JULY 2017
Dedo Weigert Discusses Before you start writing in saying “Is this mag sponsored by Dedolight?” the answer is “no” but I do take the opportunity to talk with clever people and Dedo Weigert is one of the best, so we are here at the NAB stand of Dedolight with Mr Weigert himself, to continue our long discussion about the nature of light. I attended the morning’s presentation to the worldwide Dedolight dealer networks where I learnt further truths and came up with some questions that I would like Dedo himself to answer. Ed: Dedo, one of the first things you talked about was a way of ensuring that the light you were delivering was parallel, and you gave an example of an addition to your lights where you are using the double lens lights to produce a parallel beam. Later on in the presentation, you introduced a very large light which is producing parallel light to be used in a reflected sense. But then I thought, "hang on, way back in the early days, one of your very first lights was a 12 Volt light and it was parallel light" – you could adjust it to flood or parallel, and at that time, that was pretty much the only parallel light that was available for camera lighting. Parallel light is important? Dedo: No. Since we’ve started to find excellence in optical design of focusing lights, I was proud that our lights had a better focusing range and, also by our unique double non-spherical system, were able to do even light distribution, be it in the flood perfectly smooth and even, no hot spot, no hot shoulders, all the way to the extreme, the nearly parallel 4 degree beam that we call a “clean beam.” Now that was already quite remarkable because it allowed us to reach far away subjects at the end of the set without causing unwanted shadows and so on – precision light. Yes, that’s what we’ve always been about. But what we’re now talking about is an additional side branch of lighting practice that is not new. Reflected light has always been used in many different ways and for the application in drama productions, the Austrian cameraman Christian Berger, who was also a director and producer, developed a
Vol 237
system that he called CRLS ( Cine Reflect Lighting System ) and for this he used large, 70cm diameter, parallel beam projectors that you don’t focus – just the parallel beam, and if you were to try and focus it, you just muck up the beam, it’s not smooth enough anymore. Again, beam lights, searchlights have been around forever, mainly in the military. Mole Beam has very powerful 4K, 6K beam lights and they’ve also been used to reflect light. We have a mirror like reflector and you redirect the light to shoot the beam straight up outside a building and then have light reflectors to bring it inside to simulate sunlight entering. That’s not new. A major part of a film that I shot in Indonesia in the early 70’s was lit with reflected light because the houses that they have there, they often have roofs that go very deep down, because the inhabitants want to be in the shade. Fortunately, they live on kind of a platform that’s about one metre above ground, so that allowed me to place reflectors – actually I kind of borrowed table tops, because everybody has them, and I put broomsticks on them on a hinge to angle them and I put Rosco reflective material on them. I could make that straight with a hard reflector or crumple it a little to make a soft reflector, or a spotty reflector, and I
was kicking the sunlight inside the roof. On the inside of the roof I put other reflective material to bring it back into the room and I could have everything from gentle light to a little bit harder and more direct light. I lit the entire film that way. Ed: Would it be true to say that this technique has gone out of fashion – that you’re now bringing it back with this new light? Dedo:
No. It’s always been part of the practice.
Ed: But using a powered parallel source to produce the reflection? Dedo: Well you can reflect any kind of light, and it can have a particular beauty. Reflected light often has a much gentler, nicer character and if you colour the reflected surface – I did this in the early 70’s also. I had a particular kind of reflective material that had a nice sheen to it, not a hard reflection, and it had something between sand and tobacco colour that produced wonderful skin tones. Every photographer knows the golden reflectors, there’s no Playboy photo that’s done without golden reflectors. It gives nicer, warmer skin tones …
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Ed:
It makes things stand out?
