NZVNJune17

JUNE 2017

Vol 236

Dedolight for PLS We are at Dedolight with Fernanda Cavazos.

Ed: Fernanda, you are going to tell us about what’s new and we should start with the Parallel Beam Attachment.

Fernanda: Because our lights are double aspherics and you can add more optics to the system, we have now developed for the different lights, Parallel Beam Attachments. This means that you get a tighter beam that goes farther away and longer – it has a longer throw and it has much more light, more punch. It’s perfect to work with the likes of the cinema reflector light and those kinds of reflectors where you can have your light alongside the set and then just redirect it with reflectors. You can put some soft reflectors on and you clean your set. You can use less light heads and you can split them into different light sources with the reflectors.

Ed: So this is giving you some extra light. Now another area where some extra light’s coming from is the Turbo series?

Fernanda: That’s right. We have for some years the DLED lights and what we’ve done is that, with the same sizes of light heads, we’ve put more powerful light sources, more powerful LEDs. They do need very slow active cooling by fan and that allows us to put more light in the same size.

Ed: But a fan is a bad word in Dedolight circles I understand, however you put your ear to them and …?

Fernanda: Yes, Dedo is very mindful of the noise that can come from using a fan – it was all passive cooling, but then he was shown some very silent fans and, after a lot of tests, and you can put your ear to the light and you don’t hear it, he became comfortable and said “yes we can do it.”

Ed: To clarify, you can put your ear to the front of the light which is directed towards the talent and you can’t hear anything, but if you put your ear to the side of the light, you might hear a slight hum like a bee in the distance?

Fernanda: Exactly. If you put your ear directly to the fan, you can hear a little.

Fernanda was well into the excitement of Vegas.

Ed: Yes, but for all practical purposes, you can’t hear a thing?

Fernanda: No. Ed: Okay now, in the little panel lights?

Fernanda: Oh yes, for some years we have had the LEDRAMA panel lights. The special thing is that every LED light source has its special optics in front; aspherical optics which allow it to be more directional, staying soft, and going further distance with more light output. We have had the big ones for some time and now we have a little one which you can use for onboard or for little lighting sets. It’s the LEDRAMA Pocket, it has passive cooling and puts out a lot of light, it has almost the same light level as the Felloni’s. Of course, smaller size, bi-colour, dimmable, even with WiFi connection to be controlled by an app due soon.

Ed: A very flexible product?

Fernanda: Yes that’s right.

Ed: Now one product that has been around for quite some time but is patented to the Dedolight range and one that people tend to not to think about, are your flags or barndoors.

They’re not only rotatable but overall, a very flexible barndoor?

Fernanda: They’re not the standard barndoor. From the beginning, instead of 4 leaves we have 8 leaves, so you can really close it. You can have a wide angle attachment with your barndoors so you spread the beam but not diffusing it.

Now we even have a barndoor that kills a lot more of reflections.

Ed:

And that’s across the range?

Fernanda: That’s across the range, yes.

Ed: Okay, now in the larger lights, the DLED10 – this is a new development?

Fernanda: Yes, It’s in the housing of the DLED9, but now instead of having 90 Watt it has 300. So it has a big punch.

Ed: And having the fan in there just makes it that you can go from 90 to 300 – it’s that efficient?

Fernanda: Yes, that’s the thing. Also we have the DLED30 in the big housing and it’s also 300 Watt. It’s a lot of light, it’s more light than the ARRI L10.

Ed: Now in the kit range, just announced was a very large sale to the BBC camera crews out there – I think it was what … 80 flyaway kits. So this is an area that you’re spending more and more time and fine tuning the type of lights and accessories that go into a kit to make it useful in different circumstances?

Fernanda: Exactly. There are many different teams with different kinds of work, so we try to think about them, what would they need on the locations and then well, we’ve had the portable studio for many, many years with the classic halogen lamps; we’ve got the HMI ones and now, with LED, it opens a lot of doors to be able to make new kits and we have also new kinds of cases.

We have like a really nice hard case with wheels, or we have the backpack – that’s one I really like, and the backpack with wheels can also be very easy to take around with you.

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

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Aladdin Lighting for PLS We are with Johnny Kurtz for Aladdin.

Ed: What are we looking at first of all that's new for Aladdin since last NAB? Johnny: The most important products for Aladdin that we are selling a lot of are the BI-FLEX1, BI-FLEX2 and BI-FLEX4 Kits.

The BI-FLEX4 is our biggest unit at 200 Watts, perfect for the big studios that need a little extra light without the heat or power use that you got from older lights.

For new products we have a full range of accessories for the Bi-Flex Lights available Ed:

Johnny: Exactly yes. So this is about what we have new at NAB right now.

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For the Bi-Flex 1 or the Bi-Flex 2?

Johnny: Well, we have various accessories for each of the units, for the 1, 2 and 4 you can get Softboxes and Grids that work to soften and control the light, and for the smaller two units, the 1 and the 2 you can get China Balls that we are calling the Aladdin Ball that give an incredible softness to the LED Fixtures.

Ed: And the China Ball, how does that work with the existing frame that the Bi-Flex kits mount to?

Johnny: The China Ball has its own X-Frame that the LED attaches to, so you use your existing power supply and dimming unit, and the LED mat just drops into the holder inside the China Ball.

Ed:

So you can still control the dimming?

Johnny: Yes, exactly. You use it just like you would in its normal set-up, it mounts to the ball head adaptor, and is controlled by the dimming unit you get with the kit.

Ed: Are there any other accessories out there … for a while Aladdin was only making the lights, but now it seems they are coming out with different attachments?

Johnny: Yes. There are many accessories that people have demanded, where Aladdin has listened to their requests and they are now available, soft cases for the Bi-Flex 1 and 2 units, as well as a triple case for the Bi-Flex 1.

Ed: And this unit that looks like a 2 foot by 2 foot “wall of light” is this something new that’s coming out?

Johnny: Actually, it’s just a holder that holds four of the Bi-Flex lights in either a square or horizontal position, so you can make a 2 foot square or a 4 x 1 foot panel, perfect for punching through a diffusion frame to give a large soft source.

Ed:

And these are using your existing flexible panels?

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Datavideo for Protel We’re at the Datavideo Stand at NAB to look at some new products with Craig Moffat.

Ed: Craig we’re starting with a new product in the Datavideo range. This is a portable mixer, but it’s more – it’s got HDBaseT? Craig: Yes it’s a world first; it’s an HDBaseT switcher model HS-1500T. It’s the only production switcher in the world currently that will control HDBaseT connected PTZ cameras. It provides power to the remote camera and brings in your video using one Ethernet cable per HDBaseT Datavideo Camera. I’ve got Craig with the Datavideo GoKits. this Ethernet cable connected to my camera, a CAT-6 cable, plug it into the giving you a wide shot, or as you say you can put back of my switcher and into the camera and it powers graphics into that channel? up my camera, brings in my signal. I can actually Craig: Or a media player, or maybe a separate control the camera using the HS-1500T integrated CG. joystick, which allows me to pan, tilt, and zoom the PTC Ed: And you’ve got 3 outputs?

-150T cameras. In addition, I can adjust the PTCCraig: Yes, 3 outputs that normally would go, 1 to 150T’s focus, iris, and other settings remotely using the a recorder, maybe 1 to a streaming device such as the HS-1500T. Datavideo NVS-25, maybe you want a separate Ed: Yes how many cameras can this control? programme monitor or want to send it to a projector if Craig: You can power and control three cameras it’s in an iMAX situation where you want to project th from the vision mixer and I can bring in a 4 HDMI something in a church or a conference like this picture camera but you’d have to power that camera separately up here. on its own. Add Datavideo's three Camera GoKit (GOEd: Can you record one of the – like the wide camera 3CAM) as the perfect companion bundle to the HS– through this system so that you’ve got a safety if you 1500T. It comes with 3 x remote controlled PTZ muck up your mix so that you can fix it in post? cameras, built with HDBaseT technology to interface Craig: Sure, you can assign whatever you want to seamlessly with the HS-1500T. For more information, the outputs. visit the GO-3CAM page now. One guy can walk into a production and set up to three cameras and can start Ed: So 3 outputs, you can do whatever you want with switching the show in minutes. You don’t have any SDI those 3 outputs, but those are the programme outputs cables to worry about, nor do you have to find power for the cameras, because the power is right here built into the switcher. It’s all self-contained there’s nothing else like this on the market. http://www.datavideo.com/ap/ product/HS-1500T Ed: And each definition?

camera

is

full

high

Craig: Correct full HD 1920x1080, PTC-150T HD Pan Tilt Zoom Cameras with built in HDBaseT. Ed: Wow, and does it record all cameras at the same time?

Craig: No the mixer doesn’t record, we suggest a separate program output recorder such as the Datavideo HDR-1 and you can have that connected side by side with your switcher. You have three assignable separate HDMI outputs out of the HS-1500T vision mixer.

Ed: Okay, so basically it’s controlling 3 cameras, but there’s a 4th input where you can either have a fixed camera, so Page 6

they’re not the individual camera outputs?

Craig: You assign them out as single cameras, but in most cases people set them up for programme.

Ed: Okay, so you can take one of those channels and use it as an AUX out and record one of those cameras as a safety in case you need to do a fix later on. Now, as well as your PTZ cameras, you also have Block Cameras?

Craig: Yes, here is one. The BC200 HD 4K Block Camera has 2 x HDMI out, outputting UHD which is a 4K format and you can connect that to the KMU100 which allows you to take this camera angle and crop 4 different shots from that and then output that to your switcher. That’s the main reason for the 4K Block Camera. The BC-200 provides 12x optical focus and two HDMI video output interfaces. A tally light indicator is positioned above the BC-200 camera lens.

The control protocol supports SONY VISCA so the camera can be controlled through the RS-422 or DVIP interface.

Ed: So that looks like an expensive option for 4K? Craig: US$2100 – I don’t think so.

Ed:

Now what about the GoKit?

Craig: This is our 8 camera GoKit and you can match it up with this switcher, which is also portable, the HS-2850.

In our 8 camera GoKit, which is 2 cameras, KMU and the controller, that will create 8 different shots from my switcher. All our GoKits will have all different flavours of camera sizes – 2 cameras, 3 cameras, 4, 8 and then we have a sports one right around the corner. We just won an award for one of our GoKits … The Videomaker Best NAB Award. This is a little 4 input switcher that’s got a recorder and a streaming box with it. All the cables are right inside here. The whole thing is US$2295 and it’s a fully portable solution. The kit is GO-REPLAY and the model number is GO-650SR. So anytime there’s a “GO” on front of one of our products, it’s a GoKit. This is the 650, the “S” and the “R” mean stream and record.

Ed:

And the cameras that come with this?

Craig: Any cameras work, any of our Cameras … you can use any cameras you like.

Block

Ed:

Okay, the kit doesn’t include the cameras?

Craig: You can buy another of our 2 camera kits right here … so here’s your 2 PTZ cameras, all your cables, controller, so you get this and this and you’re good to go. So you can add your kits to suit.

Ed: Right, so basically you have mixing kits, you have camera kits and then combine them?

Craig: You got it – so you have complete solutions with 2 kits.

We’re still with Datavideo but now in their Virtual Studio. It’s a standard green screen, a seat for the talent and lighting etc, but that’s where it ends, because there’s a rather large black box in the corner, and we have Mike Gamboa to explain.

Ed: Mike, what’s in that large black box there?

Mike: It’s a TVS-2000 in a PC motherboard sound card and …

Ed: Okay, so basically in the box is the software and the hardware that drives this. It’s in a PC chassis and you’ve got a couple of monitors and the whole thing is controlled with a keyboard and a mouse, or you have the hardware option if you wish?

