: Sometimes we do. Again it depends on the occasion. If I’m mounting a camera on a ride, sure I use 60p because it eliminates any of the wobble that we traditionally get.

Ed: Okay, so do you find the zoom lens is really your “go to” lens in most situations or are you a Prime lens man?

Chuck: I’m a Prime lens person. I launched this camera for Sony, I was fortunate to make the films for it … too bad you don’t have image on that, but all these New York things were from that and I use Sony, Nikon, Canon, Cooke, Tamron – all kinds of glass – I can use all kinds of lenses with adapters on this. You know one of the questions that a lot of people ask me is “what’s the difference, like I’m torn between the C300 and the Sony FS7 you know?”

I say they’re both great cameras, but there you’re given a choice of PL or this EF Mount, here you can use PL and EF and Nikon and any other brand you want, with the Metabones adapter for $300-400. You can even put on Smart Adapters which allow you to communicate with your lenses and speed those turns that will help you gain a stop and keep a 28mm lens a 28mm lens – instead of maybe your prop factor maybe 40.

Ed: So as a user, what do you find the benefits of Prime lenses as opposed to having a much more flexible zoom lens?

Chuck: Personally, its sharpness and depth of field, you know being able to control the depth a little more.

Ed: But if you’re in a run and gun situation, depth of field can be a problem, because you want to pretty well have everything in focus all of the time and concentrate on following the subject?

Chuck: It depends on your clientele and the types of things you shoot. My main clientele is Six Flags Great Adventure big theme parks; iHeartRadio concerts around the country; and the New York Public Library.

When I do the library, it’s mostly portraits in all 92 of their branches, it’s talking heads and interviews; and the Park we’re mounting cameras on rides you know, or it could be GoPro’s, it could be Sony Action Cams, it could be this camera if we need it. So each one has its purpose. Yes, there are times I use zoom lenses, but they’re not my dominant lens.

Ed: Tell me, when you’re shooting at Six Flags, what framerate do you normally shoot?

Ed: Right, we’re talking about using the framerate for the job and with this camera …?

right

Chuck: With this camera, one thing you need to know is that if you’re working in 25 frames, if you’re working in 24 or 23.98 it’s an old rule of film photograph of like 16mm and 35mm film photography, that you need to watch your panning speeds and there’s a ratio of lenses to panning speed – the longer your lens the faster you’re moving past your subject. The old example used to be a wagon wheel and the spokes turning. How many spokes turn in the time we go from one frame to the next? So you start getting that choppy stuttery look as you go. So what’s the advice?

You gotta slow down or you gotta use a wider lens, or you have to use a faster framerate like slow motion.

Even if you’re going to slow it down in post, you will have more image between the frames. If you shoot 50 frames instead of 25, well that’s 50 images per second rather than 25 images per second; if a car is racing by you very fast, well you caught here, here and here.

With 25 or 50 you’ve caught it here, here, here, here, here, here and here – less stutter. Film class lesson No. 7.

Ed: Yes I know, but you see so many examples that people forget this and just shoot everything at 25.

Chuck: Well everything becomes like a handycam you know. If you want to shoot cinematic it isn’t “what can the camera do to make it cinematic” it’s “what can I do to make this camera look cinematic?” Can I film, do I approach the subject in cinematic, am I thinking … let me give you one quick example before I go off. In the days of home movie film, right, when a roll of film lasted maybe 3 minutes, people would go zzzzzzzzip zzzzzzzzip and shoot 10 seconds here and 10 seconds there. As soon as VHS showed up, they zoom in and out, they walk around … I see people walking around this convention with their phone filming everything in one take. That’s not going to be cinematic. It’s going to be garbage, but if you want to shoot cinematic, think cinematically, treat your camera that way, and treat your shots that way.

Page 21

Ed: So a lot’s to do with the operator and how he uses the tool?

capabilities but you don’t have to go out and buy a new camera?

Chuck:

Joe: As well at the high end right. You know an F900 the world doesn’t really want too many $100,000 cameras anymore, so you have to be accommodating and I guess the best way I can answer that is “good artists copy, great artists steal” and a good idea that also benefits the shooter community should be taken on, because that’s how we all move forward. So of course Sony’s going to be doing some new stuff, but if you look at our entire product line, from the F55 down, we’ve got a lot of good coverage; we’ve got some good overlap, we’ve got very solid models. What we’ll see next is going to be at the top end of the market, because it’s time for that. We’ve all learned a lot, but we want the 5 and the 55 to have a good long strong life and when it comes to 4K 16 bit RAW images, I don’t think that file format’s going to go out of fashion too soon. And if it does, that’s not going to be a benefit to anybody, so we all have an interest for letting these camera systems develop and allow customers to actually create their business around a camera.

A little bit, yes, very true.

We are now with Joe Schimizzi at the F55 stand.

Ed: Now Joe you’re the F5, F55 guru here I’ve been told and it’s very impressive that Sony has had this camera for quite some years now and every year it’s on the stand and still people keep coming and having a look at it because it really is a workhorse at that sort of high end television market?

Joe: Yes we made a promise about 5 years ago that said we’d be here 5 years later, don’t worry about it and we’re making good on that promise. A lot of the folks I’ve talked to so far this NAB though are a little nervous. They said “Sony, you know, you’re going to do something?” and my answer always is yes, I have to make a new camera, it’s not the end of the world tomorrow so we’re planning to still be here. But when you look at the 5 and the 55 they really do fit the bill for a lot of different kinds of very specific work. If you’re doing a major television series, this is a known entity; we know how much the budgets are when you do a show out there, we know what it’s like to do an Award Show with them, we know what it’s like to shoot the Super Bowl with them. I can shoot everything that Discovery Channel has a standard for in terms of top to bottom. There are a lot more options out there – maybe you want something lighter, maybe you don’t need all the inner connection points, that’s why we made the other models in the family, but for the 5 and 55 when we think back to our history, what comes up in my mind is the F900.

Ed: That was around for many years, it was the workhorse and yes, it just kept going?

Joe: I know it’s not normally our trend, maybe I think the Germans have more of a reputation for hanging on to a model and really just letting it grow up.

Ed: Well there’s the perfect comparison, because ARRI have been producing the ALEXA for centuries and they come out with firmware upgrades that really make it quite a different and much better camera. So is this an example of Sony doing the same, so you have firmware upgrades which improve those cameras’

Joe with the F5.

Ed: Right, so what have you got to offer in the firmware upgrades since last NAB? Joe: So we’re just doing a couple of little things based on feedback right now, and this is going to be firmware 9. It’s going to release in the mid-summer. The main things in it are we’ve launched our R7 RAW recorder a little while ago, right before the show and we wanted to add some more capability to that unit based on initial feedback. So originally it was 60p overcrank or 120 frames 4K overcrank RAW at 16 bit. Now what we’ve done is we’ve added some other framerates in between, so you can do 72, 75, 96 and then you get up to your 120 – the usual ones you’d expect on traditional cinema cameras for overcranking. We’ve also increased and added to our workflow with our WA100 proxy adapter.

This is something else you’ll see in a lot of different cameras at the booth this year at NAB. This is a little unit that can take an SDI connector that if you want to put a cellular card in, can actually make proxy and then wirelessly send it to wherever you might need to. So if you’ve got a deep IT backbone for the kind of shoot you’re doing, maybe you’re the kind of person who’s just wired a small jungle for the sake of reality TV – this could be useful to you. But if you’ve got some good computer jobs you might be able to do some fun stuff with it. And then the other thing is Rec. 2020 colour space has been added to the camera system, so we have that as a matrix option. The last thing we did was an improvement on a feature that we’ve had for a while, which was in the F55 and 5 if you have the 4K internal option, you can record two files to one card. You can get a 4K and an HD file recorded on one SxS card and that’s been pretty cool because a lot of the times if you’re doing a show, card jockeying, making sure you’ve taped to the SD card … you know let’s eliminate

Page 22

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that. But what happened was the other file, the HD file you recorded was 50Meg XDCAM next to our XAVC-I and poor little old XDCAM never thought it would be playing in 60p environments. That was a 60i codec, so what we needed to do was make sure that when you want to do that mode and you want 4K 60, we’ll make sure you get the XDCAM 60i at the same time. So now that’s a guaranteed feature. Before it used to kick out at 30 just because little XDCAM didn’t know what to do.

Now we’ve made sure that that’s going to work, so if you do a 60 4K you will get a 60i XDCAM proxy file when you’re using the two shot one card.

Ed: I would hope that in our world of PAL that it’s 50i?

Joe: Yes sir, absolutely.

Ed: Now is this feature also being introduced at the other levels of camera, because I’ve seen around the show boards or displays saying this, that you can now record your 4K and your high definition at the same time, so you’re not having to do anything in post?

Joe: That’s been a big feature for the 5 and 55. There are similar features that have made it into some of the other members of the family, so with the FS7 for example, what we have is mirror recording. So I have my two card slots and I can get two exact copies at the same time on two separate cards, and that’s been a feature for the FS7 and some of the things that just kind of get you these different options, is when these cameras are born, and then just how the signals are directed and networked within the camera.

So

sometimes that one has an easier path for two direct files, whereas this one is set up such that we have enough bandwidth to be able to get two files on the one card.

It’s not to say that anything’s technically impossible, but just certain things that certain camera systems take more time to develop based on their architecture.

Ed: I heard you mentioning before that The Big Bang Theory is being recorded on the 55, correct?

Joe: Yes, studio camera shot traditional, pedestal same kind of work you’d expect of an F900 way back in the day, but shallower depth of field and with a 14 stop dynamic range.

Ed:

And it looks great.

Joe: We’re trying real hard to keep that as a very consistent compliment.

Right, now in the smaller cameras, a new ultra-high sensitivity 4K video camera, the UMC-S3CA and to tell us about it we have Gretchen.

Gretchen: Yes this is the 4K ultra-high sensitivity camera. This camera is using the same sensor as the Alpha 7S II so the ultra-high sensitivity is very good.

So the difference between the Alpha 7S is the durability is stronger on the Alpha 7S. Alpha 7S is for the consumer use and handheld type but this camera is no attachable genre is the view screen and so the durability is stronger. Operating temperature is higher than the Alpha 7S. Ed:

So you’d tend to use this in a remote function?

Gretchen: Yes but right now we don’t have any remote function so if you want remote function we will provide the APA docking handle to the customer and so the customer makes soft deal sells.

Ed: And by remote I mean you’d put it on a crane or you’d put it somewhere where your space was limited, but you wanted a really high quality picture?

Gretchen: Yes. And also this camera has a single remote goes slow and there is no limitation for the moving recording time. So Alpha 7 is only 30 minutes movie recording, but this camera has no limitation. If you use the 256 gigabyte memory card you can record more than 8 hours. Wow. Ed: And it’s the standard E-mount lens connection?

Gretchen: Yes, E-mount lens.

Page 23

NZVN

EDIUS for AVA We’re at the Grass Valley stand looking at EDIUS the editing software and we’re talking with Alex Kataoka.

Ed: Now Alex, since I spoke to you last year, developments in EDIUS? Alex: We’ve updated EDIUS, we’ve just released version 8.5 which now has support for PQ in our HDR support, so that sort of completes our HDR support in EDIUS. We have a filter called Primary Colour Correction that allows you to apply either custom LUTs or HDR PQ and a Hybrid Log Gamma to your clips for export and we’ve added support for PQ in this 8.5 version. We also updated our codecs. We have better support for H.264, we have a faster encoder that allows you to encode faster and also in higher quality.

Ed: So it’s making good use of the metadata that was loaded in the clip?

Alex: Exactly. You can categorise search through any metadata that’s in the system, you can create what’s called a Smart Catalog which will group the clips in that criteria. So whatever you want, if you want to look for like 4K clips or if you want to look for clips that were shot by this specific camera, you can quickly make a catalogue of those that’s inside your system.

Also, the new feature in Mync is that you can create a storyboard where you can quickly stack those clips and create a playlist on set in and out points, see that as a preview, and what you create here, if you have this together with EDIUS, will show up automatically in EDIUS. You can also export this as an FCP XML so you can send that XML cut list to say like EDIUS, or to other software and import them as playlists or timelines.

Ed: Is this what you mean

by EDIUS on the Cloud or is that something different?

Alex: No actually that is totally different.

Ed: Right, tell me about EDIUS on the Cloud?

Alex: Okay, EDIUS on the Cloud we’re showing right here. We are running EDIUS on the Amazon AWS Cloud, AWS workspace.