Dedo: This was a gentle way produced by adding reflective surfaces – some people even used wood. Wood has a nice colour and it is not highly reflective – so reflected light has been around always. Christian Berger played with these parallel beam lights that don’t focus, but they concentrate the beam and it gives an incredible reach. Then you add a large, hard reflector like a mirror and I call that, not reflecting, I call it “redirecting” because we maintain, we keep the original character of the beam, we don’t want to widen it, we don’t want to split it, we just want to transport it. For one open house in Munich, I put one of my ParaBeam lights on the street, it was shining straight up in the full rain and above my office window on the 2nd floor, I put a 3 x 3ft reflector to redirect the light into the window, and there was the sun shining into my window on a rainy day – or even at night. But when you do that, at the same time, you create a virtual light source that is way up in the sky, and that light source is very far away, and therefore, your actors can move without the ill-effects of the inverse square law – you don’t have change of intensity because the actual or virtual light source is way, way out there. Then you can take this redirected beam – you don’t use it to light people, you take out of this beam with other reflectors that sometimes make it a little softer, or 2, 3, 4 other degrees of softness of spread of light, and you can then reflect and re-reflect and reflect a third time and thus, with one single big power light source, you can insert 3, 4 reflectors into the beam and split that again and light the person from 2 sides or including a back light, from one light source. Ed: Now we saw that today in a TV studio that was built by Dedolight? Dedo: Yes, but so far, Christian and his gaffer Jakob created the CRLS system – Cine Reflect Lighting System – and that has been used on some feature films, and it clears the set of all lighting paraphernalia, no stands, no light fixtures, just 2 reflectors and they’re mounted out of the way and give the actor the feeling of “I’m not hindered and disturbed by so much paraphernalia around.” Also, there’s a beautiful aspect to it … with the reflectors you can create something that Christian used to call “zoning” – creating different layers of depth by creating different light zones. That’s also again not new; you could see that in the old black and white films that James Wong Howe was shooting or the classic guys, creating a sense of depth, space, because most of the cameras that we use have one eye. With a one-eyed camera, you create two-dimensional images. So to create the illusion of a three-dimensional world is part of the art of making interesting images. These are large light fixtures – 2½-3 feet in diameter, they produce a parallel beam and they’re pretty big, pretty hefty in size that, although they only use 1200 Watt, they produce like 120,000 LUX ( approx. 110.000 fc ) at 5-6 metre distance, so people tend to be impressed by the actual light output. Page 4
Ed: Yes, we might put a diagram in here showing the difference between a point source and a parallel source, how the inverse square law works on that? https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-qmmsTWfvI Dedo: Now it is true that we’ve always built focusing lights and we were very proud that, in the spot position, we have a very narrow clean beam of 4 degrees. Then we developed extra optics that we can put in front of the light and look, there we have 4 degrees, so what’s the use? Before we had 4 degrees, now we have 4 degrees, but these special optics make the beam cleaner, a little bit more concentrated and the amazing thing is, all of a sudden, we’ve doubled the light output. How come? How can you, from a 575 Watt HMI light, having put a piece of glass in front get double the light? Why – because these optics work in the flood position of the light, so we’re not making more light, we’re just not losing as much light as we would do when we go to the original spot position. Dedolights were losing less light, they’re 3-4 times more efficient than any studio Fresnel light, but this adds, again, double the light output. Then we also designed, calculated, similar optics for some of our new LED lights – the focusing LED lights, and on the monocolour LED lights, on some of those we have 3 times the light output when we add these extra optics. On the bicolour which has a larger light source – we may only add 7080%, but it’s amazing, I had not expected this. I am a dinosaur and I’ve thought about lights for a long time, but we’re still learning every day. So then we take these additional lights as augmenting the big lights on feature film sets, to create this extra feeling of depth and so on. But now comes the other level – in the meantime, from my own developments here, we have our own name for it – we call it Dedolight Light Stream®, and what we talked about so far is “Light Stream Drama”. Now comes the other application that I believe is totally new, “Light Stream TV”. In TV studios, you have either an abundance of soft lights or an abundance of focusing lights or both, and we’ve just built 3 studios that are mainly lit with reflected light and that’s incredible. We use a 40 Watt LED light with these little parallel beam optics. We point it at a reflector that’s 4 to 5 metres away. This reflector redirects the light at another larger reflector that spreads the light softer/gentler and from this one, we then have a larger area from which we reflect. The result is what is perceived as much gentler, more pleasant than any of the multi-LED panel lights, and also we’re not losing that much light. So when we kick it into a reflector that redirects the light, and into another reflector that softens the light, again at a distance of 3 metres or so,