Mike: We also do have a hardware option, it’s the Datavideo RMC-220 which is an analogue panel to control all the functions of the TVS-2000.

Ed: Now this studio will work with standard cameras but, to really make it hum, you have a Datavideo POV camera?

Mike: Yes. In this setup, we’re using Datavideo’s PTC150 camera but the PTC-150T is also compatible with this system too.

Ed: So what do they do in this?

Mike: It’s for the virtual tracking. The system takes the rotation information from these 2 cameras, feeds it into the computer and then, when you move the camera, the computer knows to correspondingly move the 3D background. So it simulates true 3D perspective changes.

Ed: Right … and that includes zooms and pulls?

Mike: Absolutely. as tilts.

BC-200 HD 4K Block Camera.

It includes zooms and pulls as well

Ed: So it really looks as though your talent’s in the picture as opposed to a flat person on a green screen?

Mike: Yes. Since you’re able to move the camera the same way as you would in a traditional setup using PTZs in a real life scene, you can totally simulate that view, but in the virtual world.

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Ed: And when you don’t have the controllable Datavideo cameras and you’ve just got fixed cameras, you can still have a small amount of effect?

Mike: Yes, without the PTZ cameras you can focus a non-moving camera on your talent and do virtual camera movements up to 15 degrees to look just like real life. You can still move it a little bit more, but 15 degrees is about as far as you’d want to go.

Ed: So even though the set we’ve got here is rather small, you could have a full size studio set for this?

Mike: That’s correct, with a much wider green screen.

You can have your talent walk around the virtual set – a far distance – and it will look like they’re in a very big studio, when in fact they could be in quite a small studio.

Ed:

And the resolution of this?

Mike: This is working currently in 1080p 60.

Ed:

So in addition to the live camera action …?

Mike: In addition to the video aspect of it, it also comes with a software audio mixer, so there’s no need to get a separate audio mixer to use with this system, you just plug your sources directly into the computer and control from within the TVS-2000 software.

Ed:

And graphics engine?

Mike: I’m not too sure – they didn’t tell me that.

Ed: Okay, but you say you can load movies into here as a background?

Mike: Yes you can load movies, lots of types of media from movies, you can load MPEG2’s, MP4 files, anything compressed with H264, and as far as other media you can load JPEGs, PNGs, Bitmap pictures, most of the common types of pictures you can load in here and then present on the screen.

A sample studio arrangement.

allowed to put the plane for the graphics anywhere in the scene, whether it be in front of the presenter or behind the presenter. You can add graphics in front of the presenter because this comes with 2 built-in DSKs and the graphics can be still images again and they can be movies, or it can be text.

Ed: And of course "picture in picture" and all that usual carry on?

Mike: Yes absolutely. You can do picture in picture functions in this system, yes.

Ed: So if you wanted to practise your skills in augmented reality?

Mike: If you wanted to practise in augmented reality this is the setup that will get you decently there. It’s got everything that you need for the correct perspective angles, you just need to somehow connect it to a VR Oculus but as far as the scene and angles and perspective – it’s all there.

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Ed: And you can control those movies, so at some point, you could freeze them while the live action continues?

Mike: Yes absolutely. The TVS-2000 comes with a built -in media controller so not only can you stop and play individual media clips, you can load a series of clips and play them all in a row.

Ed: What about putting the graphics in front of your live presenter?

Mike: You can do that actually. When you’re making the virtual set, you’re

Mike at the controls.

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Canon Cameras and Lenses for Protel We’re at Canon with an unnamed person who just happens to be a Gordon Barry lookalike.

Ed: Now we’re here to talk about cameras and lenses, I guess 2 things Canon are particularly known for.

Firstly, a new lens in the black and red colours?

Canon Rep: Yeah, we have here the 18-80 released 2016 and today joining it is the new 70-200 making the perfect video operators twin lens kit essentially.

So these lenses resolve 4K imagery, they’re T4.4 and importantly have Optical Image stabilisation too. They have a servo motor built onto the side of the lens there, so that’s permanently part of the lens unlike the big brother 17-120 which has a totally removable option. But what does happen is the zoom/record demand controller is removable, so that’s tethered by a cable which you can then unplug from the unit for various reasons. So you can have it stripped back for manual operation with follow focus accessories or have a run and gun shoulder mount solution and even relocate the grip on an extension, very versatile and adaptable.

The EF mount has full electronic communication so you can pair these lenses to any new Cinema EOS camera like C300MKII and enjoy the ease of Auto Focus. It’s truly like no other and they’re even compatible with Face Detection too.

Ed: Okay, that was it – I was looking for the market for this and obviously, if it’s for the 100 or 300, you’re not going to have to take out a mortgage to buy one of these?

Canon Rep: No, the RRP on the 18-80 is somewhere about NZ$8500 and then you’re buying basically sub-$10,000 as a full kit, with the optional controller accessory which is cross compatible between the two lenses, so you could have the one controller and two lenses in a hot swap situation.

Ed: But it is a standard EF mount lens so any camera that accepts EF mount you can put it on and away you go?

absolutely famous for. It’s a substantial lens for the price, and compared to similar sized types of lens out there, this is an absolute cut above, if I do say so myself.

Ed: Now what about something in the smaller range in your handheld cameras?

Ed: It’s often been a point that I’ve made about using these Canon form cameras for run and gun, because it’s never been really appropriate until you’ve come up with a sensible zoom lens, then it makes sense?

Canon Rep: There’s nothing new at this point.

The only thing really new at the moment obviously is the C700 which has already been released. C700 is a big camera with a big feature set and it’s arriving in New Zealand soon. We’ll be showing it off as soon as we can through our Cinema EOS dealers, so Ken at Protel Technologies will be a good person to contact for dates. Today I’ve had a look at the purpose built CODEX recorder which becomes one with the C700 to record every available format and frame rate onto military grade SSD’s, or if your film budget is under $100M you can record internally to the industry standard dual C-Fast card slots. Just to cover a few exciting points, the camera is available in EF or PL, Rolling or Global Shutter and you don’t have to buy two cameras to enjoy these options. Not only is the lens mount interchangeable, so too is the sensor unit. What does it mean for the future? I won’t speculate but I hold hope for some exciting opportunities. Canon only arrived on the scene in 2011 and since then has been loved for their legendary colour science and being an absolute workhorse, they just keep going!

Canon Rep: Correct, and in that solution – I’m not sure if I said it at the beginning so I’ll just say it now, you’ve got the optical image stabiliser which we’re

Now we have a true A-camera that will deliver more than ever. The signs on Canon’s NAB stand say it all NZVN really, PROVEN … and in just 6 short years!

Canon Rep: Yes, correct.

And, you know, for those people who have got the FS7 which is a popular camera, we want to make sure those people are able to connect this lens to their camera too, so you’ve got Metabones who make adapters between the EF and the E-Mount, and just recently there’s been a statement saying that they’re able to access the electronic communication through a new Metabones adapter, yet to be seen and used by myself, but I will take the press release on face value and look forward to seeing it in action soon.

So theoretically we can hit a record button, zoom in and out and we can even, I’m told, use the AF capabilities of an FS7 as well. Just one more point – there are other solutions out in this market, but the unique factors for these lenses are the controller grip, autofocus capabilities and Image Stabiliser. This is a substantial offering.

Protel have the CN-E18-80mm lens and grip in stock. Check out the following link (use “control click” to activate it). http://www.protel.co.nz/shop/video/camera-accessories/lenses/ef-pl-mount/compact-servo/cn-e18-80mm-t4.4-l-is-kas-s.html

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IDX for Panavision For Panavision, we’re here at IDX with Robert Holland.

Ed: Now Robert, we are looking at some new DUO batteries?

Robert: This is the DUO Compact range – we’ve got 2 products in the range – the DUO-C98 and the DUOC198. The 198 is 191 Watt so that’s not going to go on the plane. But the DUO-C98, the one next to it, is a sub-100 Watt battery, so therefore it’s allowed on planes; it’s very lightweight at 1.36 pounds. This one’s actually got SM Bus data as well, so this is going to feed information to the camera to give you a more accurate readout from your cameras, assuming the camera is set for that one. It has a maximum discharge of 10 Amp at 25°C. You’ve got the new advanced D-Tap on there, which will allow people to both use it as a standard DTap output, but also work with our new D-Tap single channel charger. So if they’re going to travel light ( aka flying on the plane ) they can take both a small battery and the small charger on board.

Ed: And the name “DUO” is there because …?

Robert: It’s a dual output, so you’ve got both D-Tap and USB outputs on there.

Ed: Right, so you can charge anything you like off it pretty much, as well as run your camera?

Robert: You can power a camera plus run other little accessories as well as being charged with the advanced D-Tap. But what I’m about to show you you’re going to have to be sworn to secrecy on!

Ed: Oh … now, in the red bag …

Robert: In the invisible red bag that you can’t see, nobody can see, because this is top secret. What I’ve got in my hands now are the new PowerLink batteries.

These are designed like the HL9 to PowerLink on the back of your camera and allow you to hot swap. Let me just show you an HL9 and you can describe to your readers precisely what you’re seeing.

This is the current battery preferred by most broadcasters, V-Lock, dockable, so you can have two batteries on the back of a camera to give you a higher capacity, also allowing yourself on the plane. This will be its replacement.

What you’re seeing is something considerably smaller than the existing one. We haven’t compromised at all on the quality; we haven’t compromised on the functionality. What we’ve done is we’ve increased it.

So now you have a battery that has got a D-Tap, an advanced D-Tap, plus a USB, plus a V-Torch which aids the cameramen to sort things out when they’re in the dark, ably demonstrated. We’ve got two of these types of battery – we’ve got a sub-100 Watt which allows us to fly and we’ve got a sub-160 Watt which allows us to take two on the plane.

Ed:

That would be a hope?

Robert: I would always hope that we can achieve those things, but I can’t promise. It would be nice and, as a salesperson, I would certainly like that, but unfortunately I can’t stand here today and say that will occur.

But the nice thing is you can interchange between the smaller and larger batteries and run them as a pair, so potentially you could have the 198 there and then keep swapping the 98 on the back – simple as that. How’s that for a new product?

Ed: It’s the way to go. Well that’s certainly provided a battery for a gap in the market, but in the smaller batteries for the little hand-helds, do you continue to produce a new version here?

Robert: Yes, we’ve got 2 different product ranges here – the SLF and the SBU. The SBU are the PBU type

Again, hot swappable, so it means that, if we happen to get halfway through a shoot and we need a new battery, we just take the back battery off which is the first one that’s used and put the new battery on. This product at the moment is a mock-up, so what we’re hoping for is for this to be shown properly at IBC this year – so hopefully we’ll see you there – and then we expect it to be released by the end of this year, so the 4th quarter 2017.

Ed: Is this going to be a complete unit, or can you buy the base piece and then put the old batteries onto it?

Robert: At the moment the specification is tentative, so I can’t answer that question.

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batteries for Sony products. Both these products are coming out in the 3rd quarter this year, but again, similar to the batteries I’ve just shown you, they have advanced D-Tap, D-Tap and USB outputs, so very feature enhanced.

And then on the L-Series batteries, the SLF, we have X-Tap and USB. Ed:

What’s an X-Tap?

Robert: X-Tap is a smaller version of a D-Tap. It will not work on a D-Tap socket because this is going to be the 7.2 type voltage rather than the 12 Volt.

So we’ve made a slightly smaller plug to make it safe. So again, on the advanced X-Tap you can charge and have an output, same as on the advanced D-Tap you can charge and have an output on it.

So 2 product ranges from Sony should be current with these 2 new battery ranges coming out. They’re both in small and large capacity so you can see 72 Watt hour, 48 Watt hour in the XLF and then the 93 Watt hour and 47 Watt hour in the BPU version.