You can imagine actually like a system running at a data centre somewhere and it’s running Windows server version and EDIUS is running there and as it’s editing locally you can edit the contents that you have uploaded on the web and from here, from the show, you have only sort of a limited bandwidth on network, but you can still see that it’s editing smoothly and it’s almost as though Alex showing easy editing with EDIUS. you’re editing in your local system. Right now, we’re demoing it on a MacBook Pro, We also have a new H.265 importer, specifically to but it only requires that internet connection and you can support the new Panasonic GH5 camcorder that can see it on any kind of platform. shoot in H.265 4K format – you’ll be able to bring those files into EDIUS and edit on the timeline. We also Ed: So tell me the benefit of this – I mean if you’ve updated our UI to support high resolution monitors so if got your own system …? you have like a 4K PC monitor, in the past EDIUS used Alex: Well this is still a technology demo, so to show like real tiny sort of a bit hard to see, now the we’re still working to finalise it as a product, but a lot of 8.5 version, it will scale correctly to have a better our customers have already stuff in the Cloud. Also, a usability on those 4K monitors. So those things are lot of people may have stuff on the Cloud without even new in 8.5. noticing. The stuff that is there you’d want to sort and edit, so if you have software like Mync or EDIUS up on We also have a new tool that’s included with EDIUS the Cloud, you’ll be able to access those contents in the which is called Mync, which is a personal media Cloud, edit there, keep the contents there, and export organiser, player and also social media uploader. It out to say like YouTube or Vimeo; or if you’re in a was originally … the name doesn’t pop up right now, but broadcast station you want to export out to a playout it used to be included with EDIUS in a different name, server, whatever, you can select only the parts that you but now it’s called Mync and it’s newly released. Mync want edited, do your thing and export it out to any is short for media sync. It allows you to browse all the target destination. clips inside your system, so it’s a personal media Ed: So is this a stripped down version of a organiser. Basically it looks through all of your discs workstation EDIUS or …? and allows you to see them in one window and you’ll be able to sort them either by its name, or what kind of Alex: Yes, you can imagine that you can have your workstation up there. camera it was shot in, or what date it was shot on.

Page 24

Ed: So it’s the same tool as what you’d find on the workstation?

Alex: Exactly, it gives you freedom.

Ed:

Ed: So I don’t understand why you would have it – why is it EDIUS on the Cloud, because if you’ve got it on your workstation, surely you’re using it there, why do you need to have it on the Cloud as well? Or does it just mean that you are accessing Cloud material in your home workstation?

Ed: Right, now just going back to your main EDIUS – so somebody who is, for example, at the moment with Adobe Premiere, I can see from the timeline that it would be a very simple jump to move to EDIUS. Is it still the case that you have a number of ways that you can purchase EDIUS either as a standalone or a subscription?

Alex: No actually it’s the other way round. That’s the whole difficulty of it. It’s difficult to access from your local station what’s on the Cloud, because you have the distance. The merit of having EDIUS in the Cloud is that you can access the contents that are already in the Cloud in a smooth manner, so in a quicker manner.

Ed: So do you purchase a licence to use EDIUS in the Cloud or how do you get it?

Alex: Well we’re still planning on how we provide this. It might be provided as a service, so maybe like use by the hour or something like that, but yes, it’s still being …

Ed: But in that lower range you still have EDIUS Neo, is that right?

Alex: Actually we have discontinued Neo, so again we have this new software called Mync that’s available more in the lower range as a more common product, for people who don’t need as complicated editing features, but they have the ability to sort clips, they can create playlists, they can do simple editing and they can do also uploads to the Cloud. So we have tools for that.

Is that a subscription service?

Alex: It’s actually a software package, so you can buy it for US$50 online.

Alex: Right now EDIUS is still a package sale, so you can either buy it as packet software or download software. The licence is still per PC and once you buy it you can use it forever.

Of course we prefer you to upgrade, but yes, once you buy that version you can use it forever. That’s our state right now and always has been – and we will continue to do so.

Ed: And I’m pretty sure that I’m right in saying that EDIUS is totally compatible with Adobe products such as Photoshop and After Effects – all those sorts of things, you can bring material in and out?

Alex: Yes quite easily and edit quickly – that’s still our main advantage and that’s what we do. We feel we compete well with Premiere on that.

Mike Symes from AVA ( mike@audiovideo.co.nz ) adds that version 8.5 is now available as a FREE upgrade to existing users of v8 and it includes Mync.

“It is a pretty comprehensive OS now and arguably the most powerful on the market” says Mike.

NZVN

Page 25

Clear-Com for Gencom We’re here at Clear-Com with Simon Browne and Giles Co verd ale fr o m Gencom.

Ed: Now Simon, we’ve got a big range of products but we’re picking eyes out and we’re looking at products that really go across the NZ Video News readership, but particularly broadcasters?

Simon: Clear-Com is known for releasing lots of good new products, and it’s no different this year. I’d like to introduce you to four products that we’re showing.

One is a new matrix intercom panel, the V-Series 32, a 32- lever key panel for the V-Series for the Eclipse HX systems.

I’ll also be talking about the HelixNet beltpack, a new beltpack for a digital partyline system we have, which not only sits on a digital partyline but can also be used with power over Ethernet, so it can be sent across a variety of networks and is easy to install.

Also I’ll be talking about the LQ series which is a new range of boxes within our Intercom-over-IP series.

We’ve introduced GPIO so you can have controls – what we call “network control events” going over an IP network around the country if you like, so a door control in one area can put a light on somewhere else in a completely different city if you wanted to do it that way.

And then finally, Clear-Com acquired Trilogy Broadcast last year and Trilogy, through us, have brought out a new test and master reference sync generator called the Trilogy Mentor RG. Right, cycling back to the top – so the V-Series 32 Key is the latest key panel in our matrix intercom range for Eclipse. This one has 32 lever keys and we’ve got four function keys on the front so that you can very quickly assign those within the configuration programme EHX to do various functions; like for instance you can reset all your levels, enter scroll selection, or you can enter supervisor mode to control other user panels. This makes the system a lot speedier for the users. We’ve also introduced a low reflective front screen on the panels now, so that working outdoors in sunlight, it’s easier to read the displays. With expansion panels, you can have up to 112 keys in front of you if you wish to have immediate access to a lot of destinations.

Ed:

Simon and Giles.

twisted pair cable. The new beltpack is a lighter version of the older one, just as rugged, and we’ve simplified the operation to make it look more like our FreeSpeak system and make the controls feel more familiar.

Ed: And this is compatible equipment that plugs into it?

with

the

ancillary

Simon: Yes. This beltpack is completely compatible with systems using the older beltpack and you can mix and match – you don’t need to worry about that.

You have to update the software, but that’s a free update over our network, so that’s straightforward, but other than that, it will all mix and match with legacy.

Giles: The new designs of the Clear-Com beltpacks for HelixNet FreeSpeak II and Encore System have been built with strength and robustness in mind and I’ve personally seen the testing room where these beltpacks and pieces of equipment have been pressure tested to withstand even the demands of some of the more extreme environments like Hyperbaric chambers for FSII …

Ed: So you can drop them from waist height on to concrete and they’ll bounce?

Giles:

Now the beltpack?

Simon: HelixNet is our digital partyline system, so we can put 24 channels of partyline over conventional twisted pair mic cable or over IP. Some time ago, we brought out desktop panels, wall stations and remote stations that can run over IP but we didn’t update the beltpack last year, so this year we’ve added the new IP beltpack. This can go over IP or over the digital partyline Page 26

Essentially yes.

Simon: Ed:

We actually test it that way.

So TVNZ operators will be fine?

Simon: Yes. There are YouTube videos of trucks going over the Encore beltpack by the way.

Ed: Alright, we don’t want to practice that one. Now, the LQ series?

Simon: The LQ series is our glue product for Intercom over IP. If you want to connect partyline systems back to matrix based systems over IP for various regional areas, or you want to connect various churches together or you want to connect studios across a campus over IP, then the LQ series boxes are the ways and means to do it. We brought version 3 LQ this last year, and that has GPIOs on it so that we can use it for remote radio triggering for example – that’s something we can do. We also provide within the browser configuration programme CCM, a means of providing sort of combinational logic, so you can have multiple GPI inputs from various areas on various LQ boxes on the same channel to fire a GPO output somewhere else. Actually, it can probably be brought to something outside of intercom if you like, between various kinds of IP GPIO operation. It’s quite unique – I don’t think anybody else is doing that, so that’s a very helpful box. The rest of the boxes have 2 wire and 4 wire connectivity and they will also be connecting to the HelixNet systems in the very near future.

Ed:

products can reproduce a larger range of vocal frequencies, which results in a higher quality sound for easier listening.

Simon: We have something we call “the Clear-Com sound” particularly in the analogue partyline systems, where we emphasise the vocal audio, so that for example, in a theatre-based system where you want to whisper commands so you’re not heard on the stage, you can be heard, or in rock and roll you can shout into it and still be heard.

So we have this very wide dynamic range and capability of frequency and we emphasise the mid-voice range, so that people can be heard. Encore is about a 12-14k audio bandwidth; HelixNet is 12k bandwidth; and wireless is 7k bandwidth and so forth – but they all have this tailored audio at the end points to provide for intelligibility.

NZVN

Right the last one, Trilogy.

Simon: Trilogy is a brand within the Clear-Com Group who have been providing matrix based systems for broadcast and they probably are known to your readers in New Zealand. But they’re also known for doing signal test generators, the Mentor series, and we’re showing here at NAB the latest version, the Mentor RG, which has got PTP capability so you can use it for time-sensitive Ethernet networks, people running Dante for example or AES67.

Giles:

Video and audio?

Simon: Video and audio, yes. So it’s a video signal generator that provides timecode and PTP. It can take in GPS signals, or it can take in Genlock signals and give out Tri-level syncs for HD and SD, and it’s 4K ready for future high definition test patterns.

Ed: And just to finish us off, Giles the name ClearCom obviously brings up the concept of "clear communications" and it’s reliable?

Giles: One of the strengths that Clear-Com has in terms of audio quality and clarity is that you don’t need to strain to listen, so operators don’t experience any audio fatigue.

Many of Clear-Com’s more recent Page 27

The Mother of all Lights Meanwhile, back in Auckland, we are at PLS, on a very sunny day and we’re doing something a little bit different, because we’re here to look at a light that not many of us would actually use. In our April issue, you read the story about Sean O’Neill and what he’s doing with Avalanche Lighting and some very large lights – well, PLS have some of those big boys here for hire.

Angela Hume is going to tell us about SoftSun. Ed:

What is a SoftSun Angela?

Angela: SoftSun is a unit made by Luminys Corp.

They’re the same company that make Lightning Strikes, the 40Ks and 70Ks which we have here – those units simulate lightning.

They draw a lot of power but obviously are a cost effective or time effective fitting to use when you’re looking for a special effect. So the same company make SoftSuns which are a light source that give you an effect not unlike the sun. It simulates daylight basically.

Ed:

How powerful is it?

Angela: Well it takes a 100,000 Watt lamp or a 50,000 Watt lamp. What that is in lumens or footcandles right now I couldn’t tell you.

Ed: Mmmm that’s probably enough – 100,000 Watt is … well that’s a thousand 100 Watt lightbulbs if you can imagine that, and yes I have seen it on, and yes it is very bright such that, from a distance of about 20 metres, you can’t look at it. You just sort of glimpse it out of the edge of your eye that there’s a very bright light there.

Angela: SoftSun gives you an even light source from one head versus the same amount of light from say 5 or 6 heads of a smaller, say 18K for example.

Ed: So this really is to shoot at night time for day.

That’s what you want to do, you’re at night, but you want that much light, you want to make it look like daylight?

Angela: It has been used for that, but more about coverage, more about getting those lumens up and the coverage from one light source. These heads actually get used a lot – for example on provincial sport fields when FIFA or the Cricket World Cup want TV coverage at a ground like Hamilton. There, the TV guys said “no, no the light levels aren’t high enough”, they called us and we brought the SoftSuns on cranes. What you’re getting is coverage, an even light source distribution versus a whole lot of fixed light towers that they would otherwise use in those kinds of situations.

Ed: And the other part of it is, I guess, if you have a grid that could take these, fine you plug them in, but normally if you’re in that provincial situation, you can’t plug them into 3-phase power, you bring your own generator?

Angela: Yes, they do need a generator – they need a big generator, so you’re looking at a 250KVA minimum (that’s for the 50K) … the 250KVA will do both of them, but the 100 probably prefers a 300. So yes, they need a large generator.

The logistics behind getting the heads to site is probably the hardest part about them. Once they’re there, the generator’s there and everyone’s happy, they’re a really easy to use cost effective light source. But it is really the whole “getting them there”.

Ed: Because you have to transfer the bulb in its own container, you don’t transfer bulb and lamp together?

Angela: That’s right, but that’s true with most fittings Grant.

We send HMIs out with the lamps separate – anything over a 4K-6K we’re going to travel

Angela shows us the light.

it delamped. But yes, it does make a difference when this particular lamp is 3 metre long.

Ed: And the ballasts are rather large?

Angela: Yes they are.

Ed: Why are they necessary?