we wind up with 900 LUX ( approx. 800 fc ) on the person/talent from one light. Ed: Because it’s parallel all the way? Dedo: No … Ed: Well mainly parallel? Dedo: We cannot keep it parallel because then the area of light emission would be too small. Somewhere we have to spread it, but we have a much higher degree of efficiency, we don’t lose as much light as we would do with a soft box or any kind of big diffuser or butterfly. And it is directional light, but coming from a larger surface, and that’s what we’ve been missing. In the old days, in the very beginning of movie lighting, you were cooking people with 10K lights, and a 10K light was not big enough for direct light and still have a little bit of a gentler transition between light and shadow, so we had the big eye 10 – a 10 kilowatt light with a specially large front lens that was larger than the size of human shoulders, so like 2-2½ feet. So with the reflectors, we can create that size again, have directional light, but gentle light that is not perceived as aggressive and, in the effect on the human face, you have a gentler transition between light and shadow. Ed: What I also like about it is that it’s infinitely variable – that you can introduce reflectors, soft reflectors, there can be colours, anything you like at any part of that beam and therefore change the effect for different camera angles? Dedo: The easier and somewhat surprising effect is when you insert the reflector into the beam and take it out, this is kind of an optomechanical dimming, because you determine how much light do you take out of the parallel beam? How much light do you leave for the other reflectors or to go uselessly onto the ceiling? So you can dim and you can change the character of the reflected light by the surface of the reflector. We have the zero reflector – that’s the mirror, and I call that, in my vocabulary, “redirecting” the light; but then we need to spread the light to some extent and we have reflectors Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 and the 4 is just very, very gentle but still more directional and different character. Now comes again the virtual light source … when we have a mirror light reflector, the mirror is not the light source, but we have a virtual light source way behind the mirror, a long distance away. And the parallel light, the light fixture is not the light source. The effect on the square law is that you have a virtual light source way behind the actual light fixture, so creating a bigger distance from which the light comes, even in a small
Page 6
defined place, you have the effect as if the light was outdoors, outside, and that makes it very different for the movement of people and the feeling of it and the character of it. THE DEFINITION OF A SOFT LIGHT … Dedo: The definition of a soft light is "how large is the area of light emission in relationship to the distance to the object being lit." If you have a small Fresnel light and you point it at a person and that person now steps back, double the distance, quarter of the light, that's the inverse square law. When you have a larger area, the square law is not that active anymore. When you have, let’s say, my big soft lights with 7 foot diameter, then the square law bites you in the ass only when you’re at a distance that’s 2½-3 times further away than the diameter of the light source. So the relationship between the diameter of the light source and the distance to the object is defining the degrees of softness, like the sun is a pretty large light source – 1.4 million kilometres in diameter, but it makes a hard shadow because it’s far away. So any soft light at a big distance becomes a hard light, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a soft light or a reflective surface, it’s just the angle of exit that changes, but the effect on the square law is similar, like a white wall or a Styrofoam board becomes a light source, but with a harder reflector, that surface is not your light source. We’ve created a virtual light source way behind the reflector way away – and thus you cheat the square law. Ed: We’re rewriting physics here. Now to get a better understanding of this, we’re going to give you a connection to a YouTube site ... https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-qmmsTWfvI where
there are a number of videos where lighting has been used in a clever way and hopefully you’ll get an understanding of how to use parallel light and reflect it yourself, because this is something that anybody can do with a Fresnel lamp … they’re not going to get the 4 degrees necessarily, but they’re going to get something close to it and by experimenting with reflected light, you’re going to get lots of effects that perhaps you’d never thought that you could have got. However, if you really want to do it properly, was I right in thinking that the DLED10 with those 2 lenses – that’s the one that comes … now you’ve got a special kit that makes it that really good parallel source? Dedo: To all of our focusing lights we can add the parallel beam attachment and with some of them, it gives us 3 times the light output; with others 2 times and with the bicolour LEDs, with some of them, it only adds about 70% to the light output. You can’t make more light than you have, but the effect is that you lose less light because the light fixture is in the flood position, so it’s very close to the front lens and the parallel beam is very clean. The trick to it is that it has to be homogenous. If it’s not homogenous, has hot spots or unevenness, then you’re not going to do very well with the reflected light This is something that we can do; you cannot add our parallel beam attachments to any other Fresnel light, because we have lights with double non-spherical optics. Some people have never understood this, some people mean well and they say “I have an idea for you, why don’t you throw away all these crazy optics and use a Fresnel and you’ll have an ARRI light and you’ll be famous?” We’re very proud of what we’ve achieved and that we have, from our optical system, 3 times the
Page 8
efficiency that you have with any Fresnel sometimes gets lost, because all people see is a small light and they can’t believe why it outperforms other lights. Ed: Now I do remember another point in the presentation where you discussed “ray tracing” and, to understand the optics in a new system, one needs to know where the light is going and how it is behaving on its way, and so drawing ray tracing diagrams was one way of doing it. But what you’re saying is that, these days there’s a much better option doing photon tracing. How do you manage that? Dedo: It is just incredibly complex software that happens to be incredibly expensive and every year you’re asked whether you want the upgrade and you don’t know what’s coming, so you pay a lot of money and you never know “does it really help me any further?” So with the new, very complex software we can do about 10 million rays in a few minutes, and we print out a map showing where the rays go. Ed:
But it also tells you the intensity?