Ed: Okay, now where do the customers get the cables that fit this new X-Tap – do you supply those?

Schneider Kreuznach for Panavision For Panavision, we are here at what was known in the USA as Schneider Optics talking with Ira Tiffen, vice president of the MPTV filter division and Peter Taylor.

Ed: Peter, what’s the “Kreuznach”?

Peter: Schneider-Kreuznach is the main company.

It’s located in Germany, the mother of Schneider Optics is Schneider-Kreuznach and we sit in Bad Kreuznach in Germany. It’s located near Frankfurt, so Kreuznach is the city.

Ed: Right, okay, we’re now clear. Now, MPTV filters – I know the TV, the M and P stands for?

Peter: Motion Picture and Television …

Ed: Now Ira, Tiffen’s a pretty famous name?

Ira: I’m very familiar with it.

Ed: Is there a connection with the original Tiffen name?

Ira: Of course …

Ed: Of course, otherwise you wouldn’t be in filters.

Ira: I was there for decades. My father started it with 2 of his brothers, and from the age of six, I spent time in the factory with my dad, and in high school on summer vacations, I learnt how to make filters. Later, I graduated with a chemical engineering degree from NYU in 1973. I started working fulltime from then until 2004 and I created many filters, and I received an Academy Award for the Ultra Contrast Filter and a Prime Time Emmy Award for General Body of Work in 1998 and I created the GlimmerGlass, the Pro-Mist, the Black Pro-Mist, the Soft/FX – and many more.

Ed: And I guess you’re here because somebody sold the Tiffen company?

Ira: Well it wasn’t quite that good a story but in 2004, a year after it ceased being owned by the family, I left.

In 2009 I got back into making filters again – I started my own company called Optefex and I was making

Robert: I’m going to say it’s a sales item via IDX, so no problem at all. It comes with bare ends so you have to put whatever the appropriate connector is for the accessory you intend to use. Unfortunately there are so many accessory bits, we just give you the bare end to tie those together. So a competent electrician NZVN will put that on for you. anamorphic Blue-Streak filters in 7 colours plus clear, so it wasn’t just blue. They became extremely popular and I sold them around the world, and then I sold the process to Schneider in 2012. We make them today as True-Streak filters and that’s when they hired me as their vice president of MPTV filters, which I have been doing ever since.

Ed: Do you go to Germany for training?

Ira: No, I go to train them … in what I do, I’m the expert. I go there to collaborate primarily, because they’ve got some experts in a variety of things that make a difference to what our net result is, and it works very well. Anyway I just wanted to make sure you knew who you were talking to.

Ed: You’ve established your credibility sir. Okay, we’ll start with a technical question in terms of making these filters, it’s a very large thickness of glass that you’ve got here, is this because you need that for the filter effect, or is that because you need it for the rough handling it might get?

Ira: Well to some degree it’s all of the above. First of all, the thickness you see here is a standard 4mm thickness. It’s a nominal dimension that has been the standard for decades.

Whoever came up with it originally, I can’t say I’m that certain of, but I know for instance the 4x5650 dimension …

Ed: Well it wouldn’t have been an American come out with 4mm surely?

Ira: Oh you’d be surprised, but I’m not sure that it was an American. But Panavision came up with the 4x5.650 development, and back when they did that I think the standard size was already 4mm. I don’t believe that that came afterwards, but for as long as I know we’ve been making square and rectangular filters for motion pictures, they’ve been 4mm. It’s a standard for that. Now 2 key reasons, one you mentioned which is durability – if they’re too thin in that size they break too easily; and the second reason is optical integrity.

When you’ve got a piece of glass that size, if it’s too thick it’s harder to keep the high resolution capacity of the glass intact. The piece is too thin, it has a tendency

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to warp, to flex, to do other things both when you’re grinding and polishing it and subsequently, that has a net effect on the result of resolution.

Ed: Because it’s actually the whole glass that is the filter and not just the surface coating?

Ira: Well bear in mind there are filters where the effect of the filter is the surface coating, or a coating that is laminated within the glass, but in all cases, the glass itself is part of the filter, so whether it’s part of the effect of the filter or just the carrier for the filter, it’s there. The light that you’re imaging through is going through that glass whether it is the effect or it’s just carrying the effect.

So it itself has to perform no matter what.

Your actual filter effect could be a microscopic thin vacuum deposited coating on the surface of the glass, but if the glass doesn’t resolve well, if it doesn’t have optical integrity, it doesn’t matter what the coating does, you’re still not going to get sharp images. So it’s all tied together.

Ed: So the release this year?

Ira: Let me just give a broad general overview and then we’re more readily in context.

We started producing these in the late ‘90s, we’ve had experience making filters primarily for still photography with our B+W line ( a still photography filter brand owned by Schneider-Kreuznach ) in Germany. When we started, we produced a series of literally classic filter effects – our diffusion filter, the first one was the classic soft which has little lenses in the glass that create a partial selected diffusion. You can have an image that looks in focus, but find wrinkles and blemishes are softened and made less apparent, people look younger. We have our Black Frost which produces a little soft glow as well as reducing the appearance of fine details, as well as affecting contrast and a whole range of other filters … lots of colours, we make polarisers, neutral density filters of various types. All kinds of effects. So what we have now to add to all of that, perhaps the most important single introduction for this year’s NAB, is the Rhodium where the Greek letter “o” in physics stands for optical density, and we’re producing Rhodium what we call FSND ( full spectrum neutral density ). By “full spectrum” we mean they attenuate light in the near ultraviolet, the visible, and the near infrared. So for all intents and purposes, all the portions of the spectrum that a camera can be sensitive to today, are covered, which is why we call it “full spectrum.” The idea behind that is there shouldn’t be a differentiation between what happens in any portion of the spectrum, or you can sometimes run into trouble. If you have a camera that’s overly sensitive to infrared, this doesn’t fix that, it’s not designed to fix that. It is not an IRND, although some of our competition who make full spectrum neutral densities call them IRNDs, but they’re not.

Technically speaking, an IRND is a filter that attenuates in the visible as well as the ultraviolet, but attenuates more, it absorbs more in the infrared than anywhere else because it’s counteracting oversensitivity that the camera has inherent to it for infrared, which causes problems in some situations. What we’re doing here is we’re making filters that attenuate evenly throughout all of the spectrum.

Ira and Peter with filters.

Ed: So for those particular cameras you would still need an IRND filter?

Ira: Potentially, but those cameras are fewer and fewer now.

Ed:

There’s still some aren’t there?

Ira: It depends on the market of course, understood.

So you can have for instance, one of our TRUE-CUTs which reflects infrared light. We have 3 different types that have different cut offs and you can add them to these if you need to, the 680, the 715 and the 750, but today the predominant range of cameras in most markets would do best with these, because they already have managed IR through their optical low-pass filter ( the OLPF ) that sits directly on the sensor.

Most camera manufacturers have that, removing infrared to the point where they don’t have a problem anymore. Additionally, they have internal electronic and digital means of manipulating colour to get the end effect they want, in terms of managing infrared. So these filters, like any other full spectrum neutral density, are not designed to counteract an oversensitivity to infrared that’s inherent in a camera, but they are designed not to create problems as the original traditional dyed neutral density did, because with film, after years of manufacturing, they were no longer sensitive to infrared. The film manufacturers figured out that, when they were sensitive to infrared ( which at one point they were ), that was the problem, and so they fixed that in the film. So film cameras worked fine in infrared with the standard dyed neutral density filters that didn’t attenuate infrared at all because the kinds of dyes that absorb infrared are special, very expensive dyes that you normally don’t need with film for neutral density filters. So all the classic neutral density filters they dealt with – the ultraviolet and the visible but not the infrared, they transmitted a lot. And so if you had a standard film camera and didn’t care what was going on in the infrared, you could stack as many of these neutral density filters as you want, and the fact that they all transmit a lot of infrared doesn’t matter. But what happened when they started making digital cameras, the earlier ones especially, they had no internal management of infrared and so what you wound up

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with was when you stack filters … I’ll try and make it really quick and simple, but the idea is because each one of these films transmits more in the infrared than they do in the visible, when you make what you’re absorbing in the visible significant, then the difference between the visible transmission and the infrared transmission becomes much greater. So if you’re going to have infrared colour tint problems, it becomes much worse. So with the earlier cameras that were sensitive to infrared, standard traditional neutral density filters created problems. These won’t create any, but they won’t eliminate the imbalance. What’s great about this is, unlike standard traditional dyed neutral densities where you’re combining dyes that each attenuate a particular portion of the spectrum, so you’ll have 2 red dyes, a green dyes, a yellow dye and a handful of blue dyes and you mix them all together and you try and balance everything out. But with these, these are done with minerals – a fine vacuum deposited coating, a molecular coating of minerals that are not dyes. They act as physical entities in blocking the light evenly across the full spectrum and so the colour on these is fantastically colour neutral. The idea that you can take a camera – we did this with an ARRI and with a RED – you have a vectorscope which tells you the colour bias of any particular image and we ran through the whole range of .3 to 3.0 one stop to 10 stops – every stop in between that we make available in this line and cranked up the gain on it so that it in essence enhanced or magnified any disparity in colour. When you look at the centre of the vectorscope pattern, you’ve got the 6 colours going around and in the centre you’ve got white, you’ve got neutral, and in the rectangle in the middle, that rectangle generally represents the area of space on the overall screen that if you’re anywhere within that, you cannot visibly distinguish it from any other area within it. So for all intents and purposes, anything that falls in that box is colour neutral. All of these, even when enhanced by 5 times magnification, fit within the box. I don’t know who else does that; I don’t know that nobody else does, but this is as good as it gets.

Ed: Ira:

Yes, and that was with both ARRI and RED? Both cameras, right.

Ira: You may, absolutely. It depends on the type of filter they put in the filter wheel. For many years, it was traditional to put in dyed neutral density filters and you can also put in the IRNDs that are dyed traditionally, and that’s more predominant in recent years than the standard ones. But as cameras got better and as the need for an IRND became lower, these became more predominant. Not every camera manufacturer switched to something like this, not everyone is capable of making one as good as this – this is as good as it gets.

Ed: But they wouldn’t be 4mm thick would they?

Ira: Oh no, they’re much thinner – typically in the order of about 1mm thick, because they’re small, they’re may be an inch in diameter, in that order of magnitude. So they have to be all the same precise thickness, because they affect the back focus sitting behind the lens so they all have to be really, really made to close tolerances. With external filters, you can have a little more leeway, but there’s still a tight tolerance as it is. Some of our competition takes the coating that creates the neutral density effect and they put it on the outside of the glass, so it’s a solid piece of glass and it’s on the outside. They claim they have coated it with what they call in some cases a “rock hard coating” but in my experience whatever it is, it’s never as hard as glass and it can still be scratched. And it has the negative attribute ( if you’re a rental house and a large portion of the market for these are rental houses ), that you want the ability, when they get scratched, not to have to throw them away, but to have them refinished. If the coating that creates the neutral density is on the outside, you can’t. Our filters are laminated with the coating on the inside, so they’re protected and they allow you to refinish them if necessary.

Ed: But if it was refinished, it wouldn’t be 4.00 mm anymore?

Ira: No, it would be slightly thinner. You can only do that maybe 2 or 3 times before it becomes too thin, but it still works reasonably well … actually it still works very well because what’s being taken off is maybe ten NZVN thousands of an inch, it’s really not much.

Ed: One question for the uninitiated … most cameras these days come out with their own neutral density filters inside the camera. Obviously something like a filter in front of the lens is going to produce a better result than using the camera’s own neutral density, but is that just because the camera uses firmware, or is it because it’s not such a well made filter?