Angela: The ballast – they’re the power, so that’s what makes the head run. The head in itself is just simply a reflector, a piece of metal with lamp bases in it. The SoftSun is a discharge lamp, so it needs a ballast to control the power to the lamp, otherwise once the lamp is running, it will just keep consuming more and more power until either the lamp explodes, or the power supply fails. Essentially it is a choke, like a ballast in the fluro in your office, it chokes the current supply at a level the system can handle. The other function of the ballast is to rectify the AC power supply from the Genset to a DC supply.

Coming back to that power source, if you are on-site, out in the field, you need a generator – if you have access to a venue that has 400 amp Powerlock, no problem, they’ll run nice and simply off that.

Ed: But you still need the ballasts and I guess they’re 3-phase?

Angela: They are, yes. Yes you need the ballast.

The ballast is what makes the head run.

Ed: Because it’s not a filament is it, it’s a discharge lamp?

Angela: Yes, as noted previously it is a DC discharge lamp, the main benefit being that it is flicker free at almost all frame rates, because the lamp is not pulsing like any lamp on an AC supply.

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Ed: Yes well you could sunbed a lot of people all at one time I guess?

Angela: Yes you can. But the other application is large daylight scenarios. On Lord Of The Rings, they were used to fill against the sun in the South Island High Country. You can get 1:1 ratio against full sun at a 50 metre throw, and still light 20 horsemen charging up to camera. ( Remember that scene? ) Ed: Can peratures?

you

have

different

colour

tem-

Angela: No, the only way to change the CT is to gel it. There’s a gel frame, so you can put gel in front of it. Gel in front of a 100,000 Watt unit is impressive. You just don’t have it on full spot.

Ed: So the standard light colour is 3200K? Angela: No it's 5600K , which is interesting given we say it simulates daylight.

So the mechanisms you have available to you with it, as I say it’s a big reflector with a lamp in it. You have spot flood mechanism and you have gel frame capacity to put on the front. So again, depending on the throw distance, depending on how much coverage you need, you can intensify that lumen push with your spot mechanism. Also because the lamp is so long, 2.5 metre in fact, you have a soft horizontal source, with a sharp vertical cut off.

Ed: Do you think these will ever be replaced by LED? Angela: I don’t want to be here when we can get 100,000 Watt in LED. The biggest issue is the cooling as we have discussed before. These lamps need force cooling at the best of times, so an equivalent LED would be all heat sink and minimal lamp.

Ed: Because of the linear nature of the bulb, and I’m thinking of my Tota-lights here, I guess one of the other uses for these large lights would be as excellent green screen lights?

Angela: Yes, again because of its coverage.

If people are using a lot of outdoor green screening, yes you can put a couple if not more SoftSuns on cranes to get you that height and spread, definitely – really good, even coverage.

Ed: So that’s for a really big green screen, but a smaller one – you have SoftSuns that go down to as little as 10K? Angela: They do make them, yes absolutely. We don’t have any here in New Zealand yet.

Ed: What’s the smallest you have?

Angela: 50K and they have been used for that application, both 50K and 100K. They are a really effective even distribution light source.

The big blue box on the left is the ballast.

and you don’t have to keep moving lights around, it’s already there?

Angela: That’s exactly right, and what that saves in man-time alone I would imagine is good. Everything has its place – there’s the shot where you need 5 or 6 different light sources you know, but it’s just reminding people that they are here and they can get you that effect that you otherwise didn’t realise was possible.

Just trying to make them more available to people or make people more available to them really.

Ed: Hey I still use my Lowel Tota-light which has a similar design.

Angela: Exactly, don’t you ever get rid of that. The other thing I might add is that you can’t own SoftSuns, so we don’t own them, they’re here from Luminys. Now people say “yeah, a monopoly” and all of that, however what it means is the incredible support you get from the manufacturer. I really can’t speak highly enough of how receptive they are to helping, and that’s right through from the 100K SoftSuns down to the 40K Lightning Strikes. If we need something, if a controller goes down or there’s some kind of fault with it, I’ve had Lightning Strike controllers FedEx’d overnight from LA to here. Obviously that depends on whether it caught that last plane or not, but the point is they’re really receptive – middle of the night phone calls, they send techs down at the drop of a hat if there’s something happening. I really can’t speak highly enough of their ability to support their own product.

Ed: And PLS is the place to find them – talk to Ange.

Angela: Yeah, come and see me.

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Ed: Whereas a light that has a normal circular reflector, in other words a point source, is going to give you like a big circle of light, this is going to give you a wide but not so high light spread?

Angela: Yes – the width and coverage of it is going to be a lot more given the linear design of it. A lot of the discharge bulbs that are up there as in 10K, 18K, are still PARS, therefore they’ve still got that parabolic output, so the linear is going to give you a lot more. That’s where they get the claim that 100K is the equivalent to 5 or 6 18Ks because of that even distribution of the same amount of light.

Ed: Would it be true that having a 100K light is a bit of a timesaver – it might be a bit expensive setting up with a generator and the ballasts and making sure it’s in the right place, but once you’ve got it, as you say, it replaces 5 or 6 other lights Page 29

Rycote for STech For Sound Techniques, we are at Rycote with Stephen Buckland and Richard Hall from Rycote.

Ed: Not one of the major items on show and, in fact, it comes in a little cellophane packet, but this is pretty cool Stephen?

Stephen: This is actually a sample pack of Rycote’s latest products which are known as the “Rycote Essentials Range.” They are a variety of ways for people to put lapel mics on talent. People might be familiar with the Rycote stickie, which is a self-adhesive pad, double-sided, the Rycote Windjammers for use outside clothing, and the Rycote Undercovers for use under clothing.

Rycote has extended the range by developing several other variations on the theme. We’ve got a square double-sided attachment which can be used with say Sanken COS-11 which has a square rubber mount. We have a larger stickie which means it can hold things like the DPA concealer clip; we also have a cover that fits over that same stickie, so it’s slightly larger than the ones have been to date.

And then we have this doughnut thing here which is designed … or you can apply it in various ways obviously – the microphone can sit in the middle and this sits around the outside of the microphone, it’s double-sided and then you could put your cover over the top of it.

Ed: So you don’t have a large crocodile clip?

Stephen: That’s right.

Ed: But it’s a single use obviously?

Stephen: The covers can be used more than once, the stickie pads obviously single use. It’s interesting because people in the past have cut these things out themselves on the edge of a set and found a variety of surgical tapes and so forth to make them out of. What Rycote has done is made them into a simple deliverable form, they’re on a roll when you’re on set or you can hand them to the wardrobe department. They love them, they just peel the things off the roll and put them on – you know no more having to cut bits and pieces yourself.

Ed: So what are you talking about per item cost wise?

Stephen: From memory 10 to 30¢, I think it would be about that level, yes.

Ed:

Richard with the InVision Lite system.

Stephen: No, we haven’t found the Eco Wash sponsor yet. I must call up my mate at Eco Store actually … I’d forgotten about that Grant, thank you.

Ed: We’re going to give away a bottle of Eco Wash with every Softie sold.

Stephen:

Yes I must talk … yeah …

Not worth making it yourself?

Stephen: Only worth it if you’re an artiste in these sorts of matters. Applying lapel mics these days is done by other people, for example the wardrobe department and they don’t want to be mucking around.

They like something that they know it’s the same as it was yesterday, they put it on here, they stamp on the cover and then the actor can return to makeup and go back on set.

Ed: Alright, that’s in the smaller items, what about in the larger items?

Stephen: The larger items will be familiar to Sound Techniques customers. We’ve got the Cyclone range for the bigger windshields; we’ve got the Super Softie’s and we’ve got the Classic-Softie’s and the Classic windshield. Interestingly enough, these things have taken a bit of time for people to get used to, but now I would say more people come into the shop looking for the newer range of equipment than asking about the classic stuff. With the classic stuff, a lot of it can still be refurbished, there are parts for the suspensions and the mounts and so forth, and we’re happy to prolong the life of something if that’s what you want to do.

Ed:

Any luck with the Eco Wash?

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What is in the Rycote Essentials range.

Now Richard Hall chief marketing officer for Rycote is going to tell us about this new microphone suspension which incorporates the famous Lyre but in a different format.

Ed: Now what I’ve noticed with this is that it has increased the sprung mass that is there holding the microphone and that means that your smoothness and reduced vibration of any movement that you have through the base is reduced still further, because you’ve got a heavier mass being supported on the Lyre.

Richard, what’s your take on this?

Richard: Well the physics aside, I know that it works. It incorporates the patented Lyre technology as you’ve highlighted.

This is the latest edition, the "InVision-Lite" to our InVision shock mount range, which everyone will be very familiar with – tried and tested, known and loved. It’s very different in the sense that there’s only one point of contact with the microphone which is at the rear, and there’s a unique camlever lock at the back of the suspension which enables the rest of the microphone to be free to accept a foam windscreen. So you can slip that right the way onto the microphone and cover all of the interference cancellation slots without fouling them onto the Lyres.

So 2 versions of this mount will be available – a 19mm which is suitable for DPA 4017, 4018, Sanken CS1, Sennheiser 8040, 5060; and a 21mm for the Schoeps Mini CMIT. Ed: Is this suspension system also included in the Cyclones?

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Richard:

Not yet, but we’re looking at it.

Stephen: The point of this is that it’s designed for short microphones. In the past, people would say "well I want to put a foam windshield on." What they would have to do is, to put it on the old type of suspension, they would have to cut a slot in their expensive foam windshield. Now it’s all cantilevered from one point – you can slide the windshield on the front and it doesn’t obstruct and fully covers the slots and you don’t have to cut it.

Ed: But as you say, it’s only for the shorter microphone – the longer one really you’ve a bit too much cantilever?

Stephen:

That’s right, yes.

Sound Devices for STech For Sound Techniques, we’re at Sound Devices with Gabriel Benitez.

Ed: Now Gabriel, we met you in New Zealand a little while ago, but we’re here at NAB and as well as the large mixers for the soundies that we all know and love, you’ve now come out with a new product that’s not at that level, but certainly fills a gap in the market for the independent cameraperson or smaller audio recording person who wants good quality audio?

Gabriel: That is correct. The MixPre series consists of two portable recorders that also have the capability of USB audio streaming, and these are not replacements to any current existing Sound Devices recorders – rather they complement the line. The quality of the microphone preamps of the MixPre-3 and 6 is comparable to that of the 7 and 6 series, meaning they’re of equal quality, they just come in a different package.

We needed to develop new microphone preamps for the MixPre series to accommodate two things – one, novice users who are unfamiliar with gain structure and naturally experienced users who want more control.

Richard: So this is for short shotgun mics up to 210mm and 120 gram. Anything heavier or longer, you rely on whatever the InVision mount is for your microphone.

Stephen: The short microphones are often used in low ceiling small rooms – people might be doing documentary work or even drama, and the issue has always been “well I want to put a foam windshield on because I’m going to move the mic to and fro in the air across the room.”

Richard: That’s why we’ve marketed this as an indoor boom solution, so you couldn’t put a Softie on here, there’s no room and it would be too heavy. But for interior boom work applications, it’s fantastic.

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Gabriel: Yes and no. I think that if you’re going to just take advantage of the input and recording section of a 633 or a MixPre-6 you’ll find commonalities, but they’re widely different animals and the 633 is a mixer that happens to record. This is a recorder, its output functionalities are beyond limited in the sense that you have a stereo unbalanced out. That is it. In our 633 you have 4 analogue outputs, 4 AES outputs, you have camera return – you have a world of options.

Ed: So in other words it’s like cars – it might have 4 wheels, but what’s in there under the bonnet is entirely different?

Gabriel: That is correct and I’m not deterring 633 users from buying this …

Ed: So there’s a switch there somewhere so you can put it on "novice” or “experienced"?

Gabriel: Correct. It’s based on a touchscreen and it is "basic mode" and "advanced mode". It ships in basic mode, but it’s a matter of going into the menu and going into the systems portion of the menu to access advanced or basic mode. In advanced mode, you get more options.

But the second thing we tried to accomplish with the microphone preamps, is to present them in a way that we don’t compromise quality, but we are able to cut costs, and that’s why the recorders are so aggressively priced. If you notice – well your readers can’t see it …

Ed:

I have taken a photo.

Gabriel: Well in the menu section, you have firmware control to many of the advanced features that you would find in a 633 or a 7 series recorder, where in those devices your PFL (pre-fade listen) is a switch and your gain knob is a potentiometer. In the 664, your high pass filter is an actual potentiometer, all these things are components that contribute to cost and by being able to add these features on a firmware basis, we’re able to present the same quality from phenomenal preamps but at a very aggressive price.

Ed: Now of course, a soundie would look at this and say “well that’s a lot smaller than the 633, it’s a lot cheaper and if it produces the same audio quality, wow I should go for that”?

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Gabriel with MixPre-6.

Ed:

As a spare you mean?

Gabriel: A 633 user would have this as a backup recorder and a person who is entering into the world of Sound Devices, can enter with a MixPre-6, take full advantage of its professional grade preamps and then one day, when they need more routing and mixing functionalities, they step up into a product that does that, that has those features.