Dedo: It’s not real ray tracing in the old sense, but for each ray, we calculate how much light is transported on this ray, and that’s why it’s called “photon tracing” and the next thing is that we can even predict what colour. So we see colour aberrations appearing on the map and that helps us to simulate … it’s not software where you just put in an idea and it designs a light for you, but the simulation helps to eliminate a lot of the not so good versions. Then finally, you arrive at something where you can say from the results the computer system gives us, "we think we should build this" and from that, we design the
individual optical elements, and then tools have to be made and the optical elements have to be made and then you put them together and you just hope that it will be what the simulation showed you. Ed: Can you put in the chemical nature of the glass that you’re using – is that a function? Dedo: Yes yes yes. The refractive index of the glasses is part of the system, but the main difficulty is in defining your light source, because you can’t just take that from your Osram or Philips catalogue, that will give you completely erroneous results. So we have to learn to redefine the light source and then we calculate again, go back and forth and we’ve done that for 30 years now, so we’re coming a little bit closer to understanding how to define a light source. An HMI light is not the arc gap that you read from the catalogue, because the actual light source is much different – different shape and different size from the arc gap between the electrodes. Ed: How can you see an arc gap? Dedo: Well first, you use kind of welding glass to look right into it. Ed: But surely it’s moving? Dedo: There are all kinds of crazy things that happen and that’s why it’s beneficial that we’re high speed video specialists and that we have experience to shoot the behaviour of an arc and how it dances and how it moves and that often is mistaken. People say it flickers but it’s not flickering, the arc is just simply moving and, for most people, it’s very difficult to make an analysis of the difference of what is arc wander versus flicker. Then we develop arc stabilisation
Page 9
electronics and they work on this lamp at this frequency, but not on the next lamp, and as the lamp gets older, it changes and you have to readjust and we can’t ask anybody to do that so theoretically, you can improve, but you can’t eliminate strange effects from discharge lights. Ed: Okay, so that’s where having a stable light source such as an LED makes life a lot easier? Dedo: To some extent. On the traditional short arc Xeon for example, like it is still used in many movie houses, you have a very small light source, but it’s powerful. Ed: How short are you talking? Dedo: Like 4 or 5mm is the arc gap – the light source is bigger, because it envelopes the electrodes. It has a brighter point along this electrode and, when you change the polarity, the brightness moves from one electrode to the other. So that’s why sometimes you get a high frequency disturbance. On the LED, you can’t have endless high power from the smallest light source. A 500 Watt LED is much bigger than a fried egg. You can have a 250 Watt LED that’s the size of the egg yolk on your breakfast plate, but a 500 Watt is the size of a coffee cup and that doesn’t focus as well as a point light source. Ed: Okay, my last question here – light source, yes, we’re talking about lumen maintenance, how long will it last and it occurs to me that, in the old days, with the light source as a bulb, the bulb would wear out, it might break, it might just die, you replace it and pretty much, you’ve got a new fixture, you’re reborn. Now with LEDs, this is not the case. You have a large array, one or two of your LEDs die, you can’t really replace them? Dedo: Well on the internet, you read wonderful fairy tales and theoretically that’s all true and it can be proven that it’s true. It’s possible that an LED may live 50,000 hours. In the internet, you read about 100,000 hours, but the beastly enemy of the LED is heat. When a halogen lamp is operated at 2927 centigrade, that some people call 3200 Kelvin, it’s in its element, it’s happy, it’s dancing. But when an LED gets up to 85 centigrade, it’s in grave danger to lose output and colour and all of anything that it has to offer. When it comes to 100 degrees, it’s dead. People assume LEDs make no heat. In a halogen lamp, 90% of the energy’s turned into heat; LED about 85% of the energy is turned into heat, so how come this fairy tale “there’s no heat” – because there is no forward heat coming out of the instrument. But on the LED itself it gets hellishly hot and you’ve got to manage that heat and you can’t just have cooling surfaces, that’s not good enough. So then you go to try new cooling technologies, like membranes vibrating with synchronised valves. Nice, works, but too noisy. Then you have heat pipes that have liquid that circulates and drags the heat away. Then you’ve got more complex systems and the heat
transfer from the LED itself onto the receiving surface. The best would be if you use a diamond. Ed: But you want to keep it at about 65 degrees don’t you, you don’t want it to be too cold? Dedo: No, too cold doesn’t matter. The colder it is, the longer it will live. So if you keep it at a low temperature, it can actually reach a very long lifetime, but at the same time, you’re trying to push out as much light as possible, so if you drive it at 100%, LEDs will suffer, they will lose lifetime, they will lose output, they will lose colour, the phosphor layers age. That’s why people sometimes use remote phosphor, because the phosphor layer’s further away from the hot blue pump that drives it, and that should give a longer lifetime. But in the remote phosphor, you can’t have bicolour, and bicolour is the beautiful thing for mobile lighting, you can just turn a button and you have any colour temperature you like. So it’s which religion is better and … Ed: So are you finding some of your early LED fixtures beginning to fail or is it still early days? Dedo: No, if you have a multi-LED panel light for example … you drive it at full blast, 100% in a home shopping TV channel where they run 24 hours a day, you may find a serious degradation after 2-2½ years. It will have much lower light output, it will change colour temperature. If you drive the same light at about 80% of the full output, it will live double the time, because the temperature is lower. So we talk about lumen maintenance and there’s the term of LM-80 – how many years, how many hours does it take until you’ve lost 20% and that depends on the operating temperature and on the length of use. If in mobile use, you shoot an interview and another one in the afternoon, and the interview’s an hour, you may enjoy your lights for 10 years and not have any degradation. But if you drive it at full, so you reach full temperature and you keep it at that all day long, and it’s under the ceiling it may just be a few degree warmer there anyhow, then after 2-2½ years you may encounter a loss of light output, or even total failure, depending on the cooling system. And that’s where the operating temperature of the LED determines its life expectancy. In practical life, when people try to build light fixtures that perform at maximum, you have the risk of early failure if you use it at 100% continuously. Ed: So cameramen in Norway would probably have their lights last longer than in Abu Dhabi? Dedo: The ambient temperature does play an important role, but the cooling system on one of our new lights involves some liquid in the heat pipes, and my engineer puts in antifreeze so it won’t stop operating when you’re in below freezing temperatures. Ed: Probably safer than liquid sodium. Dedo: Laughs.