Ira: Okay, depending on the camera manufacturer, some of them are very well made. Some of them might be comparable in some ways to the performance of a filter like this. So it’s not that they’re not necessarily going to be able to perform the same function, the thing about it is they’re all in the filter wheel. Inside the camera, you have a little wheel that holds different filters, and you have a limited number of densities you can put in there. It doesn’t cover the full range and so, while you can use a filter in the filter wheel and a filter in front of the lens, just the filters in the filter wheel don’t give you everything you’ll need. So putting filters in front of a lens is a great way to enhance your ability to cover a variety of different situations in the real world. This is as good as it gets – I haven’t seen anything better than this.

Ed: So in a cheaper camera where the neutral density filters might not be the best, what sort of effect do you know that the cameraperson would notice?

Ira:

Well it depends on the technology they’re using …

Ed:

You could observe a colour shift for example?

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Screen Systems for Techtel We are here for Techtel talking with Dean Wales from Screen Systems.

Ed: Now Dean, I guess it’s all about captioning?

Dean: It is all about captioning – captioning and subtitling. We’ve been going since the 1970s – the first company to create the first electronic subtitling system in London. We’re the biggest in what we do, the biggest independent developer and manufacturer and supplier of captioning technology. So it’s not the actual service side of it, this is the actual software and the hardware right from creation to distribution, delivery of the captions and through to monitoring as well.

Ed: This is really for the broadcast market, that’s where it is, but it flows into other media streams too?

Dean: That’s probably the interesting thing actually. Over the last year, we launched a Cloud based system so you don’t have to download the software – this is the creation and preparation of subtitles and captions – and that sort of marked a bit of a change in the industry so looking at analytics on the website, yes it’s broadcast predominantly, but other businesses are now starting to look at doing captioning and subtitling from the point of view that organisations like Google, if you put a video on your website, they say that’s fantastic, but you must caption it – not only because it’s good for access services so people who are hard of hearing can watch it; but also from a search engine optimisation point of view, so that caption’s actually part of metadata, Google sees that and it’s good for their searchers as well.

So yes, predominantly broadcast but we’re seeing other people wanting to do more captioning as well which is quite interesting.

Ed: And it is important that, once you do caption a programme or some presentation that you don’t have to repurpose it or do anything to it for it to be used on a whole variety of outputs?

Dean: Generally, but there is an issue with that because obviously in broadcast, there are standards and everybody sticks to the standards. There’s a lot of

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the online based stuff that gets a little bit more messy, because some people are using different media, different players. The OTT stuff is starting to cause a bit of an issue because there’s no proper standard there at the moment.

Ed: Do you know when you’ve done it or does the software tell you that this isn’t going to work on this?

Dean: No …

Ed: It’s still a bit of a Wild West at the moment?

Dean: Yes it is. I think it will settle down but, especially in the US, we’re having a lot of people coming here because they have a lot of online content and the FCC is saying that if you broadcast anything through any channel, you’ve got to have it captioned for the hard of hearing. So we’ve seen a lot of that this week and it’s all down to the FCC regulations. People have online content and they’re going “I’m about to be fined, so I need to talk to you about captioning.”

They’ve left it right till the last minute. But that is difficult; where they’re putting it can cause a few problems.

Ed: So it’s not just a case of sort of writing a whole lot of text, there’s a lot more to it than that?

Dean: There is.

If you speak to an actual professional subtitler, if you say it’s just transcribing and put it on the screen, they’ll slap you. They’re creatives. We sponsor 2 events – Media For All and Languages & the Media where they had the whole delegation of professional subtitlers.

They’re quite creative, they have to take a piece of content, say a film, they have to understand the director’s intent of that piece, because you can’t subtitle verbatim, it has to be a gist because the legislation and the requirements are that it can only be so long to read it. If it’s too long, you don’t read it and it moves on, that’s illegal, that’s against the regulations. So as a subtitler, you have to take the context, take the dialogue, edit it so you’ve got the proper gist, you’ve still got the creative intent of the director and it’s within the time limit for somebody to read it. So they’re quite talented people.

Ed: And I guess you have to use a font that fits the movie and certainly the background? I’ve seen some terrible examples of a white font being used and the background is white … you just can’t see a thing.

Dean: Well you’ve got some that are in a box, you’ve got some in a strip, you have some with an outline to it as well – and of course, we supply all those different subtitle backgrounds.

Ed: Can you adjust that as the movie progresses – on a particular scene where it is all white, can you put a shadow on the text, whereas in other parts, not?

Dean: I’m not aware you can I think because it’s in one stream of data. I think that’s all set in at the beginning so you’ve got to be careful.

Ed: That’s something for next year?

Dean: Yes, you just found a new feature for subtitling. I’m not entirely certain, but I don’t think you can because it’s all one stream. That’s something you have to consider when you set it up. I don’t think people realise just how difficult it is to subtitle.

Ed: Okay, so here the issue is the need for the FCC regulation that you have to have it for the deaf, but in countries like New Zealand and I guess in Australia too, there’s the possibility that you need it for other languages?

Dean: It was the same in the US obviously with English and Spanish speakers, and they have to make content available. I was speaking to another chap today who does a lot of cinema captioning and I think he said that in Brazil, they have to take account of all

local languages – including Brazil sign language for the deaf, so presentations have to have a sign interpreter as well, just to put another spin on it.

Ed: Right, so in terms of charging for this, if you’re a major broadcaster and you’re doing sort of X-Men Version 3 you’ve probably got a big budget, but if you’re a small operator and you are doing some online content you don’t want to make this a large part of your budget. Are you able to look after them?

Dean: We are, yes.

We refer to it as the “YouTube generation” so this is people putting up content, they’ve got channels, they’re putting some pretty reasonable content up online.

We signed a tri-party agreement here at NAB last year with Cavena and OOOna over in Israel and we’ve created a Cloud based system which is sort of semipriced, it’s between the free stuff that you get on the website, to the professional stuff that we produce, WINCAPS – and you don’t have to download the software, it’s a sort of “pay as you go.” It’s ready to use, and you just think well I only want to do this much and it just keeps the cost way way way down. There’s no setup, there’s no training, it’s nice and easy to use and you can output any of this on a different subtitle file.

Ed: So it’s like freelance journalists – you pay per word?

Dean: Yes, that sort of thing. I think it’s done in time, but it keeps the cost way down, you just sign up and use as much as you like. I referred to it in another interview yesterday as a bit of a “dip in, dip out” sort of generation now. They don’t want the big sort of piece of software downloaded on their computer, but they do need captioning every now and again, so they dip in, they do that and back out again.

We’ve found another Screen Systems person to talk to and this is John Boulton from England.

Ed: And John I understand you do captioning for the Welsh?

John: Well one of our customers does captioning for the Welsh. In Australia, there’s been captioning for many years.

All the major broadcasters provide captions on offline programmes, recorded programmes, and most also provide captions on live and News programmes as well. Gradually, the broadcasters in New Zealand are starting to do the same as well. TVNZ have provided captions for many years on most of their content. The service is provided by a company called Able. Maori TV have a more unique requirement in that they’ve got a language localisation thing, so they provide English subtitles for people who can’t understand the Maori language service. More and more of the broadcasters in New Zealand are starting to look at providing captioning on their content as well.

NZVN

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Timecode Systems for Sound Techniques For Sound Techniques, we are at Timecode Systems and we have Olivia Allen from the UK. Ed: Now Olivia, you’ve got something very small and delicate in your hand, though I guess it’s not too delicate, it looks as though it could bounce, and it is a little sync generator?

Olivia: Yes, this is our new product, the UItraSync ONE which is designed to work with all of our existing products over a long range RF signal. It can be used as either a master or a slave device; it has the ability to generate its own timecode or take external timecode in and regenerate that. It has both timecode and Genlock and works on – well I guess in Australia you’d be on 865-868 megahertz …

New Zealand, oooh sorry, I was just talking to someone from Australia.

Ed: I hope it wasn’t such a pleasant experience?

Olivia: No, not at all. So 868 megahertz so we stay away from all of the super congested WiFi channels, the 2.4 and 5 GHz. Ed: But once this is connected to a device it is syncing up with another master signal, but it’s still keeping its own signal going?

Olivia: That’s correct, yes. The master will be sending out timecode every frame, so we’re constantly jamming to the slave units and ensuring that they stay in sync. While they’re in range of one another, there’s absolutely no drift whatsoever. If one were to go out of range, it would start to free run on its own internal generator. The benefit of all of our products being able to be a timecode generator means the crystals inside them are accurate enough that they’ll keep timecode when they are free running and you’d be looking at a drift of less than a tenth of a frame over 24 hours while they were out of range. When they then come back in, they’ll soft-lock back in which means they’ll ever so slightly speed up or slow down, so they come back into perfect sync over a couple of frames, there’ll be no jump whatsoever.

Ed: So these are designed to be connected the whole time, but there is the option of you using one like a portable sync device which you could use to sync up a number of devices going from one to the other. But that’s not recommended?

Olivia: That’s correct.

We would recommend having one of our devices attached to each camera or sound recorder that you want to connect in a multi-cam workflow. The real benefit we have in multi-cam is that when you get into your NLE, you can use timecode as your sync point from multi-cam clips. If you wanted to jam individual cameras or sound recorders from our unit, you’d then be relying on their own internal crystals to keep the accurate timecode. Our internal crystals will keep better timecode than that and also because

Stephen and Olivia.

it’s a continual communication between the master and the slave we can guarantee no drift while they’re in range of one another.

Ed: Applications Stephen?

Stephen: Any situation where timecode’s required in the field and something compact is required to generate it or receive it, such as with audio gear or cameras, this is ideal. One of the complaints about all the timecode devices that exist today is “oh yeah, but it’s really rather big” and, as you’ll know, the cameras get smaller, the paraphernalia that’s attached to them seems to get larger. Also the fact they’ve got Genlock means you’ve got extra capability to make sure that your pictures and sound are frame accurate.

Ed: So how much smaller is this in comparison to what’s been available up until now – half the size, or less?

Stephen: Yes, it probably would be half the size.

Olivia: It’s about half the size of our second smallest product, which is the Mini TRX+ product.

There is a product on the market of a similar size, but it doesn’t do embedded timecode or Genlock.

Ed: Okay, so how would you actually attach this to the camera – I don’t see any Velcro straps on it?

Olivia: No we currently don’t have any Velcro attached to it, but you could put Velcro on it; we’re also going to be working with Orca to create a mounting solution. We have pouches for our :pulse and :wave and TRX products with Orca already, so we’ll be adding to that collection.

Sound Techniques prepares for TRexit Tim Riley, Sales and Rentals Assistant is leaving and we're looking for someone to pick up where he leaves off. Full details are on Seek. http://bit.ly/2taVZvy You will need to demonstrate a passion for audio, a proven record of customer service and enjoy solving problems with a sense of humour as part of a small team.

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Stephen: Unlike most devices, it actually has a blank surface that you can put Velcro on, rather than masking all the controls and everything. Another of the features that distinguishes it from other devices is that it actually has a display so you can at all times see what the timecode is.

Ed: And that it’s actually working. So is it running on an internal battery?

Olivia: Yes, it has a 25 hour battery life and that’s with timecode and Genlock running, so you could extend that if you weren’t using Genlock and also you have the option to turn off the backlight if you want to extend it even further, and it will charge from flat in about four hours.

Ed: Do you need a special charger or just the USB?

Yes, they are tiny but powerful.

Olivia: It’s a USB-C connector, it will be provided with a USB-C to USB-A charging cable in the box and we’ll also be supplying a timecode and Genlock cable which will attach to the miniature connectors with BNC at the other end.

Ed:

Everything in one box Stephen?