Ed: I see you’ve got a MixPre-6 and a MixPre-3 – the 3 seems to have fewer knobs?

Gabriel: True. Before I get into the difference between the two I just want to make a quick mention on the Kashmir preamps. These preamps are not off the shelf ie chips that we buy from a component manufacturer.

These are discreet class A, very low noise, -130dB of noise floor, over 70dB of gain, really high input clipping levels, and a sweet set of analogue limiters that operate in conjunction with a digital limiter to allow in basic mode, virtually no distortion, and in advanced mode you take full leverage of the dynamic range. We’re using 30 bit A to D converters in these devices, so …

Ed:

There’s no compromise?

Gabriel: There are no corners cut, we did not make any compromises on the preamp section. What you

don’t see are the things that we remove, like timecode generator. You can jam it with an external accessory like Timecode Systems UltraSync ONE generator.

There’s no balanced output, there’s no routing features like you would find on another Sound Devices product.

Ed:

So, between the 3 and the 6?

Gabriel: Between the 3 and the 6 – the 3 is a 3 channel, five track recorder. You have to add left / right to get your full track count. The MixPre-6 is a 6 channel, eight track recorder. As far as being a USB

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audio interface, the MixPre-3 streams five channels of audio to the computer and streams two channels for a return. The MixPre-6 streams eight audio channels to the computer and four returns.

An interesting thing about these products given that they’re so firmware and touchscreen heavy … traditionally on the 6 series, the assignment between inputs to track count is fixed.

The same thing happens here – your channel 1 is track 1, that cannot change; however you can assign an input to a channel. So if I choose not to use microphone channel 1 that happens to be an XLR input, I can take my AUX input and assign it to channel 1; or I can take my USB channel 1 and assign it to channel 1.

On this Pro Tools example that we have here, faders 3 and 4 are USB channels 1 and 2 from the Pro Tools, so in this configuration I can plug a microphone in channel 1, stream it to track 1 on this Pro Tools session and play back the five tracks on the left / right and mix so I can record over what I’m doing in Pro Tools and I’m using it as an interface.

If I’m doing live music tracking, I can simultaneously track the Pro Tools or another software and record onto the SD card of the MixPre at the same time, so if Pro Tools crashes the MixPre has a backup.

Ed: I’m sure you can see endless possibilities for this Stephen?

Stephen: That is in fact probably my greatest difficulty at the moment – comprehending all the various uses that it can have. Among our customers, there’s obviously the entry level or videographers who are always looking for some sort of recorder backup situation.

Ed: And we’ve just taken a photo of a DSLR sitting on a MixPre-3 with some sort of proprietary clamp, so obviously the audio recording ability of the DSLR is now no longer an issue?

for special effects recorders. Sometimes special effects are recorded in a controlled environment where you have full control and there’s no supposed damage to the equipment.

Stephen: It wouldn’t be an issue, and nor if you were trying to record sound effects or, not directly related to video, we have a lot of people who want to record nature and an oral history, another group of people who pretty well to date have had to take their novice sound recording ability and try and fashion it to the equipment that’s available.

But if you are riding on a vehicle and you don’t want to trash your 633, the same way some productions have crash CAMs, you may consider the MixPre-6 as a lower cost alternative in the event that you are in a position to do a shoot that may jeopardise the recorder itself.

So having the 24 bit 192 is a huge feature for special effects and nature recordists.

These two devices, to my mind, will fit perfectly for them because there’s a simple mode to use and they will do the job far better than the equipment that we’ve had to date.

Ed: So you could even drop it in the water Stephen – attach it to your drone?

Ed: And the nuts and bolts of the system, such as the battery supply and the recording – it’s recording onto an internal recorder or SD card is it?

Gabriel: It records onto an SD card.

The accessories are various but most of them are for powering purposes. The product ships with a Y-cable that is USB-C on one end and two USB-A connectors on the other, to provide data and power, and a four double A battery sled. The optional accessories include an eight double A battery sled and an L-Mount type battery lithium ion sled that allows you to mount a lithium ion battery on the top and on the bottom and hot swap them without interrupting the recorder. I wanted to add something between the 3 and the 6 that I think is really important for sound recordists. The 3 goes up to 96k, the MixPre-6 can go up to 192 and that is fantastic

Stephen: Well I’d try and avoid dropping it in the water, unless I was prepared to write it off. The other thing about the high sampling rates is that a lot of sound effects are recorded at a high sample rate and then slowed down. That’s how they get those sorts of big bangs and thumps on movie sound tracks. This is a small portable box that should be able to accomplish that with ease in the field.

Ed: So I guess it’s a case of getting it out there and having some people use it in a serious way and they’ll come up with new and exciting ways to make the best of it?

Stephen: Correct. The first shipment is ordered and I’m hoping it’s going to arrive about the same time as I return to New Zealand and I for one am excited about getting my hands on one and putting it through its paces.

Ed:

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So come and see Stephen.

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TVLogic for Techtel For Techtel, we’re here at TVLogic “Always ON-AIR” – that’s a very good slogan – with Wes Donahue.

Ed:

Wes, “Always ON-AIR” what does that imply?

Wes: I suppose it implies that, once you plug a monitor in, it stays on the air forever, but you know it’s a tagline – what can I tell you?

image next to a fairly contrasty foreground. So again, if you apply an HDR emulation LUT to this, you’re going to be able to see how that image is going to look with PQ applied to it and actually be able to see that reproduced on this panel because it has a 17,000 to one contrast versus like a thousand to one on the LCD. So there’s much more subtle range between the darkest dark and the lightest light that you can actually see on this panel.

Ed: Right well tell us something about this 5.5 FHD monitor.

I haven’t heard of that before?

Wes: This is the third generation of our roughly 5 inch onboard viewfinder series. We originally introduced a monitor about 4 years ago, the VFM-056, which kind of took onboard monitoring by storm and became one of the most popular displays we’ve ever introduced.

We followed that up a couple of years back with the VFM-058 which was a step up to a full 1920x1080 panel.

This year, we’re introducing our first organic LED based viewfinder monitor, that’s the VFM-055A. We went to organic LED for a couple of reasons. One is that organic LED, without a doubt, has Wes would agree, the images were sharp and rich. the widest possible contrast ratio of any flat panel technology, and that’s because, with an LCD, which is Now a couple of new features that we added is that this what the previous models have been, they have a monitor now has a built-in Sony L-Series battery back. constant light source behind them. The only thing that Unlike the previous models where you had to buy makes that light source get brighter or dimmer is the optional backs for any kind of battery, we built the Sony shutter of the liquid crystal diode. So if you want to try L-Series into this so that you don’t have to run out and to get black out of it, you have to shutter it down. But buy a battery bracket if you happen to have Sony Lif you look at some of the footage that we’ve planned Series batteries, which a lot of people do. here, you’ll see that the blacks are not really fully black, Ed: Now I see luminance is 350 candela per square they’re kind of grey, kind of milky, even when I phase metre. Is that the same as a nit? out for black. So the difference between that and what Wes: Yes, I mean it would be the same as a nit and you see in an OLED is very dramatic, because when the that’s why I said that we call it HDR emulation because pixel goes to black on an OLED, it just shuts off the obviously, 350 nit is not really very high brightness. pixel completely – the light shuts off, because organic LED is an emissive light source, meaning that each pixel is its own source of light. That’s why we went with organic LED because, in production these days, we’re starting to see things like high dynamic range cameras that have preview LUTs and things, they want to be able see the look that’s supposed to be coming off the camera in different ways. So we wanted to have a monitor that had more dynamic range and more colour range than the average LCD does, so that if you applied those types of LUTs downstream, you would be able to preview it on your viewfinder monitor and kind of see how it’s going to look.

Ed: I can attest to this, that the clarity that I’m seeing in this monitor is great.

Wes: This is the current model, this is the new one.

Ed:

Aaah, so I’m not even looking at the best one?

Wes: They’re both really good because they’re both 1920x1080, but with this OLED one, you’re going to see black levels – just look at the black around that. You can’t get that black on an LCD. This is truly a black

But since this monitor will get much darker and actually still have more information than the average LCD, that’s where the HDR emulation LUT comes into play because while it won’t get as bright as HDR can get, it will get as dark as HDR will get. It will give you the whole tonal range all the way down to zero and that way you can actually see it mapped out tonally on a lesser bright display.

That’s what we’re going to be doing with the emulation LUT – it’s like a tone map.

Ed: So the applications for this – this is for a gimbal operator?

Wes: It could be a gimbal operator, it could be a camera operator who likes to use an onboard monitor to refer to out of one eye, or a director’s monitor that sits on the side of a larger camera rig. It can be used for pulling focus, for focus pullers who have a special monitor just set up for that, because it has the focus assist range of tools that help make focus and exposure easier to do.

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Ed: And a simple switch to full frame … so what we’re seeing is the full 1920x1080 and no edges, nothing cropped off it?

Wes: Correct.

Ed:

Okay, now there are many more small monitors?

Wes: Yes, these are all existing monitors in the series, and so we have 3 different 7 inch models. We have a base entry level 7 inch which is LVM-070C, then we step up to the 7 inch 1920x1080 LVM-075A – that has a really beautiful 7 inch full HD panel. This is relatively bright as a standard monitor of 600 candela per square metre. Then if you need to go even brighter and be able to see and shoot outdoors, you’ve got the 1500 nit SRM (Sunlight Readable) …

Ed: I think you could shoot in the middle of the Arizona desert with that one?

Wes: Possibly, yes. Then we have both a standard level luminance and high luminance version of our 9 inch model. So there’s an LVM-095W for standard luminance, that’s 400 candela, and then the SRM is brand new again this year – 095W-N. That is a 900 candela per square metre brightness.

These are definitely a very popular monitor with jib operators, helicopter pilots who have monitors in the chopper and even some Steadicam guys use these because they need a slightly larger screen.

Ed:

And in the larger monitor series LCD continues?

Wes: We’re going to move up now to the 17 inch model that’s new this year. We actually have 4 monitors that use the same 17 inch very beautiful 1920x1080 10 bit panel and this new model is probably going to become our highest end 17 inch in that it pretty much has every feature that a monitor can have, including that it’s a true dual-channel processor. That means that you can put 2 inputs into it and independently see those 2 channels. So, for example, if you’re going to do a camera shading, you bring both camera inputs in, bring up the same chart and you can shade independently.

So you’re not looking at a single feed like you do in a "picture in picture" kind of thing. This is 2 separate individual channels. Also for broadcasters, it has LKFS loudness monitoring built into it, so if you need to see if your LKFS loudness has been applied correctly, it has that kind of meter in there so you can see it.

Ed: By the way, how’s that going in the States – it’s seems to have been ignored where we come from?

Wes: Yeah, I don’t think it’s doing much better here quite frankly. Certainly I still turn on my television at home and the ads are still blasting out and everything else is slightly lower.

Ed: So this is really the LOTR monitor – the one ring to rule them all?

Wes: Exactly and 17 inches seems like it’s a very popular size, it fits in a rack, since it’s full HD, you’re not doing any scaling or anything like that, you’re looking at a full HD picture. We expect this monitor to be pretty popular. Next we’re going to move to our high dynamic range monitors. We have 2 – these are 4K displays, both of them and they are designed really to do two things. One is more of a reference master display, so that monitor is for authoring content in 4K at high dynamic range. We have our current model, which is the LUM-310A, and that’s a standard dynamic range monitor. It’s a very nice image, very good looking, but if you look to the right at the new LUM-310R, you’ll see that that has a much higher luminance and the blacks are much richer. The reason we’re able to achieve that is we use a very sophisticated and proprietary backlight system that is locally dimmed – meaning that, of the 2000+ individual LEDs that are directly behind that panel, they dim locally based on the image content as it’s being played. So when there’s a dark section of the frame, that dark section LEDs dim and in areas that are bright they come up brighter – and that all tracks real time with the picture as it’s being displayed. That all requires a fairly sophisticated algorithm to be able to control that and that’s what we have employed in order to bring this monitor out and have it actually be able to master HDR content at a maximum luminance of 2000 nit, which is so far unheard of. Nobody can do anything like that with any HDR reference monitor that’s been built to date.

Ed: Do you know of anybody else who has that sort of dynamic tracking of the luminance?

Wes: No one currently is doing that. The only company that’s ever really built a display that does that type of local dimming successfully is Dolby – and Dolby doesn’t really sell those monitors, they just use them to help postproduction facilities master in Golden Vision. There are other companies that claim to be doing some type of local dimming, but not anything this precise and this sophisticated.

Ed: It’s something that I’m not able to show you readers, but it is absolutely stunning – the picture on the left, on the standard 4K monitor looked wonderful, but … it’s hard to describe, it’s not really a sharpness, it’s a richness, it’s a much richer picture and there’s just no sign of any softness unless that softness was meant

Ed: So “the Don” hasn’t got involved yet and tweeted about it?

Wes: Yes exactly – he hasn’t yet. But I’m sure he will – he gets to everything eventually.