Page 11
NZVN
Just a last gasp from NAB 2017
of a couple of presentations that caught my interest. Do
have a look at their websites as there is a lot more detail that I couldn’t capture with these few words.
Telescope In the "interesting" category, I found Telescope with Jason George and he’s from England. Ed: Now Facebook?
Jason,
this
is
something
to
do
with
Jason: Well we do a few things, but the main product we’re talking about here is Light Studio, which is a software platform that enables you to connect professionally produced video into Facebook Live and stream into your Facebook pages. Ed: So you don’t need any special gadgets – you can use your own computer and plug this in and away you go? Jason: You can use your phone if you want to or, if you’ve got any camera from a GoPro up to a full highend camera, you can connect that in to stream through a streaming server into Facebook. The software offers a few things … one is that there’s a social component to it, so how do I use stuff like Facebook to drive discovery, how do people find my content, you can schedule content, you can tag things in it that enable it to be discovered more easily. Once you’re going to go live, you can preview and check audio levels and check video and then when I go out live, I can stream video and add graphics, as you would want to do with any sort of TV production if you like, so graphics, animations, I can pull in content from the users and actually feature that content within the broadcast, and after the broadcast’s finished I can go back and retarget any of the people who have been to my broadcast, you know with a message back into their newsfeed. So it’s really like a studio kind of in your pocket. It’s obviously a lot lower cost than most of the studios out there. Ed:
And a lot less hardware?
Jason: A lot less hardware, exactly. Really you need a very small piece of kit – the vast majority of the work is done in the Cloud – to actually manage the sort of streams if you like. It’s just a web based UI so you could be accessing that from anywhere. Ed: Well this really does make the independent producer fully featured? Jason: That’s right – I mean it’s interesting, our business traditionally has been really a lot around creators and producers. We ended up in the US because we worked a lot with Fremantle and they asked us to come across and do the voting on American Idol for 3 months back in 2002, so we’re very lucky. From that, we obviously work a lot with producers and you can kind of see their eyes start to light up when they realise okay, I’ve got this kind of fan base through things like social platforms on my own website – now I can start to reach them with rich content and I can monetise that content.
Obviously it doesn’t mean that broadcast and cable’s going to go away, but I think it just becomes one part of that and they don’t have to rely on antiquated systems that are managed by a third party broadcaster anymore. So it’s part of that, yes, that democratisation of content creation and distribution. Ed: Well you’ve got the American words – monetise, democratisation …? Jason: Ed:
I’ve been here too long.
How are people able to get hold of this product?
Jason: Well they can talk to us, but I mean it’s a download, like a simple kind of download that enables you to manage … Ed:
So you’re on the web at?
Jason: Ed:
www.telescope.tv
And your head office is in Tuvalu is it?
Jason: isn’t it?
It is Tuvalu – it’s one of the Pacific Islands
Ed: Perhaps you should go there, after you lose the rugby? Jason: I’d love to go there – and we’ll see about the rugby, we’ll see. NZVN
Page 12
V-Nova On the "this just took my fancy" topic, we are at V-Nova and we have Guido Meardi. Ed: Guido, the product that you’re offering here is – well it’s something special? Guido: Yes, absolutely. We created a next generation codec format that has the peculiarity that it is compatible with existing hardware, due to the fact that it is incredibly fast, and it leverages hardware acceleration already existing in the ecosystem PERSEUS. Here at NAB, we are presenting the new edition PERSEUS 2. This is able to deliver next generation compression using existing hardware and, at the same time, reducing the footprint, the encoding costs and being compatible with all existing devices. Ed: Now the beauty of this, unlike some others, is that this is a plug-in so you can purchase PERSEUS 2 and incorporate it in your workflow, because it is an MXF compatible product? Guido: Absolutely. We are very strong on making sure that we touch the elementary stream of the codec, but we don’t touch the encapsulation, so we are very compliant with existing standards like MXF for nonlinear editing, all transfer streams and MPEG encapsulation for normal live transport. This essentially allows PERSEUS to be completely transparent to the whole ecosystem, whether it is encryption or editing or CDNs or packaging CMS, etc. This is extremely simple to use because, as you said, it just requires a simple upgrade of whatever software and whatever devices people are using and then off you go, you can start using PERSEUS. Ed: So this is not a production tool, this is a delivery tool, but certainly, if you are streaming anything or you’re a small broadcaster, this is something that saves you bandwidth but maintains quality? Guido: Also for a large broadcaster because, in Europe, we are deployed with Sky right now in their production environments and contribution. So you know, as a mezzanine format, we are also doing a lot of work in remote productions, to feed multiple streams in existing pipes with very inexpensive hardware, and for nonlinear editing as well, also for pretty large broadcasters. At the distribution end, it is relevant to pay TV operators because it’s lower cost, but overall, it expands reach especially if you’re using OTT for delivery, because there are a lot of bottlenecks and this allows you to deliver higher quality to more people.