Stephen:

Exactly Grant – I can’t add anymore.

Ed: And we’ve got a little product there that’s got something to do with the HERO 4 or the GoPro? Olivia: Yes. This is our SyncBac PRO product which is a timecode solution for the HERO 4 black or silver. It’s the only timecode solution for GoPro on the market and we’ve developed it with them as part of their work with GoPro and their developer programme.

You essentially just clip it onto the back, it’s the same form factor as any of their backpack accessories. Once it’s connected on there and you start recording the camera, it will start to embed timecode as metadata into the video file, so that the media from your HERO 4 can be used in your NLE in the same way as any media from any professional camera with timecode. It works on what we call our “B:LINK network” which is a marketing term for our radio frequencies, so again you’d set one as your master, all the others to slaves.

It would be constantly jamming every frame to ensure timecode sync across all of your cameras.

Ed:

battery life on the SyncBac so you have the entire length of that battery to turn your GoPro’s on and off as much as you want without risking missing a shot because one of them has died.

We’re also now moving into the VR world a little bit with the 360RIZE rigs which now have space for the SyncBac PRO in the housings. Originally they just housed the HERO 4, now they will hold the HERO 4 with a SyncBac attached. Again, that not only gives you the benefit of being able to remotely turn all of the cameras on and start recording across as many cameras as you have in your rig, rather than doing them one at a time, but we now also have the ability to look after the settings on the GoPro, so you can ensure that you have all of the GoPro’s on the same framerate, the same resolution, and we can also get in some of the Protune settings as well.

Ed: I just have to ask the question – one of these might be £190-ish but when you multiply that by ten, that’s quite an investment?

Olivia: Yes, so we feel that the system pays for itself with the time that you can save in postproduction.

What sort of range are you getting with that?

Olivia: You’re getting about 200-300 metre range.

That’s the same with all of our products with an internal antenna.

For example, the SyncBac PRO and the UltraSync ONE both have internal antennas. The ones with external antennas you’re looking at closer to 500600 metre. The same principle applies as with the other products, that if they go out of range, they’ll start to free run and are on their own internal timecode generator and again you’ve got that accurate crystal in there as it is able to be a timecode master.

Ed: So it’s going to be pretty close – within a frame or two anyway?

Olivia: Oh within a tenth of a frame over 24 hours.

It’s a lot smaller than a frame or two. The added functionality comes if you use our :pulse as a master transmitting unit. The :pulse has WiFi and Ethernet capabilities built into it which allows you to access our B:LINK Hub application. From there, you can not only view all cameras in the network, you can remotely turn the GoPro’s on and off and start / stop record when they’re connected with the SyncBac PRO. That’s the main advantage in a multi-cam workflow, particularly where cameras are rigged for a long time and you want to save the battery life. We have about a 12 hour Page 20

One possible arrangement.

One of the huge problems with GoPro’s in multi-cam shoots in the broadcast industry is the huge volume of footage and how long it can take to sift through and sync all of that once you get to post. When you look at the VR solution, it’s then twofold, because not only are you able to timecode sync all of that footage but you also have the peace of mind from our app that all of the cameras are recording and they’re all on exactly the same setting so that you don’t have one of them firing off completely differently.

Ed: I’m sure you’d give a discount for 10 wouldn’t you Stephen?

Stephen: I’m sure we could come to some arrangement.

While you’re talking to Olivia, I’m watching the screen behind you which is showing motor sports and various angles, multi-camera angles of motor sports and you can only think how SyncBac on a GoPro is going to make the whole editing process so much quicker than trying to retrieve the individual footage and sync it up by eye … it’s probably impossible to do.

Olivia: Ed:

It replaces audio and visual markers …

Like clapper boards?

Olivia: Exactly, like clapper boards, a lot of VR workflows were using like a clicky dog toy as well to sync them all, which is ridiculous when you think of the cost of a VR rig, and we remove all of the need for that.

Once you get to your NLE you just use timecode as the sync point for your multi-cam clip and it does all the work for you.

Ed:

And you can save your clicky toy for Spot.

Olivia:

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Exactly.

NZVN

Lectrosonics for Sound Techniques Now we have Stephen Buckland from Sound Techniques at the Lectrosonics booth and we’re going to discuss the new Lectrosonics Duet digital IEM system with Karl Winkler.

Ed: Now Karl, stereo 2 channel or 4 channel mono … wow, that’s a lot to bundle into a little transmitter package?

Karl: It is indeed. Our goals were twofold really, that this product, the M2 Duet System, could be used for live performance as an in-ear monitor system, wirelessly, digital, so absolutely pristine audio quality over the air which we think we’re setting the bar a little higher now.

Also, we thought of it as an IFB system, you know with mono feeds and it would take half the number of carriers of a standard IFB system and yet deliver higher quality audio. You’re using less RF to get better quality with a new system in an IFB configuration. It’s also efficient for rack space, because the half rack transmitter has 2 transmitters in one housing. With one rack unit (1RU) you can actually have 4 stereo or 8 mono channels coming out of this system. It’s also fed with either analogue or Dante inputs, so it’s part of the whole Dante system or ecosphere, which is becoming very popular or, for traditionalists, analogue. Now for an in-ear monitor system, you may want to know about the latency; that’s a question we get a lot because it’s digital and everyone knows the digital incurs some latency. Well our team worked very, very hard to get that minimised and this from analogue input to analogue output is 1.4 milliseconds of latency. That’s about half of what other systems are doing.

Stephen and Karl.

Ed:

It’s all about control?

Karl: Yes and I’m a control freak so it’s good for me.

Ed: And Stephen’s tuppence worth?

Stephen: In a practical sense, and possibly in broadcasting or on location, different material could be fed to say the director or a boom operator because you’ve got 4 different options rather than, at the moment, you would need a separate transmitter for each line of communication.

Ed: In other words imperceptible?

Karl: It’s imperceptible. When you’re feeding it with a Dante network signal, it’s only one more millisecond than what’s on the Dante network, so also should not ever be an issue. If this is your D to A conversion at the last step, this is not going to add any latency to what you would be doing by some other means.

Ed: Just tell me the applications for a transmitter that’s dual channel stereo?

Karl: Mostly in-ear monitoring for live performance where performers on stage want to be able to hear themselves or the other mix that their monitor engineer is providing for them, and this will do it with very, very high fidelity – better than any system out there today.

Because every system out there today is analogue companded, FM multiplexed so in a sense FM radio quality.

The M2 Duet System is now part of the Wireless Designer ecosphere. Wireless Designer is our wireless system management software that allows you to do frequency scanning and frequency co-ordination and then system monitoring all in one package.

For instance, your venue to wireless mic system and your M2 Duet system can coexist in Wireless Designer and they can all be co-ordinated together and you can be monitoring them all at once.

This expands the capability of all these products together, to make a seamless system approach.

Page 22

Ed: And we’re continuing with Karl looking at a PDR – Personal Digital Recorder?

Karl: This is a small beltpack or bodypack type unit that is a high quality single channel recorder. You would connect a Lav microphone to this unit, you can sync it with timecode and then it will record digital files on a Micro SD card in 24 bit 48 kilohertz through a very good quality mic preamp. This is a kind of device that really has 2 uses. One use would be in a case where a wireless microphone system is not practical for whatever reason.

Like extreme sports, you’ve got someone snowboarding down a mountain, you know a wireless mic is not going to have the kind of range to capture that sound. You know the way they’re using GoPro’s and all that kind of camera these days – well this is a way to capture onsite or on-person audio at a very high quality.

Then the second application is maybe where you are using a wireless mic system but you need a backup recorder to make sure maybe if they go out of range or have a dropout or whatever, that you capture the audio anyway and can add it back in, in postproduction. The unit’s got a little headphone amp where you can listen to files or to cascade over to a transmitter to send the signal from there. It’s all metal construction, nice display, full featured unit and runs on a triple A battery.

Ed: And it’s waterproof?

Karl: It is not waterproof.

Ed: So you wouldn’t actually give it to a snowboarder then?

Karl: Well you could put it in a plastic bag and put it on a snowboarder.

Stephen: Or use an Aquapac?

Karl: Aquapac yes exactly, that’s a purpose designed watertight type ziploc bag system. These have been quite popular since being introduced just last fall.

Ed: And it’s full broadcast quality audio?

Karl: Absolutely. The file system is the .wav broadcast Wave file, easy to edit in any software, bring it in and the timestamp information will come in with the file.

Page 23

Ed: And how long would that last on a single triple A battery?

Karl: It runs about 6 hours.

Ed: Wow, that’s impressive. Uses Stephen?

Stephen: Well we’ve had them in stock even for several months and they’re very popular with clients in extreme sports or as a backup to a radio microphone. The first wave of them went out the door …

Ed: Well it's not good stock control if they are all in stock, they should be out the door.

Stephen: Well we carry them in stock because requirements can come it at short notice.

NZVN

MOG for Atomise Now of course, one of the big supporters of Atomise and the Avid platform in New Zealand is MOG represented here by Nuno Magalhães.

Ed: We have mentioned before, but I’d like to say it again, you guys work really closely with Avid and that’s why you have such a good relationship with Richard and the Atomise team?

Nuno: It’s been something that has been successful with some of our customers that we have been growing with in New Zealand such as TVNZ. We have worked with projects in the past and we are still trying to get more projects that involve both Avid and the Media Composer solutions or their Nexus storage.

We can integrate seamlessly with Avid with our solutions, so MOG will be able to just check in and perform operations like edit while ingest for edit while capture, so this is something that is an advantage for this integration. In parallel, we have other products and many solutions that we are representing to the market right now. Some of them will integrate with Avid, some of them are a little bit standalone because they are products that go for a different area in the production environment. So we’re wanting to continue to grow in our solutions, in parallel but making our own advances into what’s considered to be in the industry trends at this point.

Ed: And that is OTT? Nuno: That is OTT and content delivery networks; it’s engaging the audiences mainly.

Also, we are environments – augmented reality is something that we are also working on. Aside from that, we are also proposing to the market one solution which is SKYWATCH that will allow you to supervise the entire workflow. This means that, in terms let’s say for Avid again, we will be monitoring what the editors are doing on the editing stations, where you have your Media Composers or if you want to check which resources are being used in Avid storage alongside with the other brands that you might have inside your facilities. We can track all that information, we can setup groups near the editing stations, we can eventually get back information from work services, also collect information from logs, so we will present it graphically for the decision makers to have a good sense of what’s happening in their infrastructure. So they will be able quickly to pinpoint what are the issues and address them quickly, ultimately improving their resources. So if they need to contemplate an event, they will know automatically what is available for usage, what they need to anticipate in terms of budget for their next production, so all those elements will be available for them, without interfering with anyone.

Richard and Nuno.

Ed: So if you’re a small media company streaming material and not necessarily using large Avid infrastructure, do you have a product that can help them?

Nuno: Yes. From the acquisition, if it’s files, we can use our solutions for media preparations then send to the Cloud and from the Cloud we can encode into several formats that are currently being used such as HLS and Dash so that we can push that media directly for encoding devices, iPhone devices, IOS in this case devices, or eventually for virtual reality glasses.

Ed: Wow, so Richard, taking a situation where you have an emerging media platform live streaming most of their material, would the inclusion of a MOG system help them broaden that reach?

Richard: Absolutely. Because MOG works so well in so many diverse infrastructures, it gives a production a great deal of choice as to how they’re delivering their content.

Ed:

Page 24

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Richard: Yes, and proven tools. We’re not talking about something that might work; we’ve already got other tools running from MOG in infrastructures that are absolutely core to major enterprises delivering content, so we can present them with complete confidence.

Ed: And you’d back that up Nuno?