Ed:

Anyway, back to monitors …

Wes: This is a QC display and so we have the ability also to import and even export 3D lookup tables via a USB stick in the front.

It has close captioning support for all the major close captioning standards; it has a very advanced waveform and vectorscope compared to our other monitors, much higher resolution and colour.

So we threw everything in.

Page 36

to be part of the picture. For example, we’re looking at the head of a deer and every little whisker is there, it’s clear and it’s just a beautiful image.

Wes: So this is kind of an accompanying model to what I just showed you which is the LUM-310R, which is definitely a reference master HDR display for 4K – and

by the way, that resolution you were looking at there was true DCI 4K, so that’s 4096x2160.

Ed: So there are different flavours of 4K – is that what you’re telling me?

Wes: There’s actually only one that’s 4K. 3840x2160 is really UHD which is Ultra-High Definition and the reason why they don’t like it to be called 4K is that it doesn’t actually reach 4000. 4K refers to the 4096 lines of resolution.

Since this is only 3840 lines, it’s not quite 4K – it’s 3.8K. But the name has sort of stuck to these higher resolution displays so everyone calls these all 4K. But this particular panel that we’re looking at here is a 3840x2160 organic LED panel that is capable of a maximum luminance output of 750 nit and so it will actually display HDR content, but we’re designing this for QC purposes. So, for example, once you master your content at a max luminance of 2000 nit, then you output to Blu-ray or you output to some sort of streaming format, that is now going to be closer to 1000 nit and that’s going to be your distribution master.

You check that distribution master output on this monitor which is larger. It’s more likely to be that people at home are going to have something like this and you’ll be able to see then the quality of that sub-mastered image and that’s what we’re selling this for. So it’s not a grading display per se because it doesn’t get any brighter than 750 nit,

Page 37

but it is a very very rich looking image, very quick response, you know no delay, none of the kinds of things you see with the lag time and blur that you get with an LCD typically. We don’t have any of that on this, so we really believe it will be a very popular monitor. Of course, some people will use it to grade because it outperforms most everything else they have right now, like the plasmas and those things.

Ed: I’m sure some people would like to have it at home?

Wes: Right – I would. That kind of wraps up the new stuff that we have here at the show. Any questions?

Ed: Well having heard what you’ve said Wes, and having talked with other well regarded screen manufacturers, this is something that really cements in my mind your position at the top of the market. You’re not jumping in there at every fad that comes along and quickly putting out a screen just because people ask for it. You’ve got to make sure that it’s really something that people can use.

Wes: Right, and an example I’ll give you of that is, when HDR first started becoming a buzz word, companies immediately put together some sort of really bright monitor and said they were applying some sort of LUT to it and it does HDR, and there’s companies here at the show today, this week, that are saying that, and it’s not HDR. The reason I’m saying that is because, in order to really be a high dynamic range display, you have to be able to not only extend into the higher brightness areas, but you have to reach down into lower areas of black, of darkness.

No LCD that has a conventional LCD backlight behind that LCD the entire time – none of them can do that, and they can’t do it because, in order to get higher brightness, you have to pump more light, and when you’re pumping more light you can’t dim down to a very low level of black. So most of these firms that are talking about this and saying that these monitors are HDR are really just showing high luminance monitors. That’s not dynamic range, that’s just high brightness and the customers aren’t quite up to snuff on this yet, so they don’t really understand that.

What we put out here at the show, anything that we say is HDR, definitely has a wide dynamic range capability and even the organic LED, the large 550, you know we’re not telling people to use that for reference colour grading – I’m sure people might decide to do that, but we’re not saying it’s ideal for that. We’re saying that there’s one that is a reference master monitor and is ideal for that, because we’ve spent a tremendous amount of time, money and R&D to develop that panel with the manufacturer of the panel, so that it could in fact achieve the true dynamic range that’s necessary for cinema HDR and for television HDR for mastering purposes.

Because masters in HDR are created well beyond the capability of today’s current TVs. So a 2000 nit max brightness on a mastered piece of content means there’s nothing right now that actually reproduces 2000 nit max brightness besides this reference monitor. You need that because, the way HDR works is that metadata reads what your television can do and then it adjusts that PQ curve to what your TV can reproduce. But if you’re mastering content, you want to futureproof that as much as possible so more is always better when it comes to that, which is why we wanted to build the display that would let you master at much brighter levels but not just bright – they’re bright and they’re also dark.

While it does 2000 nit peak it also

does .0002 nit black, so that gives you a contrast ratio of like a million to one.

Ed: So you see that as being where it’s going for the consumer – that this whole move to high dynamic range televisions is actually a good one as opposed to 3D some years ago?

Wes: Yes, because the easy way to understand that is when you look at the image – it’s compelling. It draws you in, it has depth, it’s vibrant because it’s not only a wider colour palette but it’s also, like I said, a wider dynamic range. So it’s much more true to life. It doesn’t look like you’re looking out the window, but it’s closer to what it looks like looking out the window. The colour palette is closer to real life so, when you see the green of a street sign or something like that, that you were looking at in Rec-7 or 9, now you’re looking at it in Rec-2020 or DCI-P3 and it definitely looks more realistic. You might not have realised that when you were watching stuff in 7 or 9, that those colours weren’t really true, because you’re looking at an entire picture made up of lots of different colours that approximate real life. If you actually looked out the window with your camera and then looked out the window with your eyes and saw “oh I’m looking at my screen here and that grass is not the same colour green as what I’m seeing” well, with these new HDR displays, it’s going to be a lot closer to that. That’s really the point of all this, to try to reproduce a much more realistic and much more compelling image so the content creators can use that to be more creative and more dramatic.

Ed:

And that’s where TVLogic helps?

Wes: That’s our intent.

Ed:

“Always ON-AIR”

Wes: Yes, Always ON-AIR.

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NZVN

Connex for Panavision For Panavision, we are at Amimon, better known as Connex, the providers of wireless video transmission in a number of areas, but the one that I guess we’re most interested in at the moment is with the drones. We had a look at a product at IBC, but since then, the boys have been working furiously in the back room and have come up with something ever better and to tell us about that we have Ron Dagan.

Ed:

So Ron, what have you done?

Ron: Connex is the market leading solution for professional drone users. We have Video Link either for aerial photography, industrial inspection, surveillance, law enforcement – these kinds of applications – and we had 2 products in the family – the Connex that has the bigger form factor and longer range – up to one kilometre; and we had the small brother the Connex Mini that has a smaller form factor, lighter weight and half the range, up to 500 metre. Lots of customers were asking us to combine the two and have the smaller transmitter from the Mini with the longer range and the higher performance of the Connex.

Ed: Because they keep the weight down on the drone but they don’t worry about the weight at the other end, or the size of it?

Ron: The users want a longer range and longer performance so we agreed that this is a good idea. It was quite a technological challenge to combine them both and achieve the same performance as the full size Connex with the smaller Mini transmitter, but we made it successful and now we are offering the new member of the family, which is called Fusion. It’s the fusion together of the Connex and the Mini, so the new product we are offering is a combination of the Mini transmitter you see here, the smaller transmitter that can work with the large size Connex receiver. So a small lightweight transmitter on the drone, a bigger receiver with five antennas and a full range of one kilometre with all the goodies of the Connex.

Ed: Can you mix and match, so if somebody’s already bought the Connex Mini, can they now buy the receiver and it will still work?

Ron: That’s a very good question, because we have a very good answer for it – and the answer is "yes", positively yes. We made it such that the Connex Fusion receiver can work with the Mini transmitter after a software upgrade on the Mini transmitter. We also made it such that owners of Connex can upgrade their receiver with software and then it will operate with the Mini transmitter. So we actually opened all the options to new customers and our previous customers.

Ed:

That’s really good customer service.

Ron: It is, it’s important you know.

We serve professionals, this is not a hobby market. We have to protect their investment and keep serving them with new software and new enhancements to their investment.

Ed: And so people choose the Connex brand because of that reliability?

Ron: People choose the Connex brand because it’s the right tool for the right job. Okay, it means it gives professionals the broadcast quality video, the same quality that was chosen by ARRI from the cinematography market with a very robust link, the same technology that is used in medical applications …

Ed:

So it’s very reliable …?

Ron: It’s a very reliable, very high quality, very robust solution and you know that we have thousands of them on the market and the feedback from the customers is excellent, it’s really good.

Ed: So if you are after a software upgrade, is there something that you just download off the internet?

Ron: Yes, yes. Not from the internet – there is a standard procedure, all our users are familiar with it, if not it’s well described on the Connex service website, connecting their transmitter or receiver for USB to the PC then putting in the serial number, fetch the latest software, upgrade it, it’s a simple procedure.

Ed: Right, now with such a high quality transmitter / receiver arrangement for a drone, one could also use this in the broadcast market for camera transmission, but you have an option for that too, although it’s not available in the Connex brand?

Ron: We have several markets that we serve – drone is served by the Connex product line and it is sold as an end product from Amimon. So it’s an Amimon end product sold directly through the resellers. It can be used for broadcast of course, it can be used for many other applications – transferring video from your laptop to your television also if you wish, but that’s not designed for it. Connex can be used on any camera with an HDMI interface, if audio is not mandatory.

Connex does not support audio, there’s no point currently in sending audio from a drone down – they are too noisy – and Connex has other features that are not needed in the broadcast, like S Bus control for telemetry and stuff like that.

Our business model serving the broadcast or the professional photography

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Ron: Yes, of course there is.

Ed:

In terms of …?

Ron: Well there are many things, some of them big, some of them small that differentiate between what broadcast needs and what drone needs.

Ed:

For example, the audio?

Ron: Audio is one, the SDI is another thing supporting specific resolutions on cameras.

Ed: So in other words a bigger bandwidth to cope with larger file sizes?

Ron: Yes – it’s many things, it’s metadata – many things that are relevant for the broadcast market versus other things that are relevant for the drone market, like telemetry or S Bus control from the ground back to the gimbal on the drone, just to name a few. The interface is the power – the power range you know. Here you talk about Lipo batteries in the cameras, it’s different range of voltage. So many little things that together make a big difference.

Ed: Now Ron, this is not a new product, but one we haven’t covered and that is a lovely little package of camera transmitter and receiver, a very small form factor. What do you use this for?

Ron: That’s a ProSight product under the Connex brand – it’s Connex ProSight. The ProSight is the offering for the FPV racing drones. Again the requirement came from the market. Drone users are very satisfied with Connex and they came to us about a year and a half ago and said “you guys have great technology, I wish to use it on my racing drone” because many of the professional drone users also fly race drones as a hobby. Again, that was a big challenge because these small beasts are flying at about 100-150 kilometres per hour, sharp turns, losing line of sight, crashing into hard objects …

On the ALEXA SXT W.

cinematography market is different in that we sell, not an end product but instead our chipset and modules to all partners who package it, integrate it in their products and then they sell our technology under their brand to the market. We can name Teradek and others who are using our technology on some of their products and serving the broadcast market well.

Ed: But the money is in the spectators, so to excite the spectators you’ve got to have some good pictures?

Ron: Exactly. Also, the race organisers and media wanted it because the money will be there if they can get the media in. So we went to the challenge, we made the ProSight and we were successful. It’s really, really a lot of technology packed in a very small form

Ed: But the big name is ARRI? Ron: Yes that’s a new one.

Now it’s public and this IBC we made a design with ARRI on the latest ALEXA SXT W ( “W” for wireless ). It’s the top model ALEXA camera that is fully wireless now, including our transmitter embedded in the camera and our receiver as a standalone unit by ARRI. Ed: That’s a great vote of confidence in your products?

Ron: Yes, I agree, and we are very proud of it and we keep working with ARRI on bringing more product to the market.

Ed: Is there any difference in the technical side of it with that product, compared to the drone product?

On the left is the offer for racing drones.

Page 40

factor. We made an HD camera 720p with no delay, because if you take off the shelf HD cameras, they have tremendous delay. So we had a zero delay camera, 720p, a small form factor, very rigid transmitter that can be mounted on the quad-copter and a receiver for the pilot on the ground.

Ed:

And the range?

Ron: Up to one kilometre.

Ed: Whoa expensive?

…

okay

so

I

guess

then

it’s

quite

Ron: They are not quite expensive, it’s about US$400.

Ed:

For the whole package?

Ron: For the whole package.

Ed:

Why wouldn’t everybody have one?

Ron: Everybody has one who flys race drones. Well, they are converting from analogue video links on the quads to HD. It takes some time to build the confidence of the users that this can sustain the environment and the fast speeds and crashes. Then they can race and win with it, so that was another step you know. Then they want to win races, so it took some time for them to be convinced that they can win a race by seeing a better clearer picture and avoiding the objects. So we’re passed that … then convince the race organisers that it gives them value by showing HD on large displays for the spectators. And now, if you go on their blogs and follow the forms of the racing quads, they think ProSight is one of the hottest things. We’ve sold thousands of them.