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Ed: So how do people pay for this – it is a "once only" or a licence? Guido: In licensing it very much depends … the way we work it we try to work following the business model … Ed: So if you’re a small operator it’s not going to be a big expense? Guido: No, it’s actually very low. We are embarrassingly inexpensive I would say sometimes. Ed:
Okay, and your website is?
Guido: Ed:
www.v-nova.com
Well that’s easy. Talk to Guido.
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Through the Looking Glass We’re at Imagezone in Auckland’s Grey Lynn with Dean Thomas, owner of Imagezone along with wife Fiona – who manages the books but also, just quietly, keeps Dean from buying too many toys … but from what I saw on my guided tour, Fiona has either not been very successful at this or is really very understanding. It is quite a “Wonderland of tech” in the Imagezone equipment room which we now share with you. Ed: What I picked up from our tour Dean is that you call yourselves Imagezone and not Image Rentals, because you provide a larger service to the recording side of the industry that is quite unique and extends past just recording an image. Correct? Dean: We’ve come from a data background where we did all the early managing data work for cinema equipment specifically. We did quite well in the period where the cinema industry transitioned from a celluloid based format into a digitally acquired format. It is a key part of managing that process of making digital pictures and it’s very important to get it right. Ed: But the service you provide isn’t quite end-to-end – you start with the rental of the camera and recording equipment, but then you go to the extent that you provide a garage for the vans to come in overnight to be in a safe environment and to offload material and charge up batteries as well as delivering dailies. That’s a big package? Dean: It is. I’d actually say it starts before that. If someone has question marks about what they want to shoot, we’re actually custom designing optics or elements of optics for DPs and we’ve got ability for them to shoot and test and view that footage. Also, if you’ve got a tricky problem or you’re an owner of equipment and you need something special that you’re probably only ever going to use once or twice a year, we’ve got those bits and pieces to problem solve for existing owners of equipment. That often happens in preproduction long before the actual shoot’s been committed to. It starts right down at that ability to support people from problem to solution to the actual shoot. Production crews have got other things they want to worry about and they want to get on to the next job so what we can provide enables that to happen cleanly and quietly. It is about trying to expand upon the plain old “dry hire” and I think those days are limited. What makes a customer separate one from the next is the level of service – and I consider things like we don’t necessarily charge for that thing to drive your van in and stuff, but it makes my client’s or the freelancer’s life a whole lot easier.
Dean and Fiona.
Ed: Let’s start with your camera offer. At the moment, you’re 100% ARRI – you’ve got the whole range from the Minis, the AMIRA and a range of ALEXAs. This is good for you because it helps you standardise the workflow? Dean: We love the ARRI platform; we love the ARRI reliability; and we really understand and have a close working relationship with the ARRI people but, yes, the standardised nature of the beast has meant that all our accessories – in terms of things like long extension cables that go down crane arms and stuff that you very rarely need – they are all compatible. We know what the pins are and the configuration, and even things like onboard camera monitors having the right connectors to the cameras to power them off the camera, and all that sort of stuff. Ed: But it’s also that the industry really demands ARRI – obviously some people like other things but, by and large, it’s an ARRI industry?
Stephen Baker is the Rental Manager with the “safe hands” resulting from over 17 years of experience in the field with cine cameras. Page 14
Dean: At the top of the cinema end of the industry, it’s dominated by ARRI. Two other significant players are obviously RED and Sony, with Panasonic actually making significant inroads, and we actively support those cameras. For example, we’ve done a shoot recently with the new VariCam; because of the low light nature of that beast, it was the right tool for that job. Anyway, the point really was that we worked with another supplier to get the body in and we did all the lenses and accessories and stuff and just made sure that the workflow went well with that camera, and that they had a nice easy shoot. Ed: That’s the point – really coming here and having a look at what you have, glass is a really big part of it and it’s not just providing the glass, but it’s providing the assurance that the glass is of a “look” that somebody could choose that might be different from anybody else’s?
… and many others are out on jobs.