Nuno: Yes. You know that MOG started out quite a few years back, we were a small group of up to 35 people. By the time I joined, we are now 50 engineers and our crew and our teams are very diversified. We have people working on better science, we have people working on engineering on the MXF standards integration with partners. There are a lot of things going on at MOG and, since we have all these technological partners, it allows us to have confidence in the integrations that we propose to the market. So everything is previously tested, previously tested as well in our public broadcasters which from time to time allow us to make some events and ask us directly to make those events because they know that they have the confidence in MOG. Ed: Now 360 is something that obviously is a growing area in the market; although it’s small it’s now become a lot easier and you have solutions for that?

Nuno: Yes. We also manufacture our own cameras, so we have cameras for the 360 where we have four lenses shooting and recording in 4K. 4K nowadays is a bit of a standard for recording and capturing, making the acquisition to eventually work in postproduction, but what we are aiming for is 8K, because the 8K seems to be the best technology to go for, because you’re going to be able to get HD plans and work on those HD plans and the resolution will be way better in your viewing experience.

Ed: A startling discovery here at the MOG Booth is that MOG have now got into 360 cameras and it’s not a case that you have to have any other MOG infrastructure, you can get the camera and the software and away you go. Importantly, there’s something very special about this camera?

Nuno: The camera itself can perform the automatic stitching on the fly …

Ed: What’s that – automatic stitching on the fly, so you don’t need to process it, it’s already done for you?

Nuno: Yes, you don’t need to use any other type of software to put those images back together which is basically done through an editing system or After Effects, which is a little bit painful.

Ed: And time-consuming if you’ve got 12 channels, but your camera has 4 channels I understand?

Nuno: It has 4 cameras recording so each one will record in 4K and ingest all that media directly; if you have of course a 360 ingest system such as MOG’s one, you can also use it and start delivering that media to the Cloud and making all the workflow that you have ahead like say for the distribution to the viewers, to the audience.

And we can provide the apps for the audience as well.

Ed:

It’s all in one package?

Nuno: Yes, all in one – you just need to say what the project is and it will set you up with the right solution.

Ed:

Well Richard at Atomise will set you up.

Richard: I’ve got some interesting ideas I’m going to have to talk to Nuno about very shortly.

Nuno:

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Feel free, feel free.

NZVN

Triad-Orbit for Oceania Sales For Oceania, we’re at Triad-Orbit in Las Vegas and we have Ryan Kallas, director of product development.

Ed: It’s not your company Ryan but you’re the brains who designs all these cool things?

Ryan: Yes I’m behind it and obviously everyone puts their input in, but I’m the guy who has to put it out first and get the feedback and then go build it.

Ed: Okay, so do you have a musical background?

Ryan: Yes, I’m a guitar player and singer, but a recording engineer by trade first … film scoring, a lot of stuff and later on Ryan with a small but very handy accessory. it’s like I’m not making a living … I design product.

Ryan: Yes, exactly. That same T3 stand I just Ed: So you’ve designed this really for on stage showed you accepts wheels, because the legs are solid production for music? steel and you can thread our wheels right in it and so Ryan: Actually, recording studios first, because of there’s the wheels on the stand. I can extend that its weight the stage production guys still are a little stand to 9 feet with an extra metre extension and it's dubious about it, but the back line around a drum kit Tinkertoys – you can extend it higher because, again, they’re freaking out, it’s the best stand system they’ve everything attaches to everything else. ever seen. Pianos, for front line you know it’s heaven.

Ed: And that’s something we haven’t seen before – But we’ve made conversions for standard mic stands the extension? and for standard lighting stands to take our IO head technology and that’s the basis of everything we do.

Ryan: Yes, this is our best boom. This is called 02x … 02 drops in the same way, it’s two complete free Ed: But it’s heavy because it’s stable? flowing 360 ball joints on one stand with another swivel Ryan: Yes, exactly.

We find that people are that goes 150 degrees left and right. And again, in a buying $6000 microphones and putting them on $49-59 lighting scenario I can have a high light and a low light stands and their dog runs through the house in their all off one stand. It comes with 4 arms, the arms home studio and knocks it over. This will not fall over. release, it comes with 2 long arms and 2 short arms so This is our T3, this weighs 14½ pounds to start with.

I can have uneven setups, even setups, even no arm What’s interesting about the stands is that each leg has setups … but if I need a longer arm …

4 ratcheted articulation points, so you can angle the Ed: Just plug in an extension? stands, you can lean them over, you can put them on uneven surfaces and you can greatly reduce the Ryan: They plug together in every way. I can put footprint allowing you to stack stands right next to each the ball joint at the end or at the beginning, any way I other, which is the issue in lighting, in mic’ing. And want and this is our patented IO technology. that’s what we’re here showing – we’re not showing this Ed: So why has it taken so long to get this into the much as a mic stand here, this is a lighting stand. It’s a television industry? replacement for a C-stand for the independent producer Ryan: I think honestly because it was really who doesn’t want to go out and rent C-stands or carry expensive to build in R&D and they’re not cheap. And C-stands; but he’s carrying lightweight light stands with again, in the mic world, what’s really funny – in the mic sandbags. This covers that. world they’re going “$300 for a mic stand, are you So the next thing you notice is that there are no kidding?” In this world they’re going “this is only 300 threads on that stand. It comes with the standard mic bucks. This is amazing.” So it’s the mentality of the thread stud and it drops right in. Unlike the competitive people using it and what they’re used to buying. mic quick releases, this doesn’t make a sound, it Musicians, we’re cheap man! doesn’t wiggle, it won’t come out. Even if my tech engineer misses halfway, I’m not dropping a $6000 mic anywhere, because it will not come out through release.

Today, I’m an audio producer, tomorrow I’ve got to shoot video – put a lighting stud in it, now it’s a video stand. I need to hold my camera, there’s a quarter twenty for the camera; I’ve got a larger video camera, there’s a three eight for the camera; I’ve got a GoPro head … you can buy 8 different heads for this stand. So it’s a media stand that covers anything anyone needs and most people don’t make a living off of one discipline anymore, you’ve gotta do it all.

Ed: And it’s that quick release, it’s the stability of the release, the strength of it enables you to have quite a weight and a height, such as a light or a monitor?

Ed: Now that’s pretty much what we talked about with Nigel in the issue where we did the story, but we’ve got some additions that have occurred since then, and they are …?

Ryan: They are first of all IO-Desk which is a laptop holder. This is a three eight cheese plate desk that allows you to put these speed dials, these rotating dials to hold down your laptop, in any position you want. It comes with a band system that holds down power supplies and hard drives on the desk. Of course, it’s quick release and drops right in your laptop bag.

The newest is right here. This is the new iORBIT. We already had 3 iORBITs – iORBIT 1, 2 and 3 because Apple kept coming out with new devices. Well we’ve

Page 27

finally made the universal one that fits everything, so the other 3 are discontinued. It now comes with our IO -C Clamp, so you get a really cool tool to start with. IO -C Clamp goes anywhere you want from a pane of glass to just under a 2 inch pole. It’s got our stainless steel quick release ball joint system, giving you unbelievable fluid motion; it will move down as small as a 4S and as large as an iPad Pro really fast, and what’s really cool – it’s got this movable centre point, so I can offset the viewing of that iPad left or right. So that’s new … and then a really simple thing that people kept saying “I’ve got all this stuff on one stand, what do I do with the cables?” We have now Cable Control and this is a PET weave that swings back into its shape. Basically, you align your cables on the stand and you just let it go and it wraps itself around the cables, and it will slide with the cables as you make your adjustments. It’s usable forever, until you lose it obviously. They come in 3 sizes, small medium large – the more cables the larger you want to go, or that matches the tube size you’re working with. IO-Vector, another cool one. That is our stereo bar but when you put Micros on the end of the stereo in twos, now you’ve got a stereo bar that gets you into any position including OTRF and plumb line 90 degree of phase with ribbon mics. If you add the arms that you buy with an 02x or you can buy separately, it’s an instant Decca Tree and it is the dimensions a Decca Tree should be. It comes with a third head which is IOR38, which is a three eight head which can go into any extra three eight holes – you could put 5 points of light, 5 points of audio reception mic’ing all off this one device and also then this three eight head can go on your desktop – your IO-Desk – because that’s three eight cheese plate threaded as well.

Ed: This is Lego for the stand market isn’t it?

Ryan: It is, completely. Everything connects to everything else – we call it “Tinkertoys for Pros.”

Ed: And it’s really solid, really well made and it’s going to last and last?

Ryan: Yes. All the products have a 3 year unlimited warranty once registered on our website. We are a company of major ethics. If there’s something wrong, that it wasn’t just thrown down a stairway and abused and run over by a car, we’re going to replace it.

Ed: It’s good to stand by your product.

Ryan: Yes, for sure.

Ed: Now I can see, for 360 degree cameras, this would be an ideal support because of its very small footprint and strength.

Ryan: It is. Actually, anyone using the the Nokia OZO demand it’s on this stand, because you don’t have to stitch out the legs. Also, it has air loaded shafts – so if it did happen to slip, it doesn’t crash, and they love the fact of the IO because they thread IO three eight into the Nokia and just drop it right on the stand, not playing with threads, trying to get that $60,000 camera in place. And because of Nokia’s request, they needed a way to balance the stand, so with the Micro2, we just created this bubble balance that goes between the thread adapter and the Micro and now the Nokia sits on that and now they can balance that camera.

The Micro2’s very small and that camera’s like 15 pounds, but on a straight-up vertical positon there’s no issues whatsoever. It’s more like 3-4 pounds sideways, but in this sort of position it’s not an issue at all.

An elegant solution.

Ryan: Yeah. Depending on how tight you get the clutches you know, it’s set up.

Ed: But as you say, it’s air cushioned?

Ryan: It’s air loaded shafts in the T3 so if it did fall, it’s cushioned. Now be careful, T2 and T1 and TM don’t have that, so I had a guy loosen a clutch on a T2 and it came down pretty fast.

Ed: I know these stands are very secure, but when you’ve put a $60,000 OZO on the top there, you still want to make sure, and you’ve got something better than a sandbag?

Ryan: Yes. It’s called Grav Bag (gravity obviously). They are stainless steel shot bags, oddly enough shaped as our logo in the Tri section. So when you look at it, it is our logo, that was the concept. But that was really easy to divide out, so they Velcro together to create a doughnut, but when you separate them into their individual bags, which is one end of each part of our logo, they can Velcro together and create booties for the end of other stands. It also has Velcro straps and a receiving system so it can go over the end of a boom and create a counterweight, or stay on the legs any way you want. So it’s a dual purpose use and oddly enough because it’s shot, on a noisy floor I had a customer turn it over and rest the stand on top of it and it defeated the ambient noise coming from the floor. But interestingly enough – and this is true – I’ve had people tell me our mic stands sound better than any mic stand they’ve ever used, because it’s solid steel legs and with all the mechanisms in between, the sound is not transferred up into a non-shock mounted mic.

Ed: And there’s a lot of rubber connections there which helps as well.

Ryan:

Yes, exactly.

Ed: Yes, I wouldn’t want to put an elephant on top there, but I imagine the vertical loading on this – what do you reckon the vertical loading …?

Ryan: It’s pretty good. My testing method is very high tech, I try to climb it like a pole!

Ed:

Just one example of the sturdy fittings.

Aaah, then spin on it in your leopard skin outfit?

Page 29

NZVN

Ross for Gencom We are at the Ross stand for Gencom with Giles Coverdale from Gencom and Amanda Leighton and Stuart Russell from Ross.

Ed: There is a lot to talk about, because Ross is continuing its rise in our industry and producing more and better products, so what’s leading the charge Amanda, would it be Graphite?