Ed: Right, and it takes the power from the drone’s power supply?

Ron: Yes. Power is not an issue in these small beasts.

Actually it’s a flying battery.

NZVN

Freefly for Panavision We are here at Freefly Systems, the makers and supporters of the MōVI product, and we have Alan Yates.

Ed: Alan you’re familiar with the Asia-Pacific region and how the team at Panavision support the MōVI product?

Alan: Yes, we’re very familiar with the region.

It’s a region that loves to innovate; they jump on the latest product right away, you know we’re in close communication with customers and dealers there all the time.

Ed: Okay, so since last NAB you’ve been innovating yourselves?

as legacy equipment for TV broadcasters. So the MōVI XL is one big thing that we’ve announced at the show; the next thing that we’ve announced is a new product called the Pilot. What we’ve done is we’ve taken the MōVI controller that we’ve had for several years and we’ve pulled it apart and made it modular, so that you have control of focus, iris, zoom – so full lens control; you have control of pointing the camera with the MIMIC component, and you have a sensitised wheel that allows you to do precision that you couldn’t do before. You

Alan: Absolutely.

The big news this year is the MōVI Pro, so a really completely breakthrough product for the industry. People are loving it. The MōVI Pro has a number of convenience benefits as much as anything else that makes filmmakers happy. So that was the first thing, but after that, using the same technology as for the MōVI Pro, we’re just about to release the MōVI XL and the XL happens to carry a 50 pound payload, so it works with the highest end cameras and lens combinations that major film companies prefer to use, as well

Alan with the new MōVI Pro. Page 42

can also put these components in other people’s hands, in multiple people’s hands, so it’s not just one operator on one controller – you know, each person focused on a piece of the filmmaking puzzle. So that’s the Pilot. The last thing that we’ve announced that will ship some time this summer is called the MōVI Carbon and that’s a pretty unique product that is kind of dear to our heart because, for aerial cinematography, in order to get long zoom lens performance, you wind up bringing on some shake, it’s very difficult to do. So we’ve created this integrated product that has the MōVI Pro, it has a Sony A7S and has a 240mm zoom lens with total control over that, so that you can finally fly and zoom in and out in just a totally utterly smooth way, from whatever distance.

Ed: So who needs a helicopter anymore eh?

Alan: That’s right.

You know drones can get close to certain objects, but having the ability of this just wonderful zoom capability to zoom in and out …

Ed: And all fully stabilised?

Alan: All stabilised – it’s what filmmakers such as are in the booth today have been drooling over for quite some time, or dreaming of …

Ed: No, I like “drooling.” Now one of the benefits I see of the MōVI range is, as you said, now you’ve broken up the controller into components, but it seems as though you have always had a basic MōVI kit but then you can put that kit on a little go-kart, you can put it on a trolley, you can move it around and use it in a whole lot of different ways?

to all the nuances and changes that they thought would be beneficial.

NZVN

Alan: Exactly. We call that a “camera movement system” that we’re building over a long period of time, so whether you’re riding 2 feet from the ground, whether you’re flying 400 feet in the air, whether you’re in someone’s hands, whether you’re in a vehicle, it’s about creating professional smooth impossible shots while the camera’s in motion. So that’s what it’s all about and that’s given us sort of the 3 components – the MōVI stabilisation, the aerial unit and the controller system.

Ed: Now it all sounds very complicated and I do know that there are situations in New Zealand where people have gone online and bought this product from online suppliers, but surely something like this needs dealer support?

Alan: Oh definitely. We rely on dealer support all around the world to support our customers because you just can’t beat the time for an answer, you can’t beat the local support. We love it when a dealer will spend a few hours with the customer as soon as they get the unit, because we won’t hear from the customer for quite some time. They’ll be fully taken care of by the dealer.

We rely on the expertise of our local dealers, we train our local dealers to have that expertise, we support our dealers just a tad bit better than direct customers. At the same time, we don’t deny experts who want to deal with Freefly directly, because they’re the ones who follow us on Facebook every moment and understand everything that we’re doing.

Ed: And also give you ideas I guess?

Alan: Absolutely, we learn from them. You know that’s how the MōVI Pro came about and really listening Page 43

That’s a large drone under that rig.

Brother ... yes, Brother.

It’s not normal that we find Brother at NAB so to explain, we have Akira Shinoda, ably assisted by Brandy.

Ed: Now Akira, you’ve got this very interesting little monitor attached to your head, tell me what’s that for?

Akira: This is a head mount dish array which is actually a second generation because generation one is now available in the market supporting the HD 720p.

On this model, for the broadcast market, we support SDI connectivity at 1080p. And then one more thing so we changed the screen save image, existing one and bought us this generation we expand 1.5 gig connector.

So we have the video camera looking at the viewfinder, the screen made exact the same size come in front of you and the quality – you can measure it and you can check the focus using our product. It is called the AiRScouter and it’s particularly applicable for drone operators who are looking at the view from their camera on the drone.

Ed: Now this is also something for the gimbal operator, the cameraman who’s out there with a steady rig of some sort – sure you can have your high res monitor as well, but having this you can use it alone or you can use it in conjunction with that. It just gives you so much more flexibility especially in those very bright conditions?

Akira: That’s right. Once you’re going to carry the camera, you don’t need any more the store, you can carry the camera …

Ed: You can put the camera at all sorts of different angles and heights and low, and not have to have the monitor set in a position where you can see, because you are permanently attached to the camera by this headset?

Akira and Brandy.

viewfinder, that you can still use your other eye to look at the scene around you and it’s not disturbing.

Akira: And there are not only people using the monitors beside the camera, but a monitor is all set up properly under the sunshine. But this product we are saved under the sunshine or even under the rain, this is already a waterproof product. You can go outside in the sunshine or the rain, it doesn’t matter.

Perfectly simple and quick to use and I have to add that having the name Brother there, it’s made by that company, therefore it’s got to be good.

Ed: And I’ve actually tested this myself, because it’s something to know that you can use the camera, and I carried the camera, used the camera with the little

Akira: Yes. We are planning to come in August with this product.

Akira: Ed:

Ed:

Yes, that’s right.

Brother by your side?

We’ll look forward to it.

NZVN

Just to show you all that I do other things than write about TV technology at NAB, there are other distractions in Las Vegas and gun ranges are one of the best.

My home interest is clay bird shooting with a 12 gauge, but here I get to try hand guns and machine guns.

The young staff member was only too happy to show off my skills in this photo – but was not harmed in the process. Ed

Page 44

Sony Two for Protel We’re continuing the Sony story at the Professional Media Section and this is for me the area that should be talked about more because it’s so, so important to get this right. The person who is going to tell us about it is Joe Balsam, senior marketing manager for the Professional Media Group.

Ed: Well Joe, you’re the right person to talk to.

Joe: What I can do is tell you about the new products and what the line-up is about.

Ed: Now we just had a release recently about this new SSD drive and, well … we actually did a story in our last issue about SSD drives and how they have a certain life, and that’s it. You can write a number of times on them and then they die?

Joe: The spec is called “terabytes written” and any memory media has a finite life, whether it’s a card or it’s an SSD or a hard drive …

Ed:

Joe looks after media for Sony.

Or even a tape?

Joe: Or even a tape, depending on how you store it, absolutely. In our case, with our new SSD’s we have error correction code technology that we’ve installed in these drives. Sony is not a drive manufacturer, we don’t make drives, we don’t make Flash. What we do is we specify the kind of products that we want our vendor to make to a certain level and then we add our touch to it.

In the case of our Solid State Drives, we’ve added error correction code technology that essentially, as you just said, when a drive finds an error in the recording device, it will go back and rewrite all that same space on the hard drive or the SSD. What we’ve been able to do is create a technology that goes into these drives that minimises that rewrite over the error. It stops the error before it happens; it’s error correction. So we have extended the natural life of the drive and based on the tests that we’ve done on these drives, we are comfortable quoting that our drive, if you use it 5 days a week, 5-6 hours a day, you can get up to 10 years on our drive, whereas other drives on the market that are used for the same purpose might only last 2-3 years.

Ed: But because it’s a drive, it has a standard connection and you can put it where you like?

Joe: A drive’s a drive’s a drive … put it where you like.

Ed:

Great, okay and they come in 480 and 960 …?

Joe: Gigabytes.

Ed:

Okay, now in the smaller cards?

Joe: Now we’re talking about terabytes over here with our hard drives. We have a line-up of portable storage hard drives with military grade silicon built around the inside of the hard bare drive in the casing and around the outside of the casing we have port covers to protect from dirt and dust when you’re out in the field. We are the only manufacturer that supplies a library box as if you were buying a tape – not that we recommend longterm storage of your content on hard drives – we would never do that – but for people who do want to have a much more organised way of putting their drives on a shelf, we provide that.

Ed: But you do have an option which we’ll talk about later, for long-term storage of valuable media?

Ed: Now the connection I see there is a USB. I guess it’s USB 3 …?

Joe: Well what you’re looking at is the connection through the Atomos adapter.

We aren’t selling the adapters, we just sell the hard drives and they are designed for Atomos recording devices, Blackmagic recording devices … there are a couple of other manufacturers who make devices that this card could potentially be used with, but we’re showing in our exhibit the Atomos adapter with a USB connector on it, so for all intents and purposes it could be used as an external drive if you wanted to use this adapter.

But its primary purpose is to go inside the caddy of the Atomos or the Blackmagic.

Page 45

Joe: We do, that’s at the other end of the table. Next to our portable storage drives we have a RAID that’s a 4 and a 6 terabyte RAID. Again, it’s ruggedised with silicon wrapped around the inside of the casing, silicon on the outside, a nice carry handle, very portable, very popular.

Ed: Is there anything internally in the firmware that makes it more suitable for video recording application in the field than say Brand X? Joe: Just the ruggedness. Typically we’re spec’ing from the suppliers who get us the drives … this is going to be used in the field, it’s going to be moved, it’s going to be bumped, it’s going to be carried, it’s going to be transported.

So it has to have a higher level of ruggedness versus a drive that might be in a desktop computer or even a laptop that’s essentially just carried from a table to an office and back and forth in a car.

This takes much more punishment out in the field and it has to be more rugged.

Ed: Now, SxS cards, SD cards and something else new?

Joe: Well SxS cards, memory card technology as time goes on we’re able to read faster, write faster. The current generation of our SxS cards has increased write speed by about 15% versus the previous version. Read speed stays the same. So we have a whole new series of those we’ll be transitioning to over the next couple of months. In the PRO+ series card we’re going to be calling them the RE Series ( the current series is D Series ); in the SxS-1 Series, slightly more economical and available in two packs.

These are going to transition from B Series to C Series.

Brand new is our UHS-II card. Sony finally introduced a UHS-II capable DSLR and we now have a UHS-II card to go along with it, which speed increases tremendously.

A UHS-I card speed is about 95 megabits a second and the UHS-II’s are up to 300.

Now these are not ruggedised. We do have a series of ruggedised UHS-1 cards as you see right underneath our XQD cards, packaged in the same way as the XQD’s with a nice protective case on it, but the shell that we use for these professional UHS-I SD cards is approximately 10 times stronger than any consumer card that’s out there, including our own. These were built for the professional user in the field as well. And the line-up of XQD cards you may be familiar with … just a couple of months ago we introduced a 256 gig XQD card, so that’s relatively new from us.

Ed:

And XDCAM cameras are still operating?

Joe: They’re still available, Sony still sells XDCAM camcorders, although the market …

Ed:

What using the optical disc?

Joe: Using the optical disc, right. Of the 4 flavours of XDCAM of single, double, triple and quad layer discs, only the single and double layer discs go into our camcorders.

The triple and quad layer discs are primarily used for archiving purposes – they work in our decks but not in our camcorders.

Ed: And these are discs that you can take out and put on the shelf and you don’t have to worry about it degrading?

Joe: Of all the media formats there are, optical is by far the most stable.

Ed:

Even more stable than film?

Joe: Well film can degrade. These optical discs don’t degrade. In fact, we were showing a video here on the table where we’ve actually taken some of the discs and submerged them in saltwater for weeks at a time which would corrode just about anything. We take them out, wash them up, put them in a new case, play back the content that’s on them, they’re perfectly fine. I actually had a shooter email me some video of himself taking some of our discs to the North Pole, putting them in a bowl of water and leaving them outside for a couple of days, bringing them back in, melting them down, putting them in a washing machine – the disc in a washing machine – and having it come out, drying it up, putting it in his deck and no content loss. So that’s rugged.

Ed: And the cost of these is coming down and the capacity’s going up and the ability to play these is easy because … well you’ve got a couple of caddies sitting here?

Joe: What we’re looking at here is the optical disc archive system and that’s where we’ve taken the individual single, double, triple, quad layer individual discs and put them into a single cartridge where we have 12 cartridges and you maximise capacity in the 12 cartridges. Generation 1 took us from 300 gigabytes to 1.5 terabytes in write once or re-recordable options.