Dean: First and foremost, I think we do seriously have the best test and measurement equipment for cinema optics in the country at the moment. Whilst I’m not saying that one lens is better than another, because people do make decisions to use even slightly poorer performing lenses to get a “look”, and even big name DPs are deciding that’s the way they want to go to give their thing a look. The point behind
all this test and measurement equipment is that it gives us the ability to quantify what the difference between various optics is, and better still, communicate to DPs who are trying to make a decision, exactly where those differences are. “Are they sharp in the centre, what are they doing at the edges, how is that glass performing long, does it breathe, is focusing an issue, what colour shift we’re looking at, depending on where it’s focused” or, as I showed you before, depending on where you
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are, sometimes it can have a green feel or a red feel, and the fall off. Even things like anamorphics and taking it a stage further, what you can do with filtration on top of that look to create something that’s totally unique. Ed: And you can give them a document that lists all of the features of one of your lenses or in fact they can bring their own lens in and you can do this measurement on their lens for them? Dean: Given that we’re still new at this, we’re not 20 year veteran lens engineers – and there are a few of those around who are very, very good – the clear differentiator between us and them is that I’m not pulling anybody’s lens apart, I’m happy to look, to put it on the machine, we’ll develop a report that puts a metric or qualifies the performance of that lens.
Look, no glass! These are extension tubes.
That’s important, especially for us, because it gives us the ability to reference that metric back over 2 or 3 years later and see how the lens has changed or is it service time for that lens or not, but the key thing is, because we’re still trying to build up our knowledge base, I actively seek other people, owners of lenses, to bring their lenses in.
ARRI ALEXA size-ish sensor, they may well be perfectly good at that – you know, using just the centre of their image circle.
We have an EF mount and a PL mount for our projector so that we can then put their lenses on the projector and have a look at how their personal lenses compare to our lenses, and that’s building up a mental database of lenses and how they perform comparatively. There’s always going to be the lens manufacturer out there who says “my $5000 lens is just as good as the $20,000 Zeiss” thing right and I’m happy to say “hey, maybe that’s true, technology changes and maybe manufacturing changes, bring it in and let’s have a look.”
Dean:
Ed: And you can also see that a lens that might be really good at the centre, but might not be so good at the outsides – though you can still use that for certain cameras because their sensor is only reading the centre of the lens. But other cameras need that full outside edge reliability?
Ed: So that’s worthy to come in and test. Let’s just get on to some of the little oddities that you have and one that you’ve demonstrated was for doing those macro shots … Yes, the extension tubes.
Ed: An extension tube – it’s not actually a lens because there’s a big finger poking through it, but what do you use them for? Dean: Owner/operators have become very experienced with their lenses and they know what they do. But occasionally they’ll have to get some pack shot, food shot, or the old eyeball shot as the iris changes, or something similar, something very, very close. This tube allows you to get better than 1:1 macro imaging on your existing lenses. It does assume that you’re in PL mount world, that is a PL product, the downside being that you can’t focus deep background. That’s not necessarily a problem if you’re doing a pack shot or something similar, but it means that a DP who’s familiar with the look of the lenses, or their camera, whatever the vast majority of the shoot will be on those lenses, they don’t have to go out and hire a macro. They can take their existing lens, put it on and still get a genuine 1:1 macro super-close focus. I’ll let them worry about the lighting!
Dean: Yes, there’s a big knock-on there because sensor size is the big thing that’s emerging for cinematographers … in the next 3-5 years, the physical size of the sensor will be a significant player. Even in my world, micro four-thirds to standard 35mm APS-C up to full size 35 like the Sony A series and beyond, just to see what optics are working on those lenses at that edge of what we refer to as “the image circle” and how they’re performing. It’s important that we know – for example, large format lenses that are coming or full size sensor lenses like you see from the 5Ds and Canons etc, they probably aren’t very good at the real edges of their image circle, but the fact that you’ll only use a small chunk at the centre of that image circle, those are optics that, if you put Dean with a top-of-the-line Chrosziel projector. them on an APC size, which is the Page 17
Ed: You’ve also got uncoated lens elements?