Amanda: Absolutely. Graphite is our smart production “all in one” box, so it’s taking our really well-known, trusted and proven technology of Carbonite and XPression and XPression Clips and popping it all into one box along with a new audio mixer that we have built internally as well.

The unique feature about Graphite, which is very different to any other "all in one solution", is that the switcher is actually on a PCIe card which means that, if you ever have to reboot your Windows box for any reason, your switcher still operates, which is fabulous for redundancy and reliability.

Ed: Is this a product only for the big broadcasters, or is this something that really is across the board?

Amanda: It could go everywhere from corporate, flyaway packs, houses of worship, education facilities to small studios in broadcasters, because it’s a 2 ME Carbonite switcher, it’s an XPression Prime, it’s 2 channels of XPression Clips plus a record channel, and it’s 29 channels of audio. So it’s a really, really full featured box in a 4U chassis.

Giles: As David Ross said in the Keynote conference address, he fully anticipates seeing Graphite being deployed in both smaller operations and major News networks alike.

Ed: If you have a Carbonite system are you able to upgrade to Graphite?

Amanda: Well it’s all in one box, so it’s different hardware.

Whereas the Carbonite has its separate frame with I/O in a separate panel, Graphite is in an XPression chassis with Carbonite put on just the PCIe card. So it’s really unique, really powerful and cost effective as well.

Amanda and Giles at Ross.

which is the proprietary software that’s embedded in the camera that allows you to produce some fantastic looking keys when you’re operating in a green screen environment. I think customers have tended to pick up on that and have been inclined to buy the camera specifically for green screen applications.

We’ve certainly sold a few into traditional studios but it handles keying so much better than anything else that’s out there, so the bulk of the sales have been into virtual studio environments Ed: Has it won an award recently?

Stuart: It won an award last year actually at the SATIS Show in Paris – we got the award for the Most Innovative Product and I just found out this morning that we’ve been shortlisted as a finalist for the TVB awards, again in that Innovation category, so it’s doing pretty well and we’re very proud of it.

Ed: And also in that area of green screen robotics, there have been further developments?

Amanda: Yesterday we announced about 20 new developments across all of our product ranges … I’ll keep it short. So we have 2 in that space – one, we have Frontier which is our hyper-realistic graphics rendering solution.

It’s based on video gaming technology so we can really get super realistic virtual sets environments and they’re really amazing. You’ve

Ed: Now last year I was particularly impressed by your camera, specifically for green screen operation, the ACID. How’s that been developed?

Stuart: It’s been a very good seller. When we launched ACID we positioned it as a very good standalone studio camera, so you can use it in a traditional studio environment because it performs very well.

It has excellent signal to noise ratio, it’s competitively priced and the spec’s, if you look at it against a competing camera at the same sort of price point, I think it stands up very, very well.

Ed: So in other words, it doesn’t have to be green screen alone, it is a perfect ordinary studio camera?

Stuart: Correct, but I think we are very conscious of the fact that the magic is in the Ultrachrome HR Page 30

really got to see it to believe what kind of quality we can get from it.

Also, we launched our new Furio SE dolly which has a beautiful new carbon fibre body It’s got 21% higher reach – 2.2 metres high now, so you can get some amazing shots that you couldn’t get before.

There have been multiple redesign features to make it easier for support and maintenance.

It’s faster, stronger, it’s really impressive and it looks really good. It’s beautiful, made out of carbon fibre now, so really strong.

Ed: Now Giles, what have Ross produced that is going to be on your list of top promotions for our New Zealand market?

Giles: I think the popularity of Ross live production switchers and the Carbonite range is going to continue to grow.

There have been new developments this year and the product just keeps getting better. Now we have a free software upgrade for Carbonite Black that dramatically improves its UHD switching and media store capabilities, and a brand new Carbonite Black frame that includes 12G SDI inputs and outputs for single link UHD connectivity.

The entry-level Carbonite Black Solo also has an exciting new upgrade with the addition of a media

Stuart with robots.

player built into the frame, allowing H.264 video to be played directly via its USB port. There really is no other switcher on the market at this price that packs as much power as the Ross Carbonite.

Ed: Stuart, of course one of the Ross products that impressed me many, many years ago, was OpenGear and this just continues to grow?

Page 31

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Stuart: Yes, we’ve got over 90 partners now and we won an Emmy for OpenGear as a platform last year.

It has become a de facto standard in the industry and sometimes, when people ask me about the ethos of Ross as a company, I think OpenGear really typifies the way that we do things. We are very happy to cooperate with competing brands where we can if it’s going to be in the customers’ best interests. OpenGear really came about because David and John Ross looked at the market and said “there’s so much confusion here, what we need is an open standard” and they were the first guys to put that together and I think the number of partners testifies that it’s successful and customers like that security and simplicity that it offers.

We’ve also just launched a new card, a Raptor, which is our kind of halo IP card product, so again we’re quite optimistic about how that’s going to go.

Ed: And really, to simplify it, if you haven’t heard of OpenGear, it’s basically a rack and you can pop any number of cards in to that to do a whole range of functions.

Stuart: Again, it’s that whole thing of us being agnostic … you know we don’t mind, if you want to use one of our cards, great, but there may be applications where we don’t make a card and Blackmagic make a card that you want to use, that’s entirely up to you. We really don’t mind – it’s just trying to do things that are in the customers’ best interests and make their lives easier and give them the security that they can mix and match as per the application.

Amanda: It’s not only the frame, it’s the control system too.

So from an engineering perspective, having multiple different vendors going to the same frame, not only does it save you space, but it puts it all under one interface for the engineering department to control all of them, which makes things so much easier and simpler for them when they need to troubleshoot or replace or upgrade.

Ed: Because they have to be certified to work with the OpenGear system?

Amanda: Absolutely, yes.

Ed: And now Stuart’s having another tuppence worth.

Stuart: While we’re here round the table, I thought it was just worth highlighting a point that Giles actually made earlier on. We had a Keynote event last night and David Ross made the point that we’ve had 25 years of consecutive growth, and your opening gambit was that we’re growing and we’re definitely a company on the move. I think that 25 years of consecutive growth is a fairly significant statistic. It shows that in some parts of the world, Europe for me and Australia-New Zealand for you guys, we maybe haven’t always been as well known a brand as we would like, but I think the direction of travel is very positive. We had over 900 people at the event last night, we had a lot of good stuff to talk about, 20 plus developments as Amanda said earlier on. We’re doing pretty well and we’re very lucky to enjoy the success that we’ve been having, and that 25 years is a nice round number.

Ed: 25 years of growth – fantastic, and I guess most of that is in the broadcast market. The broadcast market itself is shrinking because of the rise of various internet delivery mechanisms, is Ross really concentrated on broadcast, or do you cross over?

Stuart: Well I think there are a couple of points here – 25 years of growth that’s been self-funded which I think in itself is quite a remarkable achievement.

In terms of broadcast and the overall size of the pie, I think we’ve seen a lot of production companies spring up that are streaming; we’ve seen a lot of growth in the sports market; we’ve also seen a lot of private corporate organisations that are producing content for their own staff internally or for different sites, different offices, or just content for customers and partners.

Accenture is a very good example; they are a large consultancy firm around the world with multiple offices, and they wanted a broadcast quality studio in one of their head offices so they could produce internal content for staff. So would you define that as being traditional broadcast? Maybe not. eSports is another classic example … you wouldn’t necessarily think of those guys as being traditional broadcasters, but we’re doing a lot with all of these people that I’ve just mentioned.

We’re still servicing our core broadcast market – the BBC, ABC and national level broadcasters of the world – but that market is obviously changing and I think we’re being flexible with the products that we’re bringing out, Graphite being a great case in point. We’re trying to respond to the needs of these different kinds of customers with products that will still allow them to do what they want to do, because their challenges are actually not really any different to the top level broadcasters, many of whom are finding their CapEx and their Opex budgets are being squeezed. They’re under pressure to produce more creative content and not spend as much money doing it.

Ed: And I’m sure the ACID camera, in the space of augmented reality, has got to be the way to go?

Stuart: Yes I think so. For me it’s not even just about the cameras, it’s about us providing a range of solutions for different levels of broadcaster or content producers – that’s maybe a better way of referring to it – that allows them to, like you said, be more creative, futureproof from a technology standpoint, but also not have to spend as much money.

Consider it like a triangle – there are the 3 points which represent the creative, the business, and the technology challenges faced, and I think regardless of the size of the content producer, we’re helping these people on those 3 core areas. I think that’s the thing we have to focus on.

NZVN Ed: It’s a winner.

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AWS Elemental for Gencom We are here at AWS Elemental ( the “AWS” I believe stands for Amazon Web Services ) and we’re talking with Andrew Thornton.

Ed: W e have known Elemental for a number of years, but now you are AWS Elemental. Is this a significant change?

Andrew: We look at it more as an intensification in our collaboration.

For example, at the 2017 NAB Show, we launched new branding, making it clear that Elemental is now a core part of the AWS business.

As part of AWS, we’re part of a large team working to help customers solve their most difficult challenges as they transition to cloudbased video workflows. We’re finding a number of areas where coupling our solutions more tightly is making it easier and faster for customers to gain access to the elasticity and scalability of the cloud. At the same time, we continue to support core on-premises video solutions for customers so that they can make a stepwise transition to the cloud when they are ready.

Ed: What kind of traction have customers following the acquisition?

Andrew: examples:

you

seen

with

Customers are reacting positively. Current

Astro: Astro implemented AWS Elemental softwarebased video solutions in the cloud to power its Astro on the Go workflow, which consists of more than 6,000 hours of VOD content and 34 live linear channels. Benefit: fast turnaround of thousands of hours of VOD content transcode and expanded delivery to more devices.

Cinépolis: The Cinépolis KLIC transactional video ondemand (TVOD) service uses an integrated AWS and AWS Elemental solution to create a platform for movie delivery to customers on connected devices across Latin America. Cinépolis is realising means to monetise content rights beyond theatre and concession sales while minimising data centre build out.

Frontier: Frontier Communications is using AWS Elemental video processing for its Vantage TV by Frontier™ live and on-demand video services. AWS Elemental unified headends support video processing in local markets and national channel video processing at Frontier’s super headend, as well as Frontier TV support of streaming content to consumers’ connected devices. VOD assets that require dynamic scaling are transcoded using AWS Elemental Cloud. The AWS Elemental Delta video delivery platform supports just-in-time packaging and just-in-time digital rights management for the Frontier TV Everywhere app.

NASA: Together with Amazon Web Services and AWS Elemental, NASA streamed the first-ever live 4K video from space.

The US Space Agency is leveraging advanced video software and cloudenabled workflows to enhance its ability to observe,

Andrew for AWS Elemental.

uncover and adapt new knowledge of orbital and deep space. The live feed from 250 miles above Earth was encoded using AWS Elemental video processing software on board the International Space Station (ISS) and on the ground at Johnson Space Center for delivery by AWS in the cloud to multiscreen devices.

Ed: With that range of offerings, do you have solutions for smaller broadcasters or corporates who want to deliver media, as well as for major broadcasters?

Andrew: Definitely. We are seeing the industry start to transition over-the-top (OTT) production to the cloud, and with that comes substantially less capital investment to get into content delivery. You spin up what resources you require, test the service and, if it does not find an audience or if you do not need it later, you run it down again. You only pay for the resources you use. The important point, though, is that anyone can have the same quality that the world’s biggest broadcasters demand. The codecs and workflows are the same whether it is on-premises, in the cloud or a hybrid of the two.

Ed: What about new formats like HDR and 4k?

Andrew: Customers around the world have turned to AWS Elemental to power multiple 4K commercial services such as those launched by BT, DirecTV, Globosat, Sky UK and Tata Sky. Dozens of other customers, such as the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), are following suit.