This year we’re coming out with Generation 2 optical disc archive. It takes you to a 3.3 terabyte cartridge

Ed: So why would you trust all of your data in one little card rather than spread it across two smaller ones – that’s the question really?

Joe: It depends on the file size.

I wouldn’t recommend, and nor do I think most of the shooters who are using the XQD format would use a 256 gig capacity if they were shooting small files, and risking all that content on one card.

They’re usually using a shorter capacity.

But if you’re shooting with very big files, then you want a larger card.

Ed: Fair enough. Now to the part that I love particularly?

Joe: Well XDCAM is a format that has been a workhorse for us, it’s been around for just about 10 years now and we have essentially taken the …

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and we’ve got a roadmap that we’re looking at probably 2018 sometime getting this up to over 5 terabytes. So optical disc is here to stay for quite some time. There’s a lot of concern in the market about what about we see so many format transitions, will this really be around?

Well digital technology based on zeros and ones, optically read, is something that I think everybody is in agreement, will be with us for generations to come.

Ed: Yes, as somebody once said to me, every man and his dog can make a little laser reader and that’s all you need.

Joe: That’s why people are still doing film outs; even when they’re shooting digitally and in video, they’ll make a film negative copy because essentially, when all the formats are gone, you just need a lightbulb and a mechanism to drive those sprockets through and some engineer can build one of those fairly easily.

Ed: Now I see you’ve got some HDCAM tape here on your booth?

Joe: Well yeah, we decided that this year, since Fuji and Maxell have decided to exit the professional magnetic media business, we wanted to send a message to the professional user community that Sony’s in it for the foreseeable future. We still make tape, I think you’d probably be surprised how many video cassettes we still sell because there’s a lot of VCRs and camcorders out there that use them, and there’s a need for primarily high definition. We have our HDCAM cassettes and our HDCAM-SR cassettes as well as 6mm tape here on display, because there are thousands upon thousands of 6mm camcorder users out there that haven’t yet found the need or the budget to be able to migrate to a memory card format.

Ed:

So that’s a Sony HDV tape is it?

Joe: This is not HDV, this is the professional … this is our VG series of 6mm tape that could be used in a DVCAM machine, could be used in a conventional mini DV camcorder, but what we don’t have here but we do move a lot of it, are still DVCAM cassettes that are in a larger case than this.

Ed: But in that small case that could be used in a Z5P for example?

Joe: Sure.

Stephen: Okay, so all those cameras have the streaming wireless capability. It’s great because you can then send your video files to a News station, to FTP server or a streaming device in the Sony Cloud. So the streaming device can control up to 30 cameras and can support two output sources and you can combine two of them, so you can control up to 60 cameras and have four output sources, and the Sony Cloud is really cool because it can also affect Metadata. So in other words, if I’m Steve the camera guy working on a hurricane story, the Newsroom can make a slug saying “Steve hurricane” and they could send it to the camera that’s working on that story and so anything that I’m shooting will say Steve hurricane-1, Steve hurricane-2, -3 -4 etc and then it will send it back to the streaming device in the Sony Cloud as a proxy file. And it does that because let’s say something’s urgent and live, you can then air it really soon; but if you want the high resolution file for like the 11 o’clock New or something, you could send it back to the camera and they can send you the high resolution file.

Ed: Can you tell the camera to send you back just the parts of the file that they want, or an edited version or is it the whole clips?

Stephen: Yes, so they can send files from this deck back to the FTP server.

I believe so, yes.

The streaming device is also cool because again it’s compatible with NLE devices such as Adobe Premiere, Avid, Final Cut Pro etc.

Ed: Okay, now what are the little boxes that we have here?

Stephen: These are just playback decks, so you play your media files. Currently there’s an SxS media disc in there and it’s also got wireless capability, so you can see here there’s a wireless adapter, you put the wireless dongle in and you can also stream the footage from the playback module to the FTP server or the streaming device.

Ed: So in other words your cameraman could be off doing something else, but in the meantime your reporter is actually doing a pre-edit or an edit of what they want in this little deck and then send back that file?

Ed: Well there we are – my camera lives and should live for many years to come.

Joe: Your camera will live for years to come. We have no plan to discontinue making 6mm or at the moment no plan to discontinue making half inch high end formats either.

Ed: Fantastic, I think there could be a resurgence in tape as well?

Joe: Mmmm ... wake me up when that happens.

Still with Sony we’re at XDCAM AIR and right from the PMW-300, the PMW-320, a whole range of Sony cameras, basically anything that has a streaming capability, that’s where you start and where do you go from that.

To tell us we have Stephen Rosenberg.

Stephen handles XDCAM AIR. Page 48

Stephen:

Yes.

Ed: Can you use any camera with this and the answer is …?

Stephen: Yes because the little box that is the streaming device just has an HDMI connection so you could plug it into another camera that had HDMI and you could then use this with the playout deck to do the complete service. What we’re showing here is that we’re streaming out to our streaming server, so this signal could connect to that box.

Typically, if you’re using a Sony camera, we’re built to do the control and transfers and everything of course. But with third party decks then all it is, is someone will have to hit “play” on this side and then we’ll start capturing and that’s it.

Ed: So it has a value in a News organisation where everybody in the system doesn’t have a Sony camera with that capability. So with the Sony camera the material that’s sent by proxy to the station, they can then ask for just the high res bits that they want …?

Stephen: I think they’re showing a demo over there where they can browse what’s in the camera, so they can mark the ins and outs.

Ed:

So they’re actually browsing from the …?

Stephen:

Ed:

That’s very flexible.

Stephen: There’s an app called Content Browser Mobile and you can actually control the camera with your phone. So in other words with your phone you can actually do the iris, the focus, playback, record – the works – white balance.

Ed: I think you’re giving the phone companies too much power here?

Stephen:

You can see the contents on the camera.

Ed: And they can set in and out clips and then just get those high resolution bits?

Stephen: To get those high res it would have to be a push not only done on the camera, we wouldn’t pull it from the machine. The cameraperson would have to push those clips out there.

Riedel for Protel For Protel, we are here at Riedel Communications with Espen Brynildsen.

Yeah, maybe.

Finally, in one corner of the booth there is what they call the “Compact Production Studio” from Sony and it seems as though there’s a bit of a kit with a number of controllers, a screen, a couple of cameras, tripods and bits and pieces that enable you to do everything yourself from one package, including streaming – and we’ll take a picture.

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previous generation wireless intercom in there and we took them to some of the most difficult RF

Ed: Espen, I guess I’d like to start with this very cool little beltpack which is on a big stretchy cord. Oh my goodness, this is a compact unit.

Espen: Yes. We have developed a brand new wireless intercom solution from the ground up.

It’s not based on any other existing solutions and I guess the background for this is that we realised that, up until now, all the current solutions for wireless intercom have their limitations, especially when you go into difficult wireless environments. Take the example of a stadium – there’s so much metal which, with regard to wireless communication, the only alternative up until now has really been two-way radio, it’s the only thing that works.

So we took our

Espen wasn’t distracted … but I was.

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environments we normally work in – Esprit stadium in Düsseldorf is one of them; I think Dallas Cowboys stadium here in the US is another one. What we found is that, with our intercom solution at that time, we could be 10 metre away from the antenna and it would start dropping out. Any further away than that didn’t work. So we thought "okay, let’s bring a top quality DECT telephone" – same technology, but you know a well-known brand, and see how that performs … even less than 10 metre. So obviously something’s going on there. So what we did then is we …

Ed:

Upped the power?

Espen: Upped the power – no. So power is not the solution. What was happening, and we confirmed this in a testing lab, was that RF reflections, so multipath reflections, were the problem. Because of all the metal, you have so many reflections to deal with that the beltpacks very quickly couldn’t differentiate between what’s a valid signal and what’s a bad reflection. So we developed an algorithm that looks at all these signals and allows us to pick the strongest signal, the right signal, the signal that would get us working audio connection. We did this in a couple of stages where we put this algorithm into these difficult venues and what we saw immediately was that, all of a sudden, we could go much further away from an antenna, so we had much better performance. But then once we started developing the hardware for this wireless solution, which is called Bolero ( like the dance ), we did some things with the antenna design also inside these devices, so that, for instance, there are two antennas, we have diversity on the antennas, but they’re also rotated, which means we pick up two distinct different polar patterns. That helps us to then find the strongest signal. So even on the antenna design inside, we’ve done some clever things which give us a further improved performance with these systems. Now we have the end product and it’s being used by a lot of different clients.

We’re in the manufacturing stage, but we have a large backlog because we’ve had some major projects that have signed on to this from an early point, one of them being BBC Television, who are building a new facility in London, where they’ve really seen this as a very good fit for what they want to do within the studios. Now there’s a range of smart functionality on top of the RF side which works very well and I’ll give you some examples of what we can do. Just look at the beltpack first – we’ve got four keys or channels on the side of the display, they’re clearly labelled 1, 2, 3, 4 and there’s also a number 5 and a 6, so we basically have 6 channels. On top of that, we also have a dedicated reply key. This is not programmable but all the buttons are programmable, so we can determine exactly what we want to use them for. As an example of things we can do with this – if you look at the top of that rack over there, there’s like a beacon, if I push this button, I’m making that light go on. That’s just to show that this is actually a wireless panel; it can do all the same things that a panel can do, a panel being like a rack mounted intercom panel that is a very powerful solution, where you can control all sorts of things. This wireless beltpack is the same. Another example, if you see the screen above the stand there, that has a multiviewer at the moment. If I push this button, I’m switching that video signal. So again, this is showing that this is more than just a basic intercom solution – it’s very powerful and it’s really up to our customers how they’re going to use this. We’re just showing some of the possibilities.

Ed: That's impressive. Is this functionality built into every one, or do you have to choose what you load into it?

Espen: This functionality depends on how you integrate it into other systems. In this example, with the red light we’re triggering through the intercom matrix and the multiviewer switching of the video, we’re triggering our media in its video router to make that change. But obviously, basic functionality like intercom, they’re built into talk to say a group of people or a conference, or to talk to individual people. Each of these buttons can be programmed to do exactly what you want. It’s completely open and up to you as a user of the system, how you want the system to work, what you want to do with it.

Ed: Okay, so you say you developed this algorithm from testing this in places like the Dallas Cowboys stadium, but when you take it into a different stadium setup, does it learn the reflections or the errors in a new stadium, or is it a dumb machine in that way so that it doesn’t adapt to a different situation?

Espen: The algorithm basically deals with the multipath reflections, so it doesn’t really care about if it’s this stadium, that stadium, if you’re outdoors where there are buildings, where you get reflections – it will look at all the signals it’s receiving and it will filter away a lot of the noise so that what you’re left with is a good solid connection to the beltpack. The end result is that you get a longer range of connectivity so you can connect to the antenna from a further distance.

Then there’s another side to these beltpacks. We’ve chosen a very modern audio codec and we’ve done comparisons between the codecs that are used in all the other current wireless intercom solutions and the codec that we chose for this product – and our product at 32 kilobits performs better than any of the other 64 kilobit codecs out there.

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Ed:

How many kilohertz is it?

Espen: It’s 7 kilohertz, so it’s high bandwidth audio, and that was a requirement when we built this – we wanted 7 kilohertz audio so that it’s good and clear high quality audio.

Ed: It looks as though it has a nifty charging system – obviously it’s got some connectors there where you just slide it into a box and away it goes?

Espen: Exactly, so if you look at the form factor of the beltpack itself, it’s sort of similar to a two-way radio, especially when you also have these buttons on the side. It’s actually got like a walkie-talkie mode because, if you look here, it’s got a built-in speaker, it’s got built-in microphones, so you can turn the speaker on and all of a sudden, you have like a walkie-talkie.

You could even integrate this through the intercom matrix; you can integrate this with a two-way radio system and then you can be talking to people who are on two-way radio at a completely different site or different distance. That’s one thing. Another is the detail in design here … obviously we have the beltpack mode, we have this walkie-talkie mode, but the last mode is that there are some rubber dots on a belt clip.

If you put this on a desk, you basically have a desktop panel and that sits fairly snugly there because of those rubber dots.

There’s actually a 4th user mode … there’s a bottle opener there! It’s just a little detail. So the belt clip itself has a bottle opener. Now when we designed this beltpack, we made a decision that, well, it would be nice to actually design a really nice belt clip, and we have that, but we chose the standard Motorola belt clip standard for the attachments. What that means is, say if you have two-way radios and you have these, and someone breaks this clip off. If you need a spare, you can take one from one of your radios. So if you have some spare Motorola clips, you just put that on and it still works and you still have a belt clip. You said with the charging system it is a fairly nifty solution … you can take the battery off obviously. The charger is five slots and you can charge the beltpack with the battery, or you can take the battery off and charge just the battery. It’s very similar again to a two-way radio charger in functionality. The beltpack itself is IP65 rated, so it can take dropping on the floor, it’s dust sealed, so it can take a lot of beating and this basically comes from Riedel being a provider of global event solutions.