some
Dean: Actually that’s really interesting. We’ve got a number of bits coming in that area and some of it which I can’t speak of at the moment, because it’s not finalised. But for the master anamorphics, they create a product which they refer to as a “flare set”. Now whilst those aren’t completely uncoated, there are lightweight coatings on those optics; they don’t have the full gamut of coatings, so therefore they do flare significantly. But what we are coming to with some other lenses, is interchangeable front optics that are completely uncoated. Now we need a day to Dean with the lens test and report equipment available at Imagezone. do the conversion because these Dean: Okay, that is the Artemis Prime. Now are not a filter in the field that you can screw on and Artemis is a software application that you can actually make a look – it’s not that. get for an iPhone, but this is essentially a PL mount for Ed: It’s a planned look that you go over with the DOP a lens with a ground glass on the front of an iPad with a before a big shoot and they decide “this is the way we nice holder. What’s unique about this is that you can want to go”? dial in a camera view, using this tool unlike a traditional Dean: Yes, but not only that, once they make that director’s viewfinder. decision, I need a day to actually do it. I actually A key thing is that multiple people can view the image remove the front optics out of the lens, put it back in … at the same time and talk about it. Also that image can and that part of the process is actually not the hard be recorded and stills grabbed for use later. But what’s part. The real hard part is cleaning. completely unique is the ability to define what your Dust particles and stuff get in there and you’re into camera is and your lenses are and your frame lines are, quite a process once you’ve got the lens open, to all for your specific project, so the accuracy of that keeping dust out. image as it refers to on the day with those lenses – it On the horizon for us is a laminar flow bench which is couldn’t possibly be higher. The DP can then take that basically an overhead vacuum. stuff to the director, and then forward it off to the Ed: Well, we’ll come back when that’s on. And lastly, locations guys, or the lighting guys, or the grips if a nifty little gadget that is for a director to go out and they’re setting up a crane, so everyone knows exactly do a reccie … can you explain that? what the proposed vision is that the team can go to work on building. Ed: Now Dean doesn’t stop there, he has a geek side to him and he’s really keen on solving people’s problems or coming up with a look that could be just for you, and one of them he’s just showing me here is something for the ARRI Mini which I find intriguing. But there are lots of things you can do with lenses and mounts and filters that can provide someone with just the look that they really want? Dean: It’s a case of problem solving. We really like a good challenge and this concept we are looking at here is not by any means brand new but what’s unique about it is applying it in a different fashion. So, behind the lens filters have been common in the ARRI cameras for quite some time – what is unique is running diffusion filters, custom diffusion and custom optics in the back of the Mini, which nobody else can do that I’m aware of.
The director’s friend – the Artemis Prime. Page 18
It’s still a work in progress, there’s downsides to all of this stuff – not necessarily compromises, but the camera more on page 21
LYNX Technik greenMachine the recipient of a 2017 NAB Best of Show Award We couldn’t let our coverage of NAB end without mentioning an award made by the international magazine TV Technology. “The greenMachine Titan, LYNX Technik’s second hardware platform for the greenMachine solution, is a four-channel hardware device that complements the existing greenMachine Callisto, a two-channel signal processing hardware appliance. Titan simultaneously processes four 3G/HD/SDSDI video streams or a single 4K/UHD video input. It offers up to 12G processing support ( 3840 x 2160 @60 Hz ) and also provides the functionality to convert between single-link 4K video (12G) and quad-link 4K video (4x3G). Titan and all greenMachine hardware are compact selfcontained general purpose A/V processing platforms designed to host a wide variety of applications or APPs. Being fully APP driven, the greenMachine Titan will enable a smooth transition from an HD to UHD world. Broadcasters can use titan with their 3G-infrastructure today and upgrade to 4K-12G with a mouse-click. Full functionality of the greenMachine Titan is designed and built by the user stringing together APPs from the LYNX greenStore. APPs are modular and function-
specific and can be mixed and matched to reconfigure greenMachine to suit virtually any application. As new APPs will be constantly added to the greenStore, this enables the hardware investment to be easily adapted into new applications as required ... making greenMachine truly future-proof.” Find more info on greenMachine at: http://greenmachine.com/ LYNX Technik products are represented in New Zealand by Techtel … ( see NZVN February 2017 issue for an early taste of this machine.) NZVN
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won’t work identically the same. Sometimes in terms of being able to give someone something that’s completely unique to them, or solve a problem that exists elsewhere, we quite actively do R&D work in optics and optical mechanic work, to give people you know an edge or a separator, or a point of difference in their work. Ed: But at this sort of level you don’t get halfway through a shoot and decide “ummm, nah I think I’ll go back to the old way”? Dean:
I look at it a little differently.
I think every shoot requires a different solution and so sometimes these tools will be unique for a DP for a specific job and the next job that same DP does requires a totally different toolset, so therefore this is not necessarily relevant. It is just a case of, at the moment, saying we can actually work with you to give you something that’s completely unique and it goes well, well beyond the old “come in, read the box and go out again.” Although sometimes that sounds like a pretty good world for me because I’ve spend thousands of hours on this. Ed: So you’re inviting people to come in, see what you’ve got and talk to you.
Power your chargers and offload files.
goes into that soup. We might not be able to fulfil the wish list 100%, but we might be able to get 75% of the way there, which is a whole lot closer. Ed:
No promises, but we’ll do our best?
Dean:
Yes, correct.
They can go on your website and have a look and see what’s available there, but really it’s making that point of contact and, if you come in, I’m sure you’ll find something that you think “aaah that’s what I could use, that would make my production just something different.” That’s where you can help them? Dean: Well I think it just shows a starting point. We’ve got a lot of stuff where they might go “oh perfect, just what I need” that’s already on the shelf, but half the time what happens is they go “I’d like a bit of that, and a bit of that, and a bit of that” and it
There is room for 3 vans to be secured overnight.
N
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