Proven, scalable software-based video solutions from AWS Elemental enable media leaders to maintain operational efficiency while assuring the highest quality 4K viewing experience for viewers and to provide them a unified experience for UHD along with other services across multiple delivery platforms.

The 4K viewing experience can be further enhanced with high dynamic range (HDR), given its ability to provide richer, more vibrant content by expanding the range between the brightest and darkest pixels. The difference in images is very noticeable and may well be the catalyst for accelerating 4K UHD. Multiple proprietary and standardised HDR solutions are in the market today. With AWS Elemental solutions, customers don’t have to make a full commitment to any

Page 35

one standard, or any combination of technologies, in order to generate a return on their video infrastructure investment. It can evolve as the industry and their requirements evolve.

AWS Elemental has implementations for the major solutions including: Dolby Vision, HDR 10, Technicolor HDR, and the Hybrid Log-Gamma.

A consistent comment from media companies is that Elemental delivers great picture quality at a good bandwidth.

We talk about VQ, for video quality. What VQ actually means, essentially, is “how low can I move my bandwidth and still have acceptable viewing experience?”

What we have been doing at AWS Elemental over the past 18 months or so has been a very big push on compression efficiency and human perception optimisation. Our aim is to get the picture quality as high as possible, because we know that for many of our users, bitrate is a real issue.

Ed: Is this predominantly an OTT issue?

monetisation. This is a challenge of scale, to make every stream completely customised, and you only get that scale from the cloud. Whether one consumer is watching a live stream or 10,000, the cloud allows you to scale up to create an individually tailored package for every individual stream – nothing else can do that.

Consumers expect to be able to see the content they want, when and where they want it, using the device which is most convenient for them at the time. Content owners and broadcasters want to earn a fair return for providing it.

Monetising the services calls for new revenue models, which need processing and tailoring way beyond anything that could have been envisaged just a few years ago. The cloud provides a solution that can meet these new requirements, and Elemental as NZVN part of AWS is ideally placed to lead the industry.

Andrew: VQ is related to the codec, and whether you use that codec for OTT or for broadcast it makes no difference. Many people think of us as OTT experts, and of course we are, but we also supply delivery platforms for terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcasting.

We are increasingly seeing media companies looking for unified headends, with all the outputs coming from the same rack – or same cloud implementation – bringing up quality across all platforms.

But VQ for OTT is becoming very important. It is part of the positioning of OTT for traditional broadcasters. It was the secondary delivery platform; now for many it is becoming equal, or maybe even more important than broadcast.

So however they were measuring their standards for traditional broadcast – customer satisfaction, video quality, reliability, whatever you want to measure – those same parameters are now being applied to OTT. And significant investment is going into OTT as a result.

Ed: Does the shift to OTT bring us back to the AWS integration?

Andrew: We are seeing a huge shift to OTT globally.

The challenge is to provide the encoding, packaging and delivery to multiple devices. AWS has the resources to do this. It not only gives users the flexibility to store, process, encode and package in the cloud, but AWS also offers the content delivery network: CloudFront. So there is a single point of service all the way to distribution right to the consumers’ devices. The next step then is looking at advertising insertion for direct

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ARRI Cameras We’re here at the ARRI stand looking at cameras with Sean Dooley.

Ed: Now Sean, all the notifications that I’ve been getting about ARRI cameras are WiFi or some sort of “over the air” – wireless is the word?

Sean: The ALEXA SXT W is brand new for this show. It’s an upgrade to the ALEXA SXT so it’s now the third hardware update for the camera. There are now five antennas on the camera, so you have two for wireless video, two for WiFi and one for the lens control system that’s been around for a while.

Ed: Now when you say “wireless video”, this is just for monitoring, this is not transmitting the actual usable video is it?

Sean: Well it’s an uncompressed HD feed, so yes, if you wanted to record it, you certainly could … we don’t expect many people to do that, it’s more for a monitoring situation. With the integrated wireless in the SXT W, you can connect up to four receivers and we’ve also made a transmitter module which you could use with any ARRI camera, or anyone’s camera, and also connect four receivers to that. It’s an incredibly simple system, it’s dustproof, it’s splash-proof, it’s in an all aluminium housing, there is one button to pair the cameras, there are no menus, there’s no interfacing with a PC or a Mac. The whole idea was to keep this as simple as possible.

It uses a dynamic frequency adjustment where the transmitter and the receiver all talk to each other and then they will be continually searching for better areas of available spectrum which have less interference to move into, and they will seamlessly move together with however many receivers are paired to the transmitter.

You can run six transmitters or six cameras with four receivers each and have no interference problems whatsoever at a range of up to 600 metres.

Sean with a full ARRI kit.

seen probably the first ARRI cameras being used in anger on the drones and our service technicians are finding all sorts of wonderful ways people have put our cameras to creative good use, and interesting ways they’ve been broken and retrieved – never seen before, but it’s always nice to have a new challenge in the office.

Ed:

And some excellent crash footage?

Sean: Ed:

Aaah yes, lots of spinning …

And crying?

Sean: Well salties infested waters was one of the first accidents we had.

Ed:

I guess it’s still there?

Sean: There was a man with a shotgun and some brave soul went fishing …

Ed: Wow, 600 metre, that’s pretty good. So you’re recommending these for drone use?

Sean: Absolutely, the transmitter’s quite a small unit, but obviously with the SXT W, it’s a big heavy 9 and a bit kilo camera, so you’re going to need a pretty big drone for that one, but sure, why not.

Ed:

And you could sell more that way?

Sean: Yes, it’s interesting.

The first year with the ALEXA Mini, we’ve

Wireless receiver and transmitter.

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Ed: Now a little bit more about the receiver for this beast?

motors with master grips so you don’t need to use an external lens motor.

Sean: We’re the only manufacturer of a wireless receiver which can be powered with anything from 10.5 -34V, so a great feature for rental houses that may not have control over what people plug accessories into. It also has a power output, so you can power the monitor through the receiver and only have one battery plate and one cable. The whole idea with this is to keep it as small and as simple as possible, and that’s what we’ve done. You can see the single button here, a simple status LED, on-off switch – that’s all there is to it.

There’s a whole bunch of viewfinder improvements including a 1.3x Anamorphic desqueeze mode and support for a simplified Chinese UI. We’ve implemented a WiFi mode so you can connect more than one camera to an existing WiFi network and control all camera functions over the internet. It’s quite a feature packed update.

Ed: Now we’ve mentioned this numerous times before, but I still like to repeat it … ARRI, unlike other camera manufacturers, doesn’t come out with a new model every now and again that supersedes everything else, they just come out with firmware updates and this again is true for the ALEXA Mini and the AMIRA this year?

Sean: Correct. Both cameras will be moving to software update 5 from June. We have a bunch of new features – the main feature that we’re pushing with the AMIRA and Mini is support for Multicam. You will now be able to interface both cameras with a bunch of third party fibre adapters using control over Ethernet, which will interface with any Sony RCP in an OB van or television station – the same protocols that are currently used.

Ed: Now I guess the general question is, and we found this in the last issue with Rocket Rentals, where the ARRI Mini has become the camera to go to, but it seems as though ARRI ( certainly in New Zealand ) has been taken on by the rental agencies, but not the independent producers.

Do you find the same in Australia, or is the market different?

Sean: To be honest, the Mini for us in Australia is the camera that’s really kind of democratised ARRI in terms of ownership.

The ALEXA is still a very expensive camera, it’s still the workhorse on all big productions – Aquaman is just about to start shooting with ALEXA SXTs in Queensland, but the Mini has come down to a price point that owneroperators can justify the cost and then rent it to productions themselves.

It’s currently the No. 1 camera that’s used in TV drama production, it’s the No. 1 camera used in commercial production, so it’s a really attractive option for owneroperators to own and supply the camera on all the jobs that they’d be going onto anyway. There have been over 80 ALEXA Minis sold in the last 1½-almost 2 years, which is huge for us.

Obviously, in our region, Sony’s the dominant player, so it’s great that our cameras will work in existing scenarios, even up to 4k 60p transmission. Customers can buy an AMIRA, make great use of the beautiful qualities of our sensor, and continue to use the rest of Ed: And I guess that if somebody buys it for their own their production backbone as before. A second new particular use, in the downtime, it’s got wonderful rental feature is the introduction of the ARRI look library for all potential? our cameras; there are 87 “looks” in three intensities available as a cost effective license in SUP 5.0 which Sean: Yes, we see a lot of camera operators include film emulations and common grades such black leaving their camera with a rental house to be sub-hired and white, high and low contrast, colour tints etc. out when necessary. We can’t supply enough cameras These will work across different colour spaces to to meet demand at the moment and the rental market increase the support for HDR monitoring that we have feels the same way. It’s a great investment.

NZVN introduced into every ARRI camera.

As has been the case since the release of ALEXA, when you use a LUT in one of our cameras, even if you’re recording Log C, it’s noted and stored in the metadata of each file so that editing and grading software will automatically recognise it and apply it for you in post.

Hopefully these new looks allow Directors and DoPs to quickly and easily set the tone of the images they’re collaborating on.

In SUP 5.0 there’s more support for a bigger variety of Canon EF lenses and image stabilisation now works.

You can control the Lots of interest from the passersby. internal focus and iris Page 38

Accessorise with ARRI

Hot on the heels of the NAB and Broadcast Asia shows, we had a visit from a small ARRI team here in Auckland.

NZ Cinematographers hosted the event in late May ( if you are not on their invite list email New Zealand Cinematographers Society info@nzcine.com and ask to be notified of upcoming events ) where Sean Dooley from ARRI Australia and Philip Vischer from ARRI Munich gave a “show & tell” plus a “hands on” of some very new gear.

Sean led us off with a run through of the wireless developments for the ALEXA ( see Connex story P40 May as well as ARRI Cameras in this issue ) which you can get in full detail at http:// www.arri.com Sean also gave a brief run through of the developments with ARRI’s SkyPanel range explaining that the latest firmware upgrades give a whole new meaning to the term “clever light” ( see pp 54 & 55 May. ) Sean then introduced Philip Vischer, the accessories product manager for the whole range worldwide.

Philip emphasised that the mechanical accessory range for cameras is not just for ARRI. He showed us some of their developments for Sony, RED and the Canon C700 that ARRI had available even before the cameras themselves were released.

Key ARRI accessories include mounting brackets and rods, but of most interest are those involved with lens support such as matte boxes, filter holders and dioptre brackets.

Philip stressed the need for feedback from users so that they have a chance to continuously improve their products – hence this visit to Auckland.

For example, he had heard that users wanted to use dioptres in a clip-on matte box so ARRI came up with “dioptre frame” using standard 138mm or 4.5” dioptres which are made safe on set by including a tray catcher so the dioptre cannot drop out of the frame by accident.

The main presentation was about the new LMB 4x5 matte box which replaces at least 3 previous models.

Philip said that he counted 13 different matte boxes in the ARRI range when he took on the product accessory role and has made the effort to rationalise this over the years. The LMB stands for “Lightweight Matte Box” and the “4x5” name comes from the fact that it takes 4x5.65” filters – the most common size used around the world.

Key features of the LMB 4x5 are that it enables a camera crew to change from a very lightweight clip-on filter holder to a full production style matte box with tilt and rotating options within seconds. The LMB 4x5 is light but strong and folds down to a very small form factor for packing away. For those of you with the most popular LMB-25 matte box, there are upgrades available to turn the LMB-25 into a LMB 4x5. Philip gave many other examples of the flexibility of the ARRI matte box range which, if you missed his presentation, you can find out for yourself by going to http:// www.arri.com/camera/pro_camera_accessories or by contacting Sean at ARRI Australia.

NZVN

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Sean and Philip.