We do things like the Olympics, Commonwealth Games and other big events. We use our own products for these events, so we have first-hand experience as to what this design needed to look like and that’s why I guess there have been so many specific requirements that have gone into this design and that comes from us being power users of our own products as well.

So we’re not just selling it.

Smart Panel and the advantage of this is it’s high resolution and it’s readable in direct sunlight, so you can use it outdoors and actually see what’s on the screen. The Smart Panel uses this screen with a touch panel; we’ve chosen not to have a touch functionality on this screen because if people have a beltpack on their belt you don’t want them accidentally changing anything.

Ed:

You’d need a flip cover, and …?

Espen: So all functions are basically done through tactile keys, and that’s done on purpose.

Ed: And they’re nice big keys too, so you could probably use this outside in a cold Norwegian winter?

Espen: Ed:

Well if you want to, sure why not.

Or you could stay inside and drink schnapps?

Espen:

That’s it.

Ed: Okay, how many users can you have in your system?

Espen: A single system can accommodate up to 100 antennas and 100 beltpacks, so it’s a very scalable system. Now we have something in addition in this system called System IDs and Islands and that actually allows us to go well beyond 100 beltpacks and 100 antennas, so you don’t really have that limitation. Ours is the only system on the market that can do this – there are no other systems that come close. All the other systems can have half the amount of beltpacks for each antenna; we can have 10 beltpacks per antenna whereas other systems can have really four beltpacks in a roaming mode – so basically in a mode where you’re going hopping from antenna to antenna and you have seamless handover. We can have 10 beltpacks doing that and that’s unique – again, there’s nobody else that can do that on a single antenna.

Ed: When would you ever want more than 100 operators?

Espen: Just get one antenna and then 10 beltpacks and you’re done. If you need more you can always add to that.

Ed: On the studio side of the beltpack, the person in the control room talking to the people out there in the field with the beltpacks – there’s a nifty little controller with a microphone?

Espen: Basically, it’s a desktop version of our Smart Panel. We have our Smart Panel in the rack, it has 18 keys in one rack unit. The desktop panel is very

Ed: Does the screen come in any other languages?

Espen: There is support for multiple languages. Currently English is the one that’s implemented, but there will be support for other languages.

Ed: And that’s what you get with a – what’s that, an LCD screen?

Espen: This is a TFT screen which is the same screen that we use in our Page 51

similar but it has 12 keys and is a very compact unit.

It’s got some really smart solutions for mounting, so we have support for Magic Arm straight into the desktop panel so that, if you have limited desktop space, you don’t have to take any of that space, you mount it on Magic Arm and you can have it up in the air.

There’s also the possibility of putting it on, let’s say, a microphone stand and so on. It’s very flexible.

This being a Smart Panel, it means we can also still do our video routing within MediorNet for instance, so we have an application running on this panel for MediorNet control so it allows us to change video sources on the different screens etc; and the same with audio routing and so on.

And then we can switch back to the intercom panel here. All the new panels are based on AES67, so in the whole broadcast industry currently, there’s a big drive towards two standards – AES67 for audio and SMPTE 2110 for video. Now we’re working on both those standards. AES67 we’re using a lot already in our existing products in intercom.

SMPTE 2110 we’re developing, and again it will at some point become a product for the MicroN hardware, so the same as the MultiViewer, that will be a SMPTE 2110 software.

Ed:

Right. Now can we talk about MultiViewer?

Espen: Yes please, let’s talk about MultiViewer.

MultiViewer is a piece of software that runs on our MediorNet MicroN hardware. What used to be just a MediorNet MicroN unit, now you can choose which software you want to run on it. You can run the standard software which gives you 12 3G-SDI inputs and outputs for routing; it gives you 2 MADI ports; it gives you an Ethernet port, so you have audio embedding, de-embedding, frame stores, frame syncs, audio and video delay – so it’s basically a powerful processing unit, but then it can connect multiple units together with fibre and build a bigger router. So that’s the basic, the standard version of MicroN. If you run this with a MultiViewer software instead, you get 4 3GSDI inputs and outputs, so you don’t get all the connectors on the front, there are only the four first and the inputs and outputs are right there. You still get the MADI ports, but I guess we use the spare processing power that we’ve freed up by doing that, to create a MultiViewer when you can have up to 18 pictures in one frame – or 18 PiPs as we call them, Picture in Picture.

So if you look on the screen behind you, you see there are a lot of video signals on that screen. This is the MultiViewer that lets us design a layout for these multiple PiPs. Since there are up to 4 processors, you could choose to, say, divide these 18 PiPs across 4 different outputs. As an example here, we might have a 9-way MultiViewer here and a different 9-way MultiViewer there, so that’s 18 PiPs together, but I still have 2 outputs. I could use that for other things. So in this example, you can see there’s a timer running on that screen and I could have, say, a clock or there could

be a screen that’s outputting just timecode, just to show what the current timecode is.

It’s a very powerful, very flexible solution.

Ed: It’s a very big solution – do you make a smaller one for smaller operators?

Espen:

You can use it for four quad use …

Ed: Yes, but you’re paying for all of that technology that’s gone into a big version – is that not valid that you …?

Espen: No, because there are other solutions in the market that cater for the lower end, so I guess what we’re targeting with this are people who have an interest in having a fibre distributed solution in the first place, and all we’re doing is we’re adding MultiViewer capability to that, so that this MultiViewer is available as a resource anywhere in this fibre network. And you don’t get that with the basic solutions because, with those basic solutions, you would have to connect it to our fibre router so that you could access it wherever you want. Our thinking is just make it part of the network, because then you can use any sources you want from any frame you want and you can also send this MultiViewer output to any output you want in the network. This MultiViewer software is being launched here at NAB, so it is now shipping software, meaning that all the existing internet customers that have these units, now have the option to add this functionality to their network.

Ed:

So they’re not having to buy a new box?

Espen: No. If they have a MicroN, it is possible to change the software on the units. It’s not something that we do but it is possible. But obviously, if you’re building a new system, it’s just a matter of working out what you need with regards to MultiViewers and video routing and we can find a solution. Even though the MultiViewer is based on the MicroN hardware, all the frames in the network can be all the other kinds of MediorNet frames that exist, so we have compact frames, we have modular frames and we have something called MetroN which is more a fibre router – and they can all be part of this setup. So on this stand we’re running a setup with all those different kinds of frames.

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ARRI Lighting We’re at ARRI Lighting with Sean Dooley.

Ed: Sean, SkyPanel is what everybody’s talking about.

Sean: It’s been an unprecedented success. We have now sold over 22,000 SkyPanels …

Ed: This is not just Australia and New Zealand?

Sean: I wish it was Australia and New Zealand, wouldn’t it be great if they were so ubiquitous we could just use them in our lounge rooms?

There are now a great number in use in Australia and New Zealand but that 22,000 figure is worldwide.

This is still a tremendous success for us and really proves our point Sean Dooley and Brett Smith from ARRI Australia. that LED is a mature flashes as they’ve really tried to mimic exactly how technology that can do a lot of the heavy lifting on all lightning looks. The most popular on this stand at the types of motion picture production and give Directors, moment is a cop car simulation – so again, it uses the DPs and Gaffers a whole new range of creative tools. A different light engines across the SkyPanel to separate lot of these Skypanels have been used on the big it into a red and a blue, or a red, white and blue section shows, you know Star Wars Rogue One was a huge just like the light on a police car. It’s the only fixture success for us – there were 1200 SkyPanels on that you can simulate something like that with, otherwise show alone; Ghost in the Shell locally in New Zealand, you need 2 or 3 and a complex DNX procedure, but it’s Aquaman on the Gold Coast, but we’re seeing them all built into the SkyPanel now. used more and more on smaller productions too. There are hundreds of SkyPanels being used in TV studios Ed: And is this right across the SkyPanel range from across the region, they’re quite a versatile light. New the smallest to the largest? for Skypanel at this show is that we’ve now released Sean: Correct, right across the SkyPanel range – firmware version 3.0. There are 10 new features, some S30, S60, S120, it’s a free software upgrade. It really of which are very technical, but the 3 main ones are brings a lot of new functionality to the light. that we now have a high speed mode, so the SkyPanel Ed: And in terms of the upgrade, is this just a case of has been tested with high speed cameras up to 25,000 plugging your SkyPanel with a USB connector into your frames a second using a 3 degree shutter angle with computer and downloading it yourself? zero flicker, which is pretty incredible. We have a new "source matching" mode, so another way you can Sean: Yes, correct. In fact, we’re giving out USBs dictate the colour on the SkyPanel is that you can say “I at this show, you can shove it straight in your SkyPanel, want it to be tungsten bulb” or “I want it to be a sodium takes less than 5 minutes. If you have them in a studio vapour bulb”, “mercury vapour light”, “I want it to be a situation, you can also update them all at once over a purple glow stick” – there’s 46 different sources where network, because all the SkyPanels have an Ethernet we’ve used proper colour measurement tools and port. So yes, it’s a pretty simple process. directly replicated with the SkyPanel.

Every SkyPanel’s calibrated when it leaves the factory and every time it comes in for service, so they’re all matched and now it’s really easy for especially single camera operators to pick up a SkyPanel, go into a hospital and they can say “oh, it’s kind of a cool fluro, so I’ll just set the SkyPanel for that” and not have to worry about setting a specific colour temperature or anything.

The third really exciting feature is that we now have twelve lighting effects in the SkyPanels, effects like fire – so it will do a random pattern, it will change the LEDs across the panel so it’s not all one individual glow, we’ll use each light engine to simulate a fire effect. There’s candle light and there’s a strobe and a lightning effect which, not only does it flash, but will do little after Page 54

Ed: Now what’s the warranty on a SkyPanel these days?

Sean: I believe it’s a one year warranty on the SkyPanel, but you can talk to your great friend Chris at PLS and I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to help you out with any service enquiries.

Ed: One of the concerns that I have with these new LED fixtures is that, it’s not like a light with a bulb, that the bulb has a life, the bulb dies, you replace the bulb, the fixture remains. This is an integrated panel with an array of LEDs. If for some reason, a little group of them goes Phut! then what happens … it’s got to come in for service?

Sean: Yes, the panel would have to come in for service. We can replace the light engine but, to be honest, it’s not something I’ve really seen. Rey, our lighting guru, has all the skills and tools to repair or colour calibrate them locally in Sydney should anything happen to one, but they’re a lot more hardy than a tungsten bulb that’s prone to popping with every bump.

They’re a very robust aluminium fixture and all of the SkyPanels are guaranteed for at least a 50,000 hour working life with less than a 200° Kelvin shift over that time.

Ed: Well that I’m sure puts a lot of people’s minds at rest – 50,000 hours is a pretty good lifetime?

Sean: Sure, absolutely and ARRI has always promoted its customer service as the No. 1 priority within the company, along with having a relationship with our customers and understanding their needs and bringing out products and software updates that address real-world requests and solutions. We’re happy to stand behind our product – just as with everything else, it’s all assembled in Germany by incredibly skilled, proud people who …

Ed: Yeah yeah yeah, rah rah rah, but SkyPanels aren’t everything and again, a recent story with Sean from Avalanche Lighting where he says he’s still using the fixtures that he bought from ARRI 20 years ago?

so there’s now a ballast for 575 up to 1.8 kilowatt lights which uses our AutoScan technology.

Ed: And in the L-Series, again this is something that’s software upgradable?

Sean: Definitely.

Unfortunately, because they were a couple of years earlier than the SkyPanels, you can’t use the gel mode, but we’re constantly bringing out firmware updates and new features, particularly in the DMX side of things.

We’re seeing the L-Series utilised a lot for installations in TV studios, theatrical. For whatever reason, they’ve been really popular. I guess power consumption is the big one. It’s a really quick return on investment with LED lighting in studios where, after about a year and a half, the air conditioning cost savings mean that you’re making money as opposed to keeping your tungsten rig. We’re getting really close to seeing the majority of TV stations across Australia transitioning into LED light instead of tungsten in major studios, so that’s great to see.

NZVN

Sean: And they still have their place. We still sell a helluva lot of HMI, obviously tungsten slightly less in the bigger fixtures, because they’re just not as power efficient, but our MAX series of reflectors for our HMI lights is incredibly popular. You know Pirates of the Caribbean was my favourite one, they used 12 ARRIMAXs at one point which was pretty incredible for an Aussie production and of course quite the power draw, but they’re unparalleled in terms of their efficiency out of a single bulb and we’re still the market leaders. We’ve also just come out with a new daylight ballast which brings the AutoScan functionality for high speed shooting to the lower end of our HMIs, Page 55

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SOFT LIGHTING | REDEFINED

Based in Sydney - Serving Australia and New Zealand Tel +61 2 9855 4300 | Email: info@arri.com.au ARRI Australia Pty Ltd, Level 1, Unit 1, 706 Mowbray Road, Lane Cove NSW 2066